When we arrived from Kenya in 2000, I soon realized that if unabated,  the unprecedented incidence of Stress apparent in Ireland would soon undermine human health. 

After taking courses in Stress Management I felt compelled to go deeper to discover the source and reason for this health hazard. 

Stress is a precursor to change. But what was now instigating these unprecedented pressures on people to change?  And what changes were coming?  How could we best address them?  “Shifting the Paradigms of Consciousness” became the title of my Master’s thesis (2002, NUI, Maynooth).

Paradigms are conceptual frameworks through which we perceive, interpret and respond to the world around us. They constitute the stories we believe and tell ourselves. Our old stories are fundamentally disrupting life, as we know it. As we, as a species, evolve with Life to ever more complex levels, we need to expand our consciousness, our awareness/perception and sense of responsibility for our engagement and impact on the world.

Expanding the stories of who/what we are, and what our world is, is the increasingly urgent requirement of our times. This is a conscious choice that is up to each of to make.

Will we choose to expand our consciousness, capacities/capabilities as a species, to create a new world that lives in harmony or will we compulsively just keep doing what we’ve been doing hoping that it will produce different effects in our world?

The following is an excerpt, from an interview in the thesis, on the order of living systems, as described by Prof. Ivor Browne, a retired professor of Psychiatry from University College Dublin who also was renown for his research on systems thinking, paradigm shifts and the third, supra-ordinate order of life:

“The first order that fulfils the properties of a living system, is the living cell. The second order consists of individuals and this marks a new beginning. An individual is more than simply the combination of cells, it is a new independent entity. The third or supra-ordinate order of complexes consists of groupings of individuals. Like the second order this again marks a new beginning and a new entity. People do not usually have difficulty appreciating that an individual is a different entity to a single cell but they find it harder to appreciate that phenomenon when moving from the second to the third order level of the system.

The fourth level is the ecosystem, which is the combination of the third level systems. Ultimately the biosphere interconnects with all levels of living things as well as all levels of non-living (like clouds and water). 

Each order follows the principle of becoming a new individual with new sets of characteristics rather than simply the conglomeration of the previous orders’ entities. Human beings have not developed their third order structures to anything like the same extent as social insects such as the termites or ants, who have had many more millions of years on earth to develop. For these insects, the termite mound or anthill is the predominant individual and the individual termite’s or ant’s characteristics are now determined by that third level order, because it is far older and more advanced that the individual insect. Third order complexes act and react as a new system, independent of the characters of the individuals involved in them. Each time a new order is formed it is a new beginning. It does not carry the sophistication or complexity of the previous level, but starts to develop simply – from the beginning.

For an example of this we could look at a teachers’ union, and compare it to the high level of sophistication and sensitivity that an adult educated in the field of education in the West, has reached. An individual teacher often shows compassion and understanding, but when a group of teachers are combined in a union they show insensitive and primitive behaviour – a bit like a dinosaur. This is because it is a new third order system, which has not had much time to develop. It can strike, retaliate and make decisions that are not at all representative of the characteristics of the individual teachers. (Me: of course this is indicative of any union of professionals as it is a systemic phenomenon).

The essential reason that we have so much stress now is due to the disorganized state of our supra-ordinate complexes. In the past, we had set up third order systems such as the extended family and the tribe, but most of that has been disrupted. These organic supra-ordinate systems have been usurped by the nuclear family, which is now fragmenting and we are replacing that with a pseudo-autopoietic system that behaves with third level human characteristics but it is not a genuine organic system, like a village. For example a large corporation like Toyota or Sony in Japan provides many of the needs of life such as housing, schools, medical care, social clubs and activities, but its survival is ultimately dependent on the cash flow of a given week. If the business side does not add up, all the human structure is endangered. We get entrained in these systems as if they were organic living systems, but they are not. They take precedence over us and we are no longer free to take our own individual decisions. It has a destructive effect in relation to what our physiology demands. We have a very definite type of physiology that is thousands of years old and we cannot do certain things like sit in a traffic jam, without getting frustrated and disturbed. Yet we have organized this third level order in such a chaotic way that it is full of traffic jams of all kinds and this leads to our frustration and stress. If the third level is not organically interconnected with the other orders, it disrupts all the other levels. This is what is causing the pathology on the planet.. In the biomedical model of stress management it is often assumed that individuals can adapt to any circumstance, but humanity has moved well beyond the level that we can adapt to this corporate world or even control it. We are disturbing ourselves right down to our cells. If you go downwards, the toxins or radiation produced in some of the chemical farms or nuclear plants may cause some of our psychological disorders including some forms of cancer. Going upwards, projects like Sellafield are disrupting the whole biosphere. Pollution damages the vegetation, air and water. Systems theory tells us that all of life is interconnected – humanity included. We have been behaving as if we were not animals. Animals are controlled by their instincts so that their behaviour does not disrupt the whole system’s balance. We are behaving as if we can do what we like, but this is counter to our basic nature and we cannot.”

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The world has moved on over the last 20 years since this interview. I had also interviewed a Raja yogi and a senior European Overseas Development Aid official managing international environmental and development projects who was also an advisor in international peace talks. Though they obviously had different perspectives and approaches, they all agreed that only a major shift in human consciousness could change our present trajectory towards mass destruction.

The good news is that finally the new green shoots of hope and possibility are sprouting up everywhere. Things ARE starting to shift and people are starting to look inside themselves and in their communities for answers.

The old paradigm is one of closed boundaries separating Me/Us from the You/Them. It is closed to new ideas and possibilities, exclusive, aggressively competitive, discouraging of hope & often obsessive about being “right”.  

The new paradigm is open and expanding to undiscovered possibilities.  It is creative, beautiful, encouraging, collaborative, inclusive, fun, open-hearted, courageous to pioneer into unchartered areas, knowing that we can make a beautiful new world where all life can thrive together.  Which do you choose?