Articles from the Religious Research Journal
2008
Big Ideas
by Judith S. Watson
A wonderful author named Parker J. Palmer introduced me to the concept of Big Ideas. As I now use the term, a Big Idea is an idea that makes all other ideas easier to understand. It is not necessarily complicated, especially after you discover it.
We don’t usually think in Big Ideas, mostly because we get caught up in living and trying to solve our problems and hoping we don’t get caught looking stupid. We also don’t share Big Ideas when we find them because they suddenly seem obvious, and we think we’re the last one to figure them out. But the truth of the matter is that discovering Big Ideas is a joy and a great relief. Big Ideas make life easier to deal with.
One such idea was my sudden understanding that knowledge changes all the time. Nobody seems to mention that very often; maybe they find it embarrassing or scary. Think about it. We spent year after year in school learning information that has not remained the same! Science has come to acknowledge that. Accounts of history finally show more than one perspective and include women and minorities who never appeared before. Even permissible sentence structure and language usage changes. Like awesome, Dude.
I also finally figured out that you can’t know something until you know it. You’re thinking that’s a statement of the obvious, but consider how many times you’ve felt like a complete fool for not knowing something—simply because you didn’t know it yet. And we think of people in the “olden days” as stupider than we are because they didn’t know what we now know. The truth of the matter is that their brains were as remarkable as ours; they were just in a different place in historical discovery.
Smart as we now think we are in this age of technology, there is an enormous amount still to be discovered. In Bill Bryson’s wonderful book, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books, 2003), he includes:
We live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
Sometimes the world just isn’t ready for a good idea. In 1944, an English geologist explained his theory that the continents could slide around. He was disbelieved and criticized, particularly in the United States. As late as 1980, one American geologist
in eight still didn’t believe in plate tectonics. [That’s right, 1980—in our own lifetimes.]
The notion of glaciers and an ice age were considered absolute nonsense and didn’t even begin to be accepted until the 1840s.
It wasn’t until 1953 that we learned the age of the Earth.
We don’t have the faintest idea of the number of things that live on our planet. Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million, and it may be as many as 97 percent that we haven’t discovered yet.
Because they can’t run from predators, plants have had to develop chemical defenses, and so are particularly intriguing. At least 99 percent of flowering plants have never been tested for their medicinal properties. Nearly a quarter of all prescribed medicines are derived from just forty plants.
For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and you could go bathing in radioactive mineral springs. Radioactivity wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938.
The idea of atoms and the term had been developed by the ancient Greeks, but a modern understanding and acceptance of them didn’t really happen until the 1900s.
Neutrons and protons occupy the atom’s nucleus. The nucleus is only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom—but fantastically dense. If an atom were the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only about the size of a fly—but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral.
This is all taught to us now as though it’s obvious, but it took one scientist eleven full years of hunting for neutrons before finally succeeding in 1932.
We are made of very ordinary elements. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you.
Atoms are very tiny indeed. Half a million of them lined up in a row could hide
behind a human hair . . . For you to be here, trillions of atoms had to assemble in an intricate and intriguing manner to create you in an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once.
Why should they bother? The atoms that make you don’t care about you—or even know you’re there. For that matter, they don’t know that they are there. They have no mind, and are not even themselves alive.
If you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would end up with a pile of atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive, but all of which had once been you.
When you die, the atoms that were you go off to be something else. They make everything. If you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be, “All things are made of atoms.”
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. All life is one.
It is astounding to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and the solidarity we experience all around us is an illusion.
[To put this in the perspective of a baby boomer’s lifetime, my mother was 18 when radioactive products were banned, by which time she had started smoking the cigarettes that no one knew were also lethal. I was six years old when we learned the age of the Earth, and continental shifts were just becoming accepted as my sister with the science degree reached 30.]
It has been said that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
Look again at the wealth of Big Ideas in those few excerpts from Bryson. One is that although we appear solid, mostly we are not. And what makes us alive and unique is not the materials we’re made of. Primarily, we are energy. No matter what you look like, your physical qualities are not what make you you. Neither are where you live, or who you know, or what you do for a living, or any number of the other things we think define us. Energy cannot be created or destroyed—only changed. Even when we die, we are transformed into other forms of energy.
This is true of everyone and everything, which means we’re all part of the same whole. We are individual beings, yes, but we’re each a fraction of the same energy field or collective consciousness. Principles of both science and spirituality are now aligning in the understanding that all life is one. I grew up believing that the fate of children starving in Africa had nothing to do with me. It never occurred to me to think otherwise until I was half a century old!
A change in your beliefs is called a paradigm shift. A paradigm is simply the way you see things, like the widespread belief most people held at one time that the world is flat. But that belief has been disproved, and we can never go back to it again. Sometimes a paradigm shift happens because of a new invention, like a jet engine or a cell phone, but not necessarily. They are not always easy to accept. Sometimes people have died to make paradigm shifts happen.
Whether they happen gradually or in an instant, painfully or peacefully, internally or publicly, paradigm shifts happen, and there will be more of them in the coming years than humanity has ever experienced. There will be so many, in fact, that the cumulative effect will create—and, in fact, is already creating--an entirely New Paradigm on earth.
A new paradigm can actually alter the dimensions we live in. Consider cars and planes. What changed? Obviously, we could ride instead of walk, and we could go much faster between one place and another. But that difference not only changed the way we travel, it changed both time and distance! It once took many days to get from Boston to Philadelphia by horseback, but it is only a matter of hours now that we have airplanes. What was once a long and physically demanding journey made the distance between the two cities gigantic, where now it is no big deal. Another way to say that is a week became less than a day. The world actually became smaller because it was so much easier and faster to get around it.
Television also changed everything, making it possible to know what was happening half way around the world at the very moment it was happening. Even if they weren’t physically in the same place, people from different countries and cultures could see each other, sometimes for the first time. When that happens, people become connected in new ways. When you get to know someone, you can choose to fear or resent them because they are different from you, or you can choose to care about and try to understand them and their problems. But you can no longer ignore them.
People used to be suspicious of each other and try to control each other, with killing and war if necessary. We used to believe that the species or the army that was the strongest was the one most likely to survive. A brilliant man named Buckminster Fuller called it a you-or-me world, where we need to fight and compete to see who wins. But back in the 1970s he spoke of the need to change to a you-and-me world, where we all have enough of what we need, which leads to the next Big Idea: the true law of survival is cooperation. Collaboration creates prosperity.
The old paradigm: you or me. The new paradigm: you and me. Look at the difference one tiny conjunction can make.
In fact, that conjunction can transform life as we know it, and I have come to think in terms of an Old Paradigm world and a New Paradigm, where our evolved understanding of who we are and what we need to do to survive together changes everything.
We originally developed belief systems (Old Paradigm) that appear to be based on reality, but the actual big idea is the exact opposite and transports us to the New Paradigm.
Example #1: There’s not enough.
The Old Paradigm belief was that there’s not enough to go around. Everyone can’t make it. Somebody’s going to be left out. There are way too many people. There’s not enough food. There’s not enough water. There’s not enough time. There’s not enough money.
‘There’s not enough’ generates a fear that drives us to make sure we’re not the person, or our loved ones aren’t the people, who get crushed, marginalized, or left out. We view everything through a lens of what is missing instead of what is there. The New Paradigm idea that becomes obscured is we are surrounded by abundance.
Example #2: More is better.
‘More is better’ is a chase with no end and a race without winners. It’s like a hamster wheel that we hop onto, get going, and then forget how to stop. Eventually, the chase for more becomes an addictive exercise, and as with any addiction, it’s almost impossible to stop the process when you’re in its grip. But no matter how far you go, or how fast, or how many other people you pass up, you can’t win. In the mind-set of scarcity, even too much is not enough.
‘More is better’ misguides us in a deeper way. It leads us to define ourselves by financial success and external achievements. We judge others based on what they have and how much they have, and miss the immeasurable inner gifts they bring to life . . . In the pursuit of more we overlook the fullness and completeness that are already within us waiting to be discovered.
(paraphrased from Lynn Twist’s book, The Soul of Money, W. W. Norton & Co., 2003)
Actually, enough is plenty, and, no matter who we are, there is no need for us to try to be more than that. Seek to discover our potential, sure; work on growth and healing, yes, but the fiction that somehow we are not good enough is the biggest distortion of all.
In fact, as I read one day in a tiny little book by John Randolph Price (The Success Book, Hay House, 1998), Without me, God would not be complete. Now how’s that for a Big Idea?
So where is all this taking us? When will we get there? Is this what 2012 is all about? What will be lost? What will be gained? What will it look like? Will the process of getting there be painful? Will we even make it?
I don’t know.
I know what I have been doing to prepare for and be part of this shift; but I cannot speak to what is best for you.
I was forced to get rid of most of my possessions. Everything I own now fits in the back of a minivan, and, if I had to, I could readily part with most of that now. The process was sheer hell, which I scarcely remember now.
I’ve been to healers and therapists of many kinds, and worked and worked and worked my way through my “stuff,” fighting my demons and learning compassion for myself and for my “inner child” - the little girl who is always with me. The process has been extremely difficult; but it is work I am very proud of.
I’ve read and written and taught and traveled and learned and questioned and wondered. I’ve learned an enormous amount about my idiosyncrasies and how to take care of myself physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Financial health still eludes me, at least by old paradigm standards. I suspect that money and credit as we know them will change radically. I still do battle with my fear of unstructured, unproductive time, and there are still times when I want to be released from this assignment. It is sometimes achingly, desperately lonely and seems so pointless.
But suppose George Washington had given up--or the fellow searching for the neutron-- or any of the pioneers there are in every field?
There was a time when we admired suffering and sacrifice not only as greatness but as the noblest of means to an end. Set that all down for a minute, and imagine a world where we are all supporting each other’s and our own potential for goodness and health. After all, as the song says, this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the age of joyful love. The Piscean Age of sacrificial love through suffering has brought us this far, yes. But as knowledge changes, so can the way we function and prosper. Let’s not permit all that suffering to have been in vain.