http://www.amazon.com/Paradigm-Conspiracy-Systems-Violate-Potential/product-reviews/1568382081/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
An inspiring, grounded perspective of profound truths, August 1, 1999
By drjanehart@aol.com (PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: How Our Systems of Government, Church, School, and Culture Violate Our Human Potenial (Hardcover)
The authors have taken dynamic ideas from the minds ofbrilliant scholars, i.e. Thomas Kuhn, and brought them home straightto our hearts and minds. This book engages every part of the reader--making one deeply examine where s/he stands in relation to living one's truth.
As I read it I recognized the complex maze of ideas first introduced in grad school readings which presented how unknowingly we collude with a system of dominance and oppression. Yet in this text of hope, the authors lead us through the puzzle of problems to the endless possibilities and solutions. Solutions which start right here, right now, on an individual basis. The awarenesses this book brings forth can shake the soul at first, but staying with how the authors unfold this mystery ultimately lets us shake off the chains we didn't even know we were bound by.

Definitely worth reading, especially in conjunction with their next book: Love, Soul and Freedom. These outstanding books bring together what a soul thirsts for in a way that quenches far beyond expectation.

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Inspirational Guide To Transcending Unhealthy Patterns, September 15, 2003
By Jed Shlackman (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews


This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential -- And How We Can Change Them (Paperback)
This book is a brilliant, inspirational guide to recognizing the inherent addictive and destructive nature of many dominant paradigms in our civilization. The authors weave their discourse around the spiritual insights of Rumi and Native American steps to "peace." The authors delineate how paradigms function and protect themselves from the threat of alternative approaches. They also expose the addictive nature of paradigms that dominate modern culture, while offering guidance for those wishing to consciously evolve and transcend the self-limiting, divisive patterns that dominate society. This book is a powerful, enlightened examination of what keeps humanity oppressed, allowing us to reflect on ourselves and the world around us. For those who recognize the flaws in existing patterns and paradigms, this book will resonate and provide insight into how we can individually and collectively develop a progressive, expansive framework for human civilization. I highly recommend this book! Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Would you rather be comfortable or awake?, July 29, 1999
By Carol Orsborn ""The Year I Saved My (down... (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews


This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential -- And How We Can Change Them (Paperback)
Reading this courageous book will change how you see just about everything in our society -- and in yourself. The authors are perceptive and highly educated, passionate and commited. You couldn't ask for better teachers to address this most difficult subject. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
A book of rare courage and soaring inspiration., June 30, 1997
By A Customer

This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: How Our Systems of Government, Church, School, and Culture Violate Our Human Potenial (Hardcover)
This book is not for the faint of heart. Though you may begin with a bias toward a book published by a 'recovery' publisher, the sheer will of its authors to contemplate and elucidate the harm we humans visit upon the earth and all its inhabitants speaks for itself. It will also speak to you and touch you in a deep place that may have been neglected and diminished by the day to day worlds we exist in.
The main premise is that we humans are in the throes of a 'paradigm conspiracy' that is so insidious and prevasive we don't consciously notice. However, one of the most damaging effects of this conspiracy is the epidemic of addictions we suffer directly and indirectly. Now, before you think that this is just another book bemoaning substance abuse, these authors include what they call 'process addictions' such as work, gambling, food, and television as well. It appears that nearly everyone in this country is touched by an addiction of some kind! Humbling, huh?!

The book continues to chronicle the current 'control paradigm' and its insidious ways. It covers all the excuses and rationalizations used to justify its existence. Then the book strips you down as an individual and puts the onus on each human being to "be all you can be".

From this point, the authors offer a well coordinated approach which incorperates both the twelve step program of Alcoholics Anonymous and "The 12 cycles of Truth" which is wisdom for the Iroquois Confederacy of Five Nations. This crosscultural match is exquiste in its symmetry and simplicity as well as adds considerable legitimacy to their individual and societal solution to enter into a second 'paradigm conspiracy' that will help us become reconnected to our souls. The emphasis is on the individual but the changes brought forth will affect the world. This is heavy stuff!!

If you are uneasy about our world and your place in it, this book offers a combination of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and the Declaration of Independence. It is rare to find suc

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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Great book...the publisher is another story..., July 26, 2004
By Violetfire777 "violetfire777" (ASHLAND, OREGON United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential -- And How We Can Change Them (Paperback)
The content of this book is excellent, wonderfully written, down-to-earth, very readable, eye-opening...I believe everyone who seeks true freedom, should read this book. I would have given it 5 stars, unfortunately the publisher appears to be part of the problem to which the authors refer. One of the messages in this book is that we don't really reach our full potential while being controlled and having our soul stifled. One result being goods and services that are not top quality (money being the most important, not people, not quality)...when I got to page 33 of this book, the pages started falling out. I had to laugh, given the incredible paradox in that and wondered what the authors would think of it. Even considered that it was an additional synchronous message pointing to how this controlling society is presently crumbling. The pages continued to fall out as I read... I decided to write the publisher and see if they would -shift their paradigm- and either send me a new book or refund my money. Yes, I had bought the book month's before from Amazon...but, apparently that's too late for an Amazon refund. The publisher (not surprisingly) said I should contact Amazon. Darn, no paradigm shift there :( Breton/Largent, I loved your book, but please find a new publisher, so other's can actually pass this valuable information on...all in One -peace- :) Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Please Read This Book & Join the Conscious "Evolution", January 29, 1999
By A Customer

This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential -- And How We Can Change Them (Paperback)
This worderfully written book portrays a simple, yet weighty, message whose time has definitly come. It will dramatically change your perceptions or support your current views in new & exciting ways. Anyone interested in human development, personal growth and consciousness will be delighted and rewarded with this read. Benton and Largent ground higher consciouness in a way that I have never experienced before and that will inspire many readers. I have been further transformed by this book. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Another 12-step "Bible" for me, July 11, 2001
By E. LaRocque (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential -- And How We Can Change Them (Paperback)
The Paradigm Conspiracy is a "Bible"-type systemic 12-step philosophical analytical meditation which I hate to go anywhere without, and can open to any page to receive daily inspiration and hope. This is a thorough open disclosure of the violence of systemic abuse, and without leaving us in the despair of broken dreams, throws light into the tunnel of darkness by outlining the steps that WE, as groups, community-poli-social systems can take to heal[without controlling the outcome],dialoguing new paradigms and meta-paradigms for healthy societies. Assumptions, strategies, responses, and goals, all brilliantly graphed as well as spiralled in the tradition of our ancestral North American and Middle Eastern spiritual masters, esp. Rumi. Appreciating your wonderful truth, Denise and Christopher! Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
One of the most important books of our time, December 19, 2007
By Patricia Robinett - See all my reviews


This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential -- And How We Can Change Them (Paperback)
This book provides a profound, insightful survey of many issues individuals need to take a good look at -- and our society needs to know -- to heal on a very deep level.

We have been programmed to live in fear. We are controlled and manipulated by fear. It's time to break out of the fear box. Many years ago, Gerald Jampolsky wrote, "Love Is Letting Go of Fear" based on "A Course In Miracles".

If you'd like to live a higher quality of life, read this book, study A Course in Miracles, Combined Volume: Text, Workbook for Students, and Manual for Teachers and start releasing fear/guilt. The more you divorce yourself from fear and guilt, the more awake, aware, alert, free and alive you will feel.

If you were circumcised, don't overlook the importance of letting go of that trauma... such an early, preverbal unhealed wound can be a big obstacle in the way of feeling love. See my book on FGM in the USA, The Rape of Innocence: Female Genital Mutilation in the U.S.A..

We all deserve love and respect and protection from harm. We all deserve to be free of fear. And the good news is, if it had a beginning -- which fear does -- then it will have an end... "Healing is always certain" and "All healing is essentially the release from fear." Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
I love this book!, May 14, 2007
By Tammy Hunter (Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential -- And How We Can Change Them (Paperback)
Here was another library book that I just had to own! More than another self-help book, Chris Largent did an admirable job of explaining how paradigm conditioning has worked throughout human history - but more so toward America's present-day societal paradigms and how we got here.

Simply put, everyone of us is the product of our biological, physical, educational, emotional, and media environment. From birth, we have our innate survival instincts which start with recognizing we'll get some attention if we cry. Subconsciously we learn how to maniuplate those around us and yet, we are just as manipulated. In other words, we become addicted to our paradigm - sometimes good, sometimes bad - thing is, once you recognize the patterns, you feel great become you know you can change your world.

This book is not a fast read. Not that's it's complicated, it's just worth your time to absorb the message and find out surprising things about yourself, your family, your community, your friends, your government. Highly recommended. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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One of my Favorite Books..., October 27, 2008
By Happy_Bean - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Paradigm Conspiracy: How Our Systems of Government, Church, School, and Culture Violate Our Human Potenial (Hardcover)
Excellent book. Really inspires the reader to think philosophically about the way we are living our lives as well as the way we raise our children. Largent and Breton create a solid perspective which we all should consider as we make an effort to evolve as a society. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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http://www.cco.net/~trufax/paradigm/paradigm/outline2.html


The Paradigm Conspiracy



The Global Crisis of Addictions
Caught in Deadly Processes
Addict-Making Systems
The Paradigm Conspiracy
Enter Paradigms
Development Within a Paradigm
Paradigm Shifts
The Paradigm Cause of Soul-Abusive Systems
The Paradigm of Control-and-Power-Over
Soul: The Big Threat
"Get Rid of The Troublemakers"
Two Paradigm Conspiracies
Making The Shift - By Death or Recovery?
Plan A - Death
Plan B - Recovery
The Limits of Micro Discovery
Getting to the Paradigm Cause of Social Illness
What Recovery Is, and Isn't
Paradigm Shifting is:
Holistic
Not About "Fixing Bad People"
Not About "Getting Rid of Bad Habits"
Not About "Becoming Normal"
Not Blame But Accountability
Blame vs. Responsibility
The Blame Dodge
The Infamous Triangle Shirt Company Fire
Paradigm Accountability
Personal Recovery as a Personal Paradigm Shift
Experiencing soul pain as our paradigm in crisis and acknowledging it as such
Spiritual Awakening
Creativity
Not Stopping With Personal Paradigm Shifts
Soul-violating family systems
Soul-violating social systems
We can't recover alone
Time for "Normal Science" or "Extraordinary Science"?
The Control Paradigm response to addiction
A Paradigm-Shift response
Support from Systems Thinking
Cashing in on a Paradigm-Systems Perspective
Listening to parts as reflective of the whole
Everyone is abused
Systems are not outside us
Is it human nature or our paradigms?
The Personal paradigm shift goes public
Changing paradigms changes everything
Making a paradigm shift in a social systems
Tracing social pain back to its paradigm origins
Spiritual awakening
Creativity
Creativity narrowed by control-paradigm structures
Exercising out paradigm-shifting powers
Paradigm Anatomy 101
What makes up a paradigm?
Assumptions
Strategies
Responses
Goals
Integral systems
Partial shifts don't cut it
The Three-fold Rhythm of Shifting Paradigms
Where are we and where are we going?
How do we get there from here?
How can we make the shift and go for change?
Ancient Steps of Transformation
A twelve-fold path of shifting paradigms
The twelve-sided foundation plan of civilized prder
The Iroquois Peace Confederacy
The Twelve Cycles of Truth
Pain and the Power of Shifting Assumptions
Confronting Pain - Making Assumptions
Assuming "misery as usual"
Example: Competition
The cost of accepting the competition assumption
We pay the price
"Hard work brings hard rewards"
Working hard on ourselves
Vintage methods of enforcement
Shifting Assumptions
Assuming that misery is a message
A message that we need
A message that our systems need
Claiming Our Power
Acknowledging misery's message empowers
The power of naming where we are
"Normal Science" : Justifying Misery
Assumptions that defend the old order
Assuming systems and problems are separate
"Extraordinary Science": Learning the Truth
Naming the system sources of pain
The Price of Not Confronting Pain-Makers
Social systems in crisis
Big business, banking and Congress
It's not just a few jerks
From the Control Assumption to Insatiability
Born into the control assumption
Control isn't everything: it's the only thing
Control leads to insatiability
Control worlds don't work
Struggling with the Control Assumption
Autonomy vs. the Control Model
More Control doesn't protect us
Playing the control game doesn't work better either
Making the invisible visible
Shifting Assumptions - The Fool's Leap
The Fool: An antidote for control
Fools: Extraordinary scientists
Assumptions about the universe
Assumptions about human beings
Flexing Our Assumption-Shifting Powers
The tools of transformation
What's within our power
Using what's in our power - or not
Open to Evolution

http://twm.co.nz/paradcon.htm

Paradigm Conspiracy
by Denise Breton & Christopher Largent
FILTERING CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH PARADIGMS
ABSTRACT [Abridged]

A brief but comprehensive overview of the structure of paradigms is presented regarding how control systems work within consciousness levels, and why there is a need to change governing paradigms to move beyond victim-blaming and toward system transformations. The concept of filtering consciousness through paradigms is presented, followed by: discussions regarding choice of paradigms; what is normal or possible for consciousness; seeking paradigms that fit us; saving paradigms but modifying them for more efficient performance. The cultural non-commitment to human potentials is discussed, and the importance of learning that new worldviews bring new worlds.
FILTERING CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH PARADIGMS
Most of all, though, we resonate with Mr. Swann's emphasis on mindsets, worldviews, and paradigms as the key to it all. That's no surprise, since we're philosophers. It just makes sense to us that philosophical models provide the channels through which our consciousness and hence our lives flow.
Filtering aspatial, atemporal, superconnected consciousness through paradigms is like pushing cookie dough through a cookie press with different gadgets to put on the end: whatever gadget we choose gives the cookies their shape. So too with consciousness: whatever mindsets or paradigms we choose determine the form of our perceptions, which in turn shape our decisions, actions, experiences, social systems, worlds, and futures.
A colleague of ours, Sue Rolfe at Hazelden, uses the 5-day work week to illustrate the power of a paradigm to shape the rhythm and flow of our lives. She writes, "Our 5-day work week is a paradigm....Who decided we must work 5 days a week? Perhaps on Mars they work on the weekend and have 5 days off. In any event, this 'working paradigm' which rules us is of our making. We decided that, for the economic health of our planet, 5 is the magic number. If you work more than 5 days a week you are a hard worker or maybe even a workaholic, less than this and you might be considered lazy and unmotivated." (It's actually Venus where they work only on weekends; on Mars they work all 7 days.)

CHOICE OF PARADIGMS
Choice, as Sue points out, is precisely what's at stake. But we first have to be aware of paradigms and how they're affecting us in order to exercise our power of choice.
If we're not aware of the role that paradigms have in shaping experience, then we believe we're stuck with the world as it is and ourselves as we are. "What paradigm? My belief-structure has nothing to do with it. This is the way I am, that's the way human beings are, and that's the way the world will always be." The sort of universe that the paradigm creates becomes absolute. Scientists of the old school, for instance, claimed to have no worldview intruding on their "objective observation of reality": they were simply "seeing things as they are."
No more. Scientists up to speed with "new physics" (a century old by now) know that their models or paradigms determine how they think, what kind of experiments they construct, therefore what they observe and how they interpret their observations. Reality isn't "out there" the way we once thought it was. It's an interactive process that's continually coming into being relative to the paradigms we choose-the cookie press gadgets we use to filter reality.
That's good news. Insofar as we recognize the power of paradigms and our power to change them, we have options-paradigm options. We're not stuck with the world as it is, because we can shift paradigms, and as we do, everything shifts with us. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn-who died in June 1996 and to whom we are indebted for naming paradigms and their power in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions-explained that when scientists shift paradigms, they live in new worlds. The old rules don't hold in the same way, and what before was considered impossible can become not only possible but even normal.
This means that whenever we shift paradigms, not only do new possibilities emerge for how we can structure our worlds together but also we discover potentials within ourselves that the old paradigm declared either nonexistent or off-limits. (If we shift away from the indentured-servants-to-money-systems paradigm, we'll have time to explore these potentials.)

WHAT'S NORMAL OR POSSIBLE FOR CONSCIOUSNESS?
Awareness of paradigms and the possibilities that emerge with changing them carry enormous implications for how we understand consciousness. Are the limits we experience in perception, learning, and knowing absolute, or are they imposed by a paradigm-one that we can choose to have or not?
Psychic and paranormal experiences suggest that the limits imposed by materialist philosophy are not absolute. Even one case of powers that defy physical limits proves what's possible, whether these possibilities are commonplace in the current paradigm or not. By challenging paradigms that put our mental powers in straitjackets, we free ourselves to tap powers we've barely begun to imagine. Examples of mental powers defying so-called laws of matter abound.
Then of course there's research begun by Georgi Lozanov in Bulgaria and reported by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder in their books Superlearning and SuperMemory. According to learning studies going on all over the globe, our minds are capable of vastly more than we ever imagined. If we have human brains, we're geniuses, and the only reason we're not experiencing our minds' powers is that they've been shut down by stress, negative programming, trauma, or mind-numbing boredom.
Clearly, there's more going on with consciousness and our human potential than the official paradigm acknowledges. Again, the fact that extraordinary powers occur at all proves the possibility of powers that may be latent in all of us.

SEEKING PARADIGMS THAT FIT US
Imagine, for instance, a paradigm that describes us as free beings, moving in time, space, and matter through the powers of consciousness, unconstrained by demands for money and unconcerned by the quest for power or control. Imagine further a paradigm that honors us for who we are, that treats human beings-as well as all beings-as treasures of the universe, and that therefore places a priority on nurturing and developing our potential.In the current world where humans are ownable, exploitable, controllable commodities-useful only insofar as they can either command or generate capital-such models seem utter fantasy.
According to spiritual teachings the world over, though, such models more closely fit what they call "True Human Beings." Hindu philosophy, for instance, takes our potential seriously enough to categorize liberation as the fourth basic desire of human beings, the one that naturally arises in us after we've grown weary of pursuing the desires for 1) pleasure, 2) success, and 3) duty.
Liberation is the liberation to be who we are in the big picture, not to be narrowed by models that aren't worthy of us. It's the freedom to live from the inside out, to be guided by who we are in our essence, rather than to spend our lives juggling family, social, financial, religious, or other cultural expectations.

SAVING THE PARADIGM
If we don't experience ourselves or each other as free and great beings, it's not because we lack this potential but rather because the paradigm/cookie gadgets our cultures pour us through aren't equal to our essence. We come out twisted, grasping, angry, and insatiable because we know we're more, yet the cultural paradigm has no room for us. The paradigm can't both acknowledge our innate worth and treat us as objects to be subjugated-objects that must be coerced into systems that violate our dignity and potential by their very structures.
Born into the culture, what choice do we have but to be subjugated? Babies and children don't have options but to submit. So we adapt ourselves accordingly. We conform to social systems by adopting the roles that go with them, narrowing ourselves to fit the cultural agenda. We become the competitive, insecure, obedient, brain dead, soul-disconnected creature that our social systems require. If we didn't comply, there'd be no place for social systems to hook into us and control our behavior, which the paradigm says they must do in order to achieve social order.
But instead of social order, the paradigm generates violence and suffering-images of which we see everyday on the news and feelings of which we experience as stress, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem or even self-hate. These images and feelings say nothing about which alternative paradigms might better serve human beings or who we might be if we used less narrowing models. They simply give us feedback about our cultural paradigm.
But paradigm oblivious, we don't interpret culture-wide pain as paradigm related. We don't trace personal and social suffering back to the cultural paradigm and so set the stage for changing it. Instead, we save the paradigm by believing that humans must be fatally flawed and we ourselves more than most. Accepting the cultural paradigm that excludes what's most valuable about us, we view ourselves in the mirror that social systems give us: a mirror of externals. Our paradigm options go unexplored.

CONTROLLED BY EXTERNAL REWARDS
In a paradigm of externals, externals call the shots. Instead of allowing us to be guided from the inside out (a formula for anarchy, the control paradigm claims), the paradigm controls our behavior through rewards and punishments. We come to think and act like Pavlov's dog, salivating over the next bonus, a bigger kennel to call home, a fancier collar to sport, or a top dog position. The paradigm isn't about developing our talents, abilities, or potential; it's about making us controllable by giving or withholding external rewards.
To achieve this control, the paradigm grades each "thing" in a hierarchy of externals. The inner life means nothing compared to the outward characteristics indicated by our species, race, gender, age, status, group affiliation, and income. If dogs possessed the wealth of Bill Gates, for instance, they wouldn't suffer in medical experiments, just as people who have money don't work in sweatshops or sell their children into slavery.
That's the problem with externals: they're fine until they become the means for enslavement, which unfortunately they do almost immediately. When a paradigm puts external values first, consciousness dimensions are dismissed out of hand.
Small wonder that the potentials of our minds and hearts-and all the values that go with them, e.g., meaning, compassion, justice, or wisdom-go undeveloped. A control paradigm has neither use nor place for them.

NOT EXACTLY WELCOME
Naming paradigms and their power for good or ill isn't a new insight; it's as old as philosophy. It is, however, an overlooked insight in an age that can't seem to shake a materialistic, control-obsessed paradigm-and for good reason. Reflecting on paradigms is the stuff of change, and changing paradigms is the most fundamental and powerful change we can make.
To a paradigm of control, that's not welcome. The sum total of our experience contingent on something as invisible and changeable as a philosophy? Change by paradigm shifts, which anyone can make? Powers of perception and creativity that defy rigid material boundaries? Humans as beings of immense powers and abilities? Once you let these cats out of the bag, there's no telling what mindsets and institutions might be made obsolete.
Obsolete is precisely what established institutions of power and control don't want to be. They learned from the fate of carriage and buggy whip manufacturers when cars came along. Established interests now make sure that questioning the neanderthal paradigm of burning things for energy triggers "War-of-the-Worlds" panic about destabilizing the world economy. Even the call for improved public transit systems borders on subversive.

"MORE TO US" IS THREATENING TO POWER-OVER INSTITUTIONS
Stiff challenges face a paradigm shift on the simple level of out-there technology, frozen at a stage that Captain Picard sometimes finds among the more primitive human civilizations he encounters. What challenges might we face if we embark on a far deeper level of questioning-on redrawing the paradigms that sort out who we are and why we're here?
Plenty. If the cultural paradigm's purpose is not to honor human potential but rather to make it an obedient servant to existing social structures, then nothing could be more threatening to the established order than a paradigm shift regarding our self-conceptions. We fit into society as it is now only as long as we don't remember that we're more and here for more.

PSYCHOTHERAPY'S PURPOSE
The agenda for traditional psychoanalytic therapy, for instance, isn't to develop human potential; it's to keep people functional in established social structures, however miserable their lives may be and however abusive or wrong-headed the social structures. "Well-adjusted" becomes a synonym for mental health.
But if someone is well-adjusted to being an SS officer in Nazi concentration camps, is that person mentally healthy? In Fire In The Soul, psychoneuroimmunologist Joan Borysenko writes of this narrow aim of therapy: "Sigmund Freud...believed that when a person was cured of neurosis the best outcome that could be expected was return 'to an ordinary state of unhappiness.'" (New York: Warner, 1993, p. 54)
Psychotherapy's official job is mopping up the mess that social systems make of our lives by convincing us that the mess is our fault, our failing, our screwiness. If we don't conform, adjust, fit in, and measure up, something must be wrong with us. And psychotherapy has its truth: we may well be frozen in grief or shock and not functioning at our best, but don't the social systems that shape us deserve equal scrutiny, equal critical analysis?
Thankfully many therapists reject this paradigm and venture forth with their clients on the forbidden territory of meaning and human potential as well as of critiquing social structures, but it's no easy task persuading insurance companies to come along. Control institutions pay insurance companies to pay health professionals to keep people in their place, serving the established order.

THE AGENDA FOR SCHOOL SYSTEMS
Nor are school systems committed to developing the more that we are. Schools are an arm of social structures, whether religious, governmental, or economic. According to the paradigm-defined needs of those structures, tapping human potential doesn't create enough Dilberts to ensure the "efficient" running of corporate, governmental, religious, and educational hierarchies.
In this century, business interests have dictated the structure of schools. Henry Ford quickly noticed that creative genius and intuitive knowing aren't useful on factory lines. So he pioneered the "modern" school system that inculcates values and skills appropriate for 20th century work life: being punctual, obeying orders, enduring hours, weeks, and years of boring, repetitive tasks, not talking while working, not resting, keeping to the schedule at all costs. Our minds become casualties of industrialization.
Our souls end up casualties as well. Trusting our own judgment, thinking for ourselves, adhering to our values, and having confidence in our innate worth don't make us good foot soldiers for my-way-or-the-highway bosses. Only people with low self-esteem are sufficiently insecure to tolerate abusive work environments. Insofar as we believe we don't deserve better, we adjust, becoming the kind of person that's required to "do the job."
Obligingly, school systems produce people with precisely the low self-esteem that's needed for worker "flexibility." Fears of being wrong, of not making the grade are fears confirmed for 90 percent of the population. That's the percentage who are required not to get A's by the bell curve system, guaranteeing that 90 percent of everyone coming out of school believe that they're incapable of excellence. Schools mirror back to students the mass message that "you're just not good enough, but if you do what you're told without question, you may get better and be rewarded." That's a handy message to have installed in the psyches of 90 percent of the population-handy for perpetuating corporate, religious, governmental, and professional tyrannies, that is.
All this modern schooling goes against what we know about the human mind and how we learn-and have known for decades. Studies in learning show that we learn best when we're most relaxed, yet schools maximize stress through fear of failure. Studies show that children learn most easily through cooperative learning, yet schools impose a competitive model. Studies also indicate that students' beliefs about their own learning abilities affect their performance-if they believe they're good learners, they learn easily; if not, learning the simplest things becomes difficult-yet schools systematically undermine students' confidence.
In these and many other ways, school systems perform virtual lobotomies on our psyches, producing graduates who've long since lost their joy in learning, who believe they must be right all the time and "know it all" or be condemned to outer darkness, and who experience post-traumatic stress symptoms at the thought of having to learn new things on the job.

CULTURAL NONCOMMITMENT TO HUMAN POTENTIAL
Alice Miller, a champion of the potential we all possess from birth, pulls no punches in her books-For Your Own Good in particular analyzes the social, cultural agenda of shutting down our potential. As she explains, the traditional rules of child-rearing passed down from generation to generation have nothing to do with developing our potential, either emotionally, intuitively, psychologically, or intellectually. Their one agenda is control: control the child as soon as possible by any means, whether it's by punishment, humiliation, intimidation, beatings, grading, whatever it takes to break the child's will and autonomy.
The justification for this agenda is that children raised any other way won't fit into society when they grow up. According to this cultural paradigm-expressed in the rules of child-rearing-learning to forget who we are and to become what others want and expect us to be is the most important survival skill. Our potential as human beings is irrelevant, a side issue, compared to our ability to conform.
Of course we're supposed to believe that social systems have our best interests at heart and that obeying them is indeed "for our own good." If we conform properly, our potential will develop accordingly. But is this so? As we've seen, schools and therapy - two systems that you'd think would be committed to developing human potential - have no such commitment. In what system or area of the culture might such a commitment exist?

Governments are fully occupied with who has power over whom, who has the biggest budget, where money can be found, who wins which election or vote, etc. Developing the human potential of its citizenry is not a priority. If anything, it's not on the agenda at all. The insider's view that "the masses are asses" is music to ambitious politicians' ears, who then believe it's their manifest destiny to expand their personal power and become benevolent dictators. Dumb masses are easy to manipulate with slogans and half-truths. For their purposes, the less human potential the better.

As much as we value spiritual teachings, we can't say that religious organizations have much commitment to developing human potential either, though granted there are exceptions. Adhering to fixed doctrines, building congregations, raising money, meddling in the personal affairs of members, running down sectarian competitors, and using fear and guilt to exact obedience and tithing keep them busy enough.

Businesses and corporations certainly don't concern themselves with human potential, even though they sometimes pay lip service to it in the hopes of making employees more "productive." The bottom line is the bottom line, and if human potential comes up at all, it's considered a frill or luxury-"warm fuzzy stuff" that doesn't count in the "real world" of business except to mollify disgruntled workers or help them adjust to higher levels of stress.

Scanning the culture, we frankly can't find any system that's consistently committed to exploring human potential. If anything, our social systems regard human potential as an impediment, an annoying feature of human beings that gums up the systems' otherwise efficient workings. If people would just learn their roles and stick to them, everything would work so much better.
If we didn't know the paradigm behind these systems, we may find this lack of interest in human potential odd. Developing human potential seems crucial to keeping human civilizations vital and evolving, up to speed with the challenges that continually arise. Technology per se can't save us, since we're not using the alternative technology we already have to remedy social and environmental ills. What we lack is the the wisdom and foresight, the honesty, the sense of meaning, justice, integrity, and the good to manage human affairs well. These aren't technology issues but paradigm ones. Wisdom and foresight are precisely the potentials that a paradigm geared to domination and control factors out of us.

FIGHTING BACK
But no paradigm, even one that's used to having the last word, is the last word. The human spirit, being what it is, doesn't take kindly to soul-lobotomies and develops all sorts of responses. One is to join the lobotomizing dominators: do it to others before any more can be done to you. Another is to adopt roles and play along, to accept one's lobotomized lot in life.
Addictions make both responses easier. We can lay off 5,000 employees and numb the pain with a 15 million dollar bonus. Or we can take drugs to make it through the day in our Dilbertesque cubicles. Either way, numbing ourselves with addictions of process (money and power) or of substance (drugs and alcohol) makes us forget the pain of living in a control paradigm culture.
By numbing us, addictions serve the established paradigm well: insofar as we forget pain, we don't confront its causes. Lobotomizing systems go unchallenged, as long as we find ways to cope with being lobotomized.
That's why recovery from addictions begins with recognizing pain. Acknowledging what we feel in social systems is the first subversive step toward a cultural paradigm shift. A paradigm of control through externals unravels when we affirm the importance of what's going on within. When pain counts with us-when we refuse to ignore it, "to put up and shut up"-the days are numbered for the paradigm that's causing us pain.

NEW WORLD VIEWS BRING NEW WORLDS
Refusing to be trapped by dominating institutions on one hand and on the other claiming our essence, who we are in the big picture-what's called the "soul" until a better term comes along-we foment revolution of the most constructive, effective, and powerful sort. Each of us in our own ways participates in creating new worldviews, which in turn create new worlds within and without.


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Denise Breton and Christopher Largent
2019 Delaware Avenue, Wilmington, Delaware 19806
Tel. (302) 571-9570 Fax. (302) 571-9615
e-mail: mjbreton@aol.com
NOTE OF INTRODUCTION (by Ingo Swann)
Denise Breton and Chris Largent, a husband-wife team, have been teaching and writing together for twenty years. They each have backgrounds in religion and philosophy (Chris from Dickinson College and the University of Delaware; Denise from Boston University, the University of Delaware, and Yale University.)
They have taught half-time in the University of Delaware's Philosophy Department for over twenty years.
Their debut book, THE SOUL OF ECONOMICS: SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION GOES TO THE MARKETPLACE (1991), was hailed by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY as "perhaps the clearest, best written book in that newest of genres, religion/business."
Their second book, THE PARADIGM CONSPIRACY: HOW OUR SYSTEMS OF GOVERNMENT, CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND CULTURE VIOLATE OUR HUMAN POTENTIALS (Hazelden, 1996), insightfully focuses on how worldviews can cause or end suffering.
This extremely important book examines many paradigms that run our social systems, what kinds of "worlds" they create, how they affect us personally, and how we can create new models to replace dysfunctional paradigms. In an extremely clear, non-antagonistic presentation, the book overall provides a workable model for individuals to claim their power to change social systems by changing the paradigms on which they are founded.

http://www.trufax.org/paradigm/paradigm.html


http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/ParadigmConspiracy.html




Paradigm Conspiracy
by Denise Breton & Christopher Largent



NOTE OF INTRODUCTION. Denise Breton and Chris Largent, a husband-wife team, have been teaching and writing together for twenty years. They each have backgrounds in religion and philosophy (Chris from Dickinson College and the University of Delaware; Denise from Boston University, the University of Delaware, and Yale University.)

They have taught half-time in the University of Delaware's Philosophy Department for over twenty years, and have lectured widely, for example, at the Second Global Structures Convention, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, the World Business Academy, and at the School for Practical Philosophy. Their international work includes seminars in Canada and England on how to interpret sacred texts.

They offer their own public-forum programs, which focus on overcoming the split between the spiritual and the practical, a focus they bring to their counseling work as well. Their programs have spanned work in mythology, near-death experiences, inner journeying, intuition, meditation, and the relationship between business and spirituality.

Their debut book, THE SOUL OF ECONOMICS: SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION GOES TO THE MARKETPLACE (1991), was highly praised by many international luminaries including Huston Smith, Hazel Henderson, Amital Etzioni, and the Dalai Lama, and was hailed by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY as "perhaps the clearest, best written book in that newest of genres, religion/business."

Their second book, THE PARADIGM CONSPIRACY: HOW OUR SYSTEMS OF GOVERNMENT, CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND CULTURE VIOLATE OUR HUMAN POTENTIALS (Hazelden, 1996), insightfully focuses on how worldviews can cause or end suffering.

This extremely important book examines many paradigms that run our social systems, what kinds of "worlds" they create, how they affect us personally, and how we can create new models to replace dysfunctional paradigms. In an extremely clear, non-antagonistic presentation, the book overall provides a workable model for individuals to claim their power to change social systems by changing the paradigms on which they are founded.

We are extremely grateful that Denise and Chris responded to our invitation to prepare a paper especially for this Web site. All rights are reserved to the authors. For further information, please be in touch with the authors at the addresses included in the paper. (Ingo Swann)

*

FILTERING CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH PARADIGMS

by Denise Breton and Christopher Largent
2019 Delaware Avenue, Wilmington, Delaware 19806
Tel. (302) 571-9570 Fax. (302) 571-9615
e-mail: mjbreton@aol.com

TOPICAL AREA: Paradigms, culture, philosophy

KEY WORDS: Consciousness, choice, awareness, human potential, liberation

ABSTRACT

A brief but comprehensive overview of the structure of paradigms is presented regarding how control systems work within consciousness levels, and why there is a need to change governing paradigms to move beyond victim-blaming and toward system transformations. The concept of filtering consciousness through paradigms is presented, followed by: discussions regarding choice of paradigms; what is normal or possible for consciousness; seeking paradigms that fit us; saving paradigms but modifying them for more efficient performance. The cultural non-commitment to human potentials is discussed, and the importance of learning that new worldviews bring new worlds.




We're delighted to be invited on to Ingo Swann's Web site to discuss some of the ideas in our most recent book. We've admired his work for years and recommended his 1993 Your Nostradamus Factor to many people interested in cultivating their innate powers of perception.
So many things about his approach resonate with us: his clear, thought-provoking, nondogmatic analysis of the future-seeing process, his courage to describe the current era of materialism as "the dark Modern Age," his nondeterministic view of the future, his positive exploration of alternative "change-routes," his intellectual honesty in taking seriously otherwise taboo subjects such as astrology and off-planet civilizations, and his no-nonsense practicality about whatever he's discussing.
Not to mention that we owe this man. While reading his book, one of us had a dream about our house being on fire, while the other put that information together with an odd smell in the dryer. Reeling from unexpected bills, we normally wouldn't have sought more expenses. But this time, based on warnings in Mr. Swann's work, we couldn't do otherwise. So we did the unusual-which is what Your Nostradamus Factor recommends-and stopped using the dryer until it could be checked. When a repair man came, he said the lint build-up around the heating element was a severe fire hazard, and he couldn't quite figure out why it hadn't caught fire already-especially scary considering we had often left the house or gone to bed with the dryer running, a practice we no longer have.

FILTERING CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH PARADIGMS
Most of all, though, we resonate with Mr. Swann's emphasis on mindsets, worldviews, and paradigms as the key to it all. That's no surprise, since we're philosophers. It just makes sense to us that philosophical models provide the channels through which our consciousness and hence our lives flow.
Filtering aspatial, atemporal, superconnected consciousness through paradigms is like pushing cookie dough through a cookie press with different gadgets to put on the end: whatever gadget we choose gives the cookies their shape. So too with consciousness: whatever mindsets or paradigms we choose determine the form of our perceptions, which in turn shape our decisions, actions, experiences, social systems, worlds, and futures.
Paradigms function like the software of human life-of personal life as well as of families, schools, businesses, churches, governments, and culture. When the software does its job well, everything works, and problems are solvable. But when the software is full of bugs or not equal to the job, systems freeze and fail, and nothing works as it should.
A colleague of ours, Sue Rolfe at Hazelden, uses the 5-day work week to illustrate the power of a paradigm to shape the rhythm and flow of our lives. She writes, "Our 5-day work week is a paradigm....Who decided we must work 5 days a week? Perhaps on Mars they work on the weekend and have 5 days off. In any event, this 'working paradigm' which rules us is of our making. We decided that, for the economic health of our planet, 5 is the magic number. If you work more than 5 days a week you are a hard worker or maybe even a workaholic, less than this and you might be considered lazy and unmotivated." (It's actually Venus where they work only on weekends; on Mars they work all 7 days.)

CHOICE OF PARADIGMS
Choice, as Sue points out, is precisely what's at stake. But we first have to be aware of paradigms and how they're affecting us in order to exercise our power of choice.
If we're not aware of the role that paradigms have in shaping experience, then we believe we're stuck with the world as it is and ourselves as we are. "What paradigm? My belief-structure has nothing to do with it. This is the way I am, that's the way human beings are, and that's the way the world will always be." The sort of universe that the paradigm creates becomes absolute. Scientists of the old school, for instance, claimed to have no worldview intruding on their "objective observation of reality": they were simply "seeing things as they are."
No more. Scientists up to speed with "new physics" (a century old by now) know that their models or paradigms determine how they think, what kind of experiments they construct, therefore what they observe and how they interpret their observations. Reality isn't "out there" the way we once thought it was. It's an interactive process that's continually coming into being relative to the paradigms we choose-the cookie press gadgets we use to filter reality.
That's good news. Insofar as we recognize the power of paradigms and our power to change them, we have options-paradigm options. We're not stuck with the world as it is, because we can shift paradigms, and as we do, everything shifts with us. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn-who died in June 1996 and to whom we are indebted for naming paradigms and their power in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions-explained that when scientists shift paradigms, they live in new worlds. The old rules don't hold in the same way, and what before was considered impossible can become not only possible but even normal.
This means that whenever we shift paradigms, not only do new possibilities emerge for how we can structure our worlds together but also we discover potentials within ourselves that the old paradigm declared either nonexistent or off-limits. (If we shift away from the indentured-servants-to-money-systems paradigm, we'll have time to explore these potentials.)

WHAT'S NORMAL OR POSSIBLE FOR CONSCIOUSNESS?
Awareness of paradigms and the possibilities that emerge with changing them carry enormous implications for how we understand consciousness. Are the limits we experience in perception, learning, and knowing absolute, or are they imposed by a paradigm-one that we can choose to have or not?
Psychic and paranormal experiences suggest that the limits imposed by materialist philosophy are not absolute. Even one case of powers that defy physical limits proves what's possible, whether these possibilities are commonplace in the current paradigm or not. By challenging paradigms that put our mental powers in straitjackets, we free ourselves to tap powers we've barely begun to imagine.
Examples of mental powers defying so-called laws of matter abound. In addition to the volumes of literature on the subject, we've encountered many cases that we find fascinating, and several come to mind:
One young woman from Laos, a student of ours, endured several years of harrowing escapes to reach America with her family. She experienced this journey between the ages of 7 and 9. Along the way, she and her family spent many months in concentration camps for refugees, where women and children were abused by soldiers. During this period of constant fear and trauma, she developed the ability to leave her body at will to guard herself and her family, especially when she was asleep. Years later as a college student, she was able to report everything that was said or done in her room or anywhere in the building while she was sleeping. Hers is an interesting case of what is now widely known as out-of-body experiences.
During the late seventies, a Swiss colleague of ours told of a little girl in Zurich who was having trouble in school because her vision did not stop with walls. She couldn't see the blackboard because she was seeing through it into the next room, where apparently things were more interesting. Her grades improved only when she was taught to make her vision stop with walls. The story was carried in the Zurich newspapers. Perhaps Mr. Swann or someone else reading this knows more about this case.
Then of course there's research begun by Georgi Lozanov in Bulgaria and reported by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder in their books Superlearning and SuperMemory. According to learning studies going on all over the globe, our minds are capable of vastly more than we ever imagined. If we have human brains, we're geniuses, and the only reason we're not experiencing our minds' powers is that they've been shut down by stress, negative programming, trauma, or mind-numbing boredom.
Clearly, there's more going on with consciousness and our human potential than the official paradigm acknowledges. Again, the fact that extraordinary powers occur at all proves the possibility of powers that may be latent in all of us.

SEEKING PARADIGMS THAT FIT US
Imagine, for instance, a paradigm that describes us as free beings, moving in time, space, and matter through the powers of consciousness, unconstrained by demands for money and unconcerned by the quest for power or control. Imagine further a paradigm that honors us for who we are, that treats human beings-as well as all beings-as treasures of the universe, and that therefore places a priority on nurturing and developing our potential. In the current world where humans are ownable, exploitable, controllable commodities-useful only insofar as they can either command or generate capital-such models seem utter fantasy.
According to spiritual teachings the world over, though, such models more closely fit what they call "True Human Beings." Hindu philosophy, for instance, takes our potential seriously enough to categorize liberation as the fourth basic desire of human beings, the one that naturally arises in us after we've grown weary of pursuing the desires for 1) pleasure, 2) success, and 3) duty.
Liberation is the liberation to be who we are in the big picture, not to be narrowed by models that aren't worthy of us. It's the freedom to live from the inside out, to be guided by who we are in our essence, rather than to spend our lives juggling family, social, financial, religious, or other cultural expectations.

SAVING THE PARADIGM
If we don't experience ourselves or each other as free and great beings, it's not because we lack this potential but rather because the paradigm/cookie gadgets our cultures pour us through aren't equal to our essence. We come out twisted, grasping, angry, and insatiable because we know we're more, yet the cultural paradigm has no room for us. The paradigm can't both acknowledge our innate worth and treat us as objects to be subjugated-objects that must be coerced into systems that violate our dignity and potential by their very structures.
Born into the culture, what choice do we have but to be subjugated? Babies and children don't have options but to submit. So we adapt ourselves accordingly. We conform to social systems by adopting the roles that go with them, narrowing ourselves to fit the cultural agenda. We become the competitive, insecure, obedient, brain dead, soul-disconnected creature that our social systems require. If we didn't comply, there'd be no place for social systems to hook into us and control our behavior, which the paradigm says they must do in order to achieve social order.
But instead of social order, the paradigm generates violence and suffering-images of which we see everyday on the news and feelings of which we experience as stress, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem or even self-hate. These images and feelings say nothing about which alternative paradigms might better serve human beings or who we might be if we used less narrowing models. They simply give us feedback about our cultural paradigm.
But paradigm oblivious, we don't interpret culture-wide pain as paradigm related. We don't trace personal and social suffering back to the cultural paradigm and so set the stage for changing it. Instead, we save the paradigm by believing that humans must be fatally flawed and we ourselves more than most. Accepting the cultural paradigm that excludes what's most valuable about us, we view ourselves in the mirror that social systems give us: a mirror of externals. Our paradigm options go unexplored.

CONTROLLED BY EXTERNAL REWARDS
In a paradigm of externals, externals call the shots. Instead of allowing us to be guided from the inside out (a formula for anarchy, the control paradigm claims), the paradigm controls our behavior through rewards and punishments. We come to think and act like Pavlov's dog, salivating over the next bonus, a bigger kennel to call home, a fancier collar to sport, or a top dog position. The paradigm isn't about developing our talents, abilities, or potential; it's about making us controllable by giving or withholding external rewards.
To achieve this control, the paradigm grades each "thing" in a hierarchy of externals. The inner life means nothing compared to the outward characteristics indicated by our species, race, gender, age, status, group affiliation, and income. If dogs possessed the wealth of Bill Gates, for instance, they wouldn't suffer in medical experiments, just as people who have money don't work in sweatshops or sell their children into slavery.
That's the problem with externals: they're fine until they become the means for enslavement, which unfortunately they do almost immediately. When a paradigm puts external values first, consciousness dimensions are dismissed out of hand.
Small wonder that the potentials of our minds and hearts-and all the values that go with them, e.g., meaning, compassion, justice, or wisdom-go undeveloped. A control paradigm has neither use nor place for them.

NOT EXACTLY WELCOME
Naming paradigms and their power for good or ill isn't a new insight; it's as old as philosophy. It is, however, an overlooked insight in an age that can't seem to shake a materialistic, control-obsessed paradigm-and for good reason. Reflecting on paradigms is the stuff of change, and changing paradigms is the most fundamental and powerful change we can make.
To a paradigm of control, that's not welcome. The sum total of our experience contingent on something as invisible and changeable as a philosophy? Change by paradigm shifts, which anyone can make? Powers of perception and creativity that defy rigid material boundaries? Humans as beings of immense powers and abilities? Once you let these cats out of the bag, there's no telling what mindsets and institutions might be made obsolete.
Obsolete is precisely what established institutions of power and control don't want to be. They learned from the fate of carriage and buggy whip manufacturers when cars came along. Established interests now make sure that questioning the neanderthal paradigm of burning things for energy triggers "War-of-the-Worlds" panic about destabilizing the world economy. Even the call for improved public transit systems borders on subversive.

"MORE TO US" IS THREATENING TO POWER-OVER INSTITUTIONS
Stiff challenges face a paradigm shift on the simple level of out-there technology, frozen at a stage that Captain Picard sometimes finds among the more primitive human civilizations he encounters. What challenges might we face if we embark on a far deeper level of questioning-on redrawing the paradigms that sort out who we are and why we're here?
Plenty. If the cultural paradigm's purpose is not to honor human potential but rather to make it an obedient servant to existing social structures, then nothing could be more threatening to the established order than a paradigm shift regarding our self-conceptions. We fit into society as it is now only as long as we don't remember that we're more and here for more.

PSYCHOTHERAPY'S PURPOSE
The agenda for traditional psychoanalytic therapy, for instance, isn't to develop human potential; it's to keep people functional in established social structures, however miserable their lives may be and however abusive or wrong-headed the social structures. "Well-adjusted" becomes a synonym for mental health.
But if someone is well-adjusted to being an SS officer in Nazi concentration camps, is that person mentally healthy? In Fire In The Soul, psychoneuroimmunologist Joan Borysenko writes of this narrow aim of therapy: "Sigmund Freud...believed that when a person was cured of neurosis the best outcome that could be expected was return 'to an ordinary state of unhappiness.'" (New York: Warner, 1993, p. 54)
Psychotherapy's official job is mopping up the mess that social systems make of our lives by convincing us that the mess is our fault, our failing, our screwiness. If we don't conform, adjust, fit in, and measure up, something must be wrong with us. And psychotherapy has its truth: we may well be frozen in grief or shock and not functioning at our best, but don't the social systems that shape us deserve equal scrutiny, equal critical analysis?
Thankfully many therapists reject this paradigm and venture forth with their clients on the forbidden territory of meaning and human potential as well as of critiquing social structures, but it's no easy task persuading insurance companies to come along. Control institutions pay insurance companies to pay health professionals to keep people in their place, serving the established order.

THE AGENDA FOR SCHOOL SYSTEMS
Nor are school systems committed to developing the more that we are. Schools are an arm of social structures, whether religious, governmental, or economic. According to the paradigm-defined needs of those structures, tapping human potential doesn't create enough Dilberts to ensure the "efficient" running of corporate, governmental, religious, and educational hierarchies.
In this century, business interests have dictated the structure of schools. Henry Ford quickly noticed that creative genius and intuitive knowing aren't useful on factory lines. So he pioneered the "modern" school system that inculcates values and skills appropriate for 20th century work life: being punctual, obeying orders, enduring hours, weeks, and years of boring, repetitive tasks, not talking while working, not resting, keeping to the schedule at all costs. Our minds become casualties of industrialization.
Our souls end up casualties as well. Trusting our own judgment, thinking for ourselves, adhering to our values, and having confidence in our innate worth don't make us good foot soldiers for my-way-or-the-highway bosses. Only people with low self-esteem are sufficiently insecure to tolerate abusive work environments. Insofar as we believe we don't deserve better, we adjust, becoming the kind of person that's required to "do the job."
Obligingly, school systems produce people with precisely the low self-esteem that's needed for worker "flexibility." Fears of being wrong, of not making the grade are fears confirmed for 90 percent of the population. That's the percentage who are required not to get A's by the bell curve system, guaranteeing that 90 percent of everyone coming out of school believe that they're incapable of excellence. Schools mirror back to students the mass message that "you're just not good enough, but if you do what you're told without question, you may get better and be rewarded." That's a handy message to have installed in the psyches of 90 percent of the population-handy for perpetuating corporate, religious, governmental, and professional tyrannies, that is.
All this modern schooling goes against what we know about the human mind and how we learn-and have known for decades. Studies in learning show that we learn best when we're most relaxed, yet schools maximize stress through fear of failure. Studies show that children learn most easily through cooperative learning, yet schools impose a competitive model. Studies also indicate that students' beliefs about their own learning abilities affect their performance-if they believe they're good learners, they learn easily; if not, learning the simplest things becomes difficult-yet schools systematically undermine students' confidence.
In these and many other ways, school systems perform virtual lobotomies on our psyches, producing graduates who've long since lost their joy in learning, who believe they must be right all the time and "know it all" or be condemned to outer darkness, and who experience post-traumatic stress symptoms at the thought of having to learn new things on the job.

CULTURAL NONCOMMITMENT TO HUMAN POTENTIAL
Alice Miller, a champion of the potential we all possess from birth, pulls no punches in her books-For Your Own Good in particular analyzes the social, cultural agenda of shutting down our potential. As she explains, the traditional rules of child-rearing passed down from generation to generation have nothing to do with developing our potential, either emotionally, intuitively, psychologically, or intellectually. Their one agenda is control: control the child as soon as possible by any means, whether it's by punishment, humiliation, intimidation, beatings, grading, whatever it takes to break the child's will and autonomy.
The justification for this agenda is that children raised any other way won't fit into society when they grow up. According to this cultural paradigm-expressed in the rules of child-rearing-learning to forget who we are and to become what others want and expect us to be is the most important survival skill. Our potential as human beings is irrelevant, a side issue, compared to our ability to conform.
Of course we're supposed to believe that social systems have our best interests at heart and that obeying them is indeed "for our own good." If we conform properly, our potential will develop accordingly. But is this so? As we've seen, schools and therapy-two systems that you'd think would be committed to developing human potential-have no such commitment. In what system or area of the culture might such a commitment exist?
Governments are fully occupied with who has power over whom, who has the biggest budget, where money can be found, who wins which election or vote, etc. Developing the human potential of its citizenry is not a priority. If anything, it's not on the agenda at all. The insider's view that "the masses are asses" is music to ambitious politicians' ears, who then believe it's their manifest destiny to expand their personal power and become benevolent dictators. Dumb masses are easy to manipulate with slogans and half-truths. For their purposes, the less human potential the better.
As much as we value spiritual teachings, we can't say that religious organizations have much commitment to developing human potential either, though granted there are exceptions. Adhering to fixed doctrines, building congregations, raising money, meddling in the personal affairs of members, running down sectarian competitors, and using fear and guilt to exact obedience and tithing keep them busy enough.
Businesses and corporations certainly don't concern themselves with human potential, even though they sometimes pay lip service to it in the hopes of making employees more "productive." The bottom line is the bottom line, and if human potential comes up at all, it's considered a frill or luxury-"warm fuzzy stuff" that doesn't count in the "real world" of business except to mollify disgruntled workers or help them adjust to higher levels of stress.
Scanning the culture, we frankly can't find any system that's consistently committed to exploring human potential. If anything, our social systems regard human potential as an impediment, an annoying feature of human beings that gums up the systems' otherwise efficient workings. If people would just learn their roles and stick to them, everything would work so much better.
If we didn't know the paradigm behind these systems, we may find this lack of interest in human potential odd. Developing human potential seems crucial to keeping human civilizations vital and evolving, up to speed with the challenges that continually arise. Technology per se can't save us, since we're not using the alternative technology we already have to remedy social and environmental ills. What we lack is the the wisdom and foresight, the honesty, the sense of meaning, justice, integrity, and the good to manage human affairs well. These aren't technology issues but paradigm ones. Wisdom and foresight are precisely the potentials that a paradigm geared to domination and control factors out of us.

FIGHTING BACK
But no paradigm, even one that's used to having the last word, is the last word. The human spirit, being what it is, doesn't take kindly to soul-lobotomies and develops all sorts of responses. One is to join the lobotomizing dominators: do it to others before any more can be done to you. Another is to adopt roles and play along, to accept one's lobotomized lot in life.
Addictions make both responses easier. We can lay off 5,000 employees and numb the pain with a 15 million dollar bonus. Or we can take drugs to make it through the day in our Dilbertesque cubicles. Either way, numbing ourselves with addictions of process (money and power) or of substance (drugs and alcohol) makes us forget the pain of living in a control paradigm culture.
By numbing us, addictions serve the established paradigm well: insofar as we forget pain, we don't confront its causes. Lobotomizing systems go unchallenged, as long as we find ways to cope with being lobotomized.
That's why recovery from addictions begins with recognizing pain. Acknowledging what we feel in social systems is the first subversive step toward a cultural paradigm shift. A paradigm of control through externals unravels when we affirm the importance of what's going on within. When pain counts with us-when we refuse to ignore it, "to put up and shut up"-the days are numbered for the paradigm that's causing us pain.

NEW WORLDVIEWS BRING NEW WORLDS
From this springboard begins the journey of transformation by paradigm shift. It took us 360 pages to explore this process in The Paradigm Conspiracy, so that's a pitch both for whoever is reading this to get a copy and for us to close this electronic essay.
We'll just say that when we're too tired to explain the book to someone, we call it our revenge on the control paradigm, both for us and on behalf of our readers. But when we're feeling more peppy, we say that the book has a happy ending, or at least holds the promise of one. Refusing to be trapped by dominating institutions on one hand and on the other claiming our essence, who we are in the big picture-what's called the "soul" until a better term comes along-we foment revolution of the most constructive, effective, and powerful sort. Each of us in our own ways participates in creating new worldviews, which in turn create new worlds within and without.
We thank you for taking the time to read our thoughts and reflections on this subject, and should you read our book, we hope you enjoy it. We don't pretend to have the answers or to give the "correct" paradigm. Our best hope is that the book gets the philosophical, paradigm-shifting juices going. That's quite enough for us. The rest we leave to the human potential emerging in all of us.

A Hathor Planetary Message Through Tom Kenyon Pt1 - August 03, 2010.mov
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpXV_lIzs...
A Hathor Planetary Message Through Tom Kenyon Pt1 - August 03, 2010

 http://www.tomkenyon.com‬ The Art of Jumping Time Lines Although it may seem paradoxical to some, your timeline—your life—is only one of many simultaneous possibilities. And it is quite possible, indeed it is your birthright, to alter your timeline and the potentials of your life. Your culture, for various reasons, has hypnotized you into believing that you are limited to one timeline. In this message we shall endeavor to discuss our understanding of timelines and how you can change them. Whenever there is an increase of chaotic events, there is a convergence of multiple timelines. Due to the fact that your planet has entered a Chaotic Node and is experiencing ever-increasing levels of chaos, there is also an increase in what we call time nodes. Time nodes occur when two or more timelines converge. As a result of their close proximity oscillation effects sometimes occur when the realities of one timeline bleed through, or are psychically perceived by those on a neighboring timeline. Strong timelines can also literally affect the possibilities and/or probabilities of other timelines within a time node. In other words, creative and novel effects often occur within timelines when they enter a time node (proximity to other timelines). These are evolutionary jumpstarts that hold tremendous possibility for accelerated evolution if you understand how to utilize them. As a result of the volatile nature of events on your planet, there are multiple time nodes emerging. This is a very complicated and complex affair, and we shall endeavor to break it down into its smallest segments, for we believe that this information has vital significance for those of you engaged in the ascension process, and for its sheer survival value. Let us turn our attention to the larger picture first and then to the individual strategies we suggest. Background Your planet is poised on the brink of utter transformation. The form of this transformation has multiple expressions, and it is you—the collective—that will affect these outcomes to a greater or lesser degree. Some of these outcomes, these possibilities, fulfill the prophecies of planetary destruction and purification. Other timelines, other expressions, reveal a different outcome. A sudden unexpected shift in human consciousness could bring the Controllers, who have so negatively affected your destiny, to their knees. And there are hundreds of other possible timelines between these two polarities. There are vested interests in your society who wish you to remain hypnotized, which wish for you to continue in the delusion that you are limited to one timeline, one experience of life as they so deem it. But you have, within your nature, the ability to change timelines and probabilities at the last moment of any event—whether it be personal or collective. We do not say this to be "positive." We say this as a matter of fact concerning your evolutionary potential. Whether you will collectively reach this potential or not remains to be seen, but the path of an Initiate is to reach upward for the highest potential, regardless of what may or may not be happening around him or her. Thus, in this message we shall discuss what you can do, and how you do it. From our perspective, your collective destiny is the summation of individual choices that you, as persons, make. This is combined with evolutionary and terrestrial forces that are far beyond your and your fellow humans' abilities to control. This collection of forces also involves cosmic patterns of energy and intentionality from areas of the cosmos beyond your local solar system, for you are a part of a complex cosmic matrix that is your universe. If we were to use a metaphor, we would say that you, as humanity, are on a great ocean vessel. But many of you are asleep, and there is someone at the helm directing this vessel that should not be there. For many historical and trans-historical reasons, which we won't go into here, various beings have commandeered your ship. But, ah, how the tides are turning. More and more of you are waking up, though some, still half-asleep, stagger across the deck as they watch the tempestuous storm of their world changing before them. The Controllers know that many of you are waking up—too many for their comfort. It is, indeed, an interesting time to be alive! (...) Read more on: ‪http://www.tomkenyon.com‬

 Music: The Ghandarvic Harmonic Choir performed by Tom Kenyon 

© 2010 Tom Kenyon All Rights Reserved. You may copy and distribute this message in any media so long as you do not alter it in any way, do not charge for it, credit the author and include this copyright notice. www.tomkenyon.com

Avatamsaka Sutra
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The Avataṃsaka Sūtra (shortened from Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra,, Chinese: 華嚴經; pinyin: Da fangguang fo Huayan jing, shorted: huá yán jīng; Vietnamese: Kinh Hoa Nghiêm; Japanese: Kegon Kyō; Tibetan: མདོཕལཔོཆེ་; Wylie: mdo-phal-po-che) is one of the most influential Mahayana Sutras of East Asian Buddhism. The title is rendered in English as Flower Garland Sutra, Flower Adornment Sutra, or Flowers Ornament Scripture.

This text describes a cosmos of infinite realms upon realms, mutually containing each other. The vision expressed in this work was the foundation for the creation of the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism, which was characterized by a philosophy of interpenetration. Huayan is known as Kegon in Japan.

The sutra is also well known for its detailed description of the course of the bodhisattva's practice through ten stages where the "Sutra of the Ten Bhumis" (Skt. Daśabhūmika-sūtra, Wyl. phags pa sa bcu pa'i mdo), is the name given to the 31st chapter of the Avatamsaka Sutra.[1]

Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Format
2.1 The Twenty-Sixth Chapter: Ten Stages Sutra
2.2 The Final Chapter: The Gandavyuha Sutra
3 See also
4 Further reading
5 References
6 External links

[edit] History
The sutra was written in stages, beginning from at least 500 years after the death of the Buddha. It is "a very long text composed of a number of originally independent scriptures of diverse provenance, all of which were combined, probably in Central Asia, in the late third or the fourth century CE."[2] Two full Chinese translations of the Avatamsaka Sutra were made. Fragmentary translation probably began in the 2nd century CE, and the famous Ten Stages Sutra (十地經), often treated as an individual scripture, was first translated in the 3rd century. The first complete Chinese version was completed by Buddhabhadra around 420, and the second by Śikṣānanda around 699. There is also a translation of the Gandavyuha by Prajñā around 798. The second translation includes more sutras than the first, and the Tibetan translation, which is still later, includes even more. Scholars conclude that sutras were being added to the collection. The sutra has not survived in Sanskrit.

[edit] Format
The sutra, among the largest in the Buddhist canon, contains 40 chapters of somewhat disparate topics, though with some overarching themes:

The interdependency of all phenomena (dharmas).
The progression of the Buddhist path to full Enlightenment, or Buddhahood.
Two of the chapters serve as sutras in their own right, and have been cited in the writings of many Buddhists in East Asia.

[edit] The Twenty-Sixth Chapter: Ten Stages Sutra
Chapter 26, the Dasabhumika Sutra or Sutra of the Ten Stages details the ten stages, or bhūmi, of development a bodhisattva must undergo to attain supreme enlightenment. The ten stages are also depicted in the Lankavatara Sutra and the Shurangama Sutra. The sutra also touches on the subject of the development of the "aspiration for Enlightenment" (Bodhichitta or Bodhi resolve) of full Buddhahood or anuttarasamyaksambodhi.

[edit] The Final Chapter: The Gandavyuha Sutra
The last chapter of the Avatamsaka also circulates as a separate text known as the Gandavyuha Sutra. The Gandavyuha Sutra details the journey of the youth Sudhana, who undertakes a pilgrimage at the behest of the bodhisattva Manjushri. Sudhana will converse with 52 masters in his quest for enlightenment. The antepenultimate master of Sudhana's pilgrimage is Maitreya. It is here that Sudhana encounters The Tower of Maitreya, which along with Indra's net is one of the most startling metaphors for the infinite to emerge in the history of literature across cultures.

In the middle of the great tower... he saw the billion-world universe... and everywhere there was Sudhana at his feet... Thus Sudhana saw Maitreya's practices of... transcendence over countless eons (kalpa), from each of the squares of the check board wall... In the same way Sudhana... saw the whole supernal manifestation, was perfectly aware it, understood it, contemplated it, used it as a means, beheld it, and saw himself there.[3]
The penultimate master that Sudhana visits is the Bodhisattva Manjushri (Great Wisdom Bodhisattva). Thus, one of the grandest of pilgrimages approaches its conclusion by revisiting where it began. The Gandavyhua suggests that with a subtle shift of perspective we may come to see that the enlightenment that the pilgrim so fervently sought was not only with him at every stage of his journey, but before it began as well—that enlightenment is not something to be gained, but "something" the pilgrim never departed from.

The final master that Sudhana visits is the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra (Universal Worthy), who teaches him that wisdom only exists for the sake of putting it into practice; that it is only good insofar as it benefits all living beings.

When this done, the world of the Gandavyuha (ceases) to be a mystery, a realm devoid of form and corporeality, for now it overlaps this earthly world; no, it becomes that "Thou art it" and there is a perfect fusion of the two... Samantabhadra's arms raised to save sentient beings become our own, which are now engaged in passing salt to a friend at the table and Maitreya's opening the Vairocana Tower for Sudhana is our ushering a caller into the parlor for a friendly chat.[4]
[edit] See also
List of sutras
Mahayana sutras
Shin'yaku Kegonkyō Ongi Shiki, an early Japanese annotation
[edit] Further reading
The Flower Ornament Scripture : A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sūtra by Thomas Cleary, ISBN 0-87773-940-4
[edit] References
1.^ Rigpa Shedra (January 2009). 'Sutra of the Ten Bhumis'. Source: [1] (accessed: April 10, 2009)
2.^ Huayan, Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., pg 4145
3.^ Cleary, Thomas. The Flower Ornament Scripture 3, Entry into the Realm of Reality / Transl. by Thomas Cleary. Boulder: Shambhala, 1987, p. 369.
4.^ D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Series 3
[edit] External links
Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article:
華嚴經

Practices and Vows of the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra from the Avatamsaka Sutra.
The Youth Sudhana Meets his First Teacher (Avatamsaka Sutra, ch. 39)
Purifying Practice (Avatamsaka Sutra, ch. 11)
The Gandavyuha bas-reliefs at Borobudur temple
The Avatamsaka Sutra (the Flower Adornment Sutra) with explanation
The Avatamsaka Sutra - translated by various translators

Huayan school
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v • d • e

The Huayan school (Chinese: 華嚴宗; pinyin: Huáyán Zōng; Japanese: Kegon; Korean: 화엄종 (Hwaeom jong); Sanskrit: Avataṃsaka) or Flower Garland is a tradition of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy that flourished in China during the Tang period. It is based on the Sanskrit Flower Garland Sutra (S. Avataṃsaka Sūtra, C. Huayan Jing) and on a lengthy Chinese interpretation of it, the Huayan Lun. The name "Flower Garland" is meant to suggest the crowning glory of profound understanding.

Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Philosophy
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History
The doctrines of the Huayan school ended up having profound impact on the philosophical attitudes of all of East Asian Buddhism. Established during the period of the end of the Sui and beginning of Tang dynasties (c. 600-700 C.E.), this school centered on the philosophy of interpenetration and mutual containment which its founders perceived in the Flower Garland Sutra. Yet despite basic reliance on this sutra, much of the technical terminology that the school becomes famous for is not found in the sutra itself, but in the commentaries written by its early founders.

The founding of the school is traditionally attributed to a series of five "patriarchs" who were instrumental in developing the schools' doctrines. These five are:

1.Dushun (杜順), Tu-Shun in Wade-Giles
2.Zhiyan (智儼), Chih-yen in Wade-Giles
3.Fazang (法藏), Fa-tsang in Wade-Giles
4.Chengguan (澄觀), Ch'eng-kuan in Wade-Giles
5.Zongmi (宗密), Tsung-mi in Wade-Giles, who is simultaneous a patriarch of the Chan tradition.[1]
Another important figure in the development and popularization of Huayan thought was the lay scholar Li Tongxuan (李通玄). Some accounts of the school also like to extend its patriarchship earlier to Aśvaghoṣa and Nāgārjuna.

Although there are certain aspects of this patriarchal scheme which are clearly contrived, as for example, Chengguan was born 26 years after Fazang's death, it is fairly well accepted that these men each played a significant and distinct role in the development of the school. For example, Dushun is known to have been responsible for the establishment of Huayan studies as a distinct field; Zhiyan is considered to have established the basic doctrines of the sect; Fazang is considered to have rationalized the doctrine for greater acceptance by society; Chengguan and Zongmi are understood to have further developed and transformed the teachings.

After the time of Zongmi and Li Tongxuan the Chinese school of Huayan generally stagnated in terms of new development, and then eventually began to decline. The school, which had been dependent upon the support it received from the government, suffered severely during the Buddhist purge of 841-845, initiated by Emperor Wuzong, never to recover its former strength. Nonetheless, its profound metaphysics, such as that of the Four Dharmadhātu (四法界) of interpenetration, had a deep impact on surviving East Asian schools.

[edit] Philosophy
The most important philosophical contributions of the Huayan school were in the area of its metaphysics, as it taught the doctrine of the mutual containment and interpenetration of all phenomena: that one thing contains all things in existence, and that all things contain one.

Distinctive features of this approach to Buddhist philosophy include:

Truth (or reality) is understood as encompassing and interpenetrating falsehood (or illusion), and vice versa
Good is understood as encompassing and interpenetrating evil
Similarly, all mind-made distinctions are understood as "collapsing" in the enlightened understanding of emptiness (a tradition traced back to the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna)
Huayan makes extensive use of paradox in argument and literary imagery. The following quote from Dale S. Wright (1982) summarizes the range of such devices a reader is likely to encounter in a first foray into Huayan literature:

The first type of paradox is modeled after paradoxical assertions found in many early Mahayana texts that emphasize the concept emptiness (k'ung(f)/'suunyataa). Beginning with the assertion that a phenomenon, X, is empty (k'ung/'suunyaa) (that is, since X originates dependently, it is empty of own-being), one moves to the further paradoxical implication that X is not X. An example from Fa-tsang is the assertion that "when one understands that origination is without self-nature, then there is no origination."(5)
A second type of paradox is derived from two doctrinal sources: the Hua-yen concept of "true emptiness" (chen-k'ung(g)) and the Hua-yen interpretation of the dialectic of the One Mind (i-hsin(h)) in the Awakening of Faith. Whereas the first type of paradox worked with the negative assertion that phenomenal form is empty and nonexistent (wu so yu(i)), the second type reverses that claim by asserting that any empty phenomenon is an expression of, and the medium for, the ultimate truth of emptiness. The union of opposites effected here is the identity between conditioned, relative reality and the ultimate truth of suchness (chen-ju(j)/tathataa). Fa-tsang's paradoxical assertion illustrates this second type. "When the great wisdom of perfect clarity gazes upon a minute hair, the universal sea of nature, the true source, is clearly manifest."(6)

The third variation of paradox is grounded in the Hua-yen doctrine of the "nonobstruction of all phenomena" (shih shih wu-ai(k)). According to this doctrine, when the ultimate truth of emptiness becomes manifest to the viewer, each phenomenon is paradoxically perceived as interpenetrating with and containing all others. This paradoxical violation of the conventional order of time and space is best exemplified by Fa-tsang's famous "Essay on the Golden Lion".

In each and every hair [of the lion] there is the golden lion. All of the lions contained in each and every hair simultaneously and suddenly penetrate into one hair. [Therefore], within each and every hair there are unlimited lions.(7)

The common element in all three types of paradox is that they originate in the tension between the two truths, between conventional truth (su-ti(l)/sa.mv.rtisatya) and ultimate truth (chen-ti(m)/paramaarthasatya). Our task of interpreting the significance of paradoxical language in Hua-yen texts, therefore, will begin by working out an initial interpretation of the two truths and the relation between them.

[edit] See also
the Hwaeom school of Korea
the Kegon school of Japan.
[edit] References
1.^ Cook, Francis (1977). Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. Penn State Press. p. 24. ISBN 027102190X.
Wright, Dale S. (1983). Philosophy East and West 32 (3).
Cleary, Thomas. The Flower Ornament Scripture (an almost complete translation of the sutra on which the Huayen School is based)
Cleary, Thomas. Entry Into the Inconceivable (important essays by Tang Dynasty Huayen masters)
Haiyun Jimeng. The Dawn of Enlightenment (commentary on the opening passage of the Avatamsaka Sutra by a present-day Huayen master)
Cook, Francis H. (1977), Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, Penn State Press, ISBN 027102190X .
[edit] External links
Huayen webpage in English
Flower Adornment Sutra - Hua Yan Jing - Avatamsaka Original Text

Huayan school
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
Part of a series on
Buddhism


Outline · Portal

History
Timeline · Councils
Gautama Buddha
Disciples
Later Buddhists

Dharma or Concepts

Four Noble Truths
Dependent Origination
Impermanence
Suffering · Middle Way
Non-self · Emptiness
Five Aggregates
Karma · Rebirth
Samsara · Cosmology

Practices

Three Jewels
Precepts · Perfections
Meditation · Wisdom
Noble Eightfold Path
Wings to Awakening
Monasticism · Laity

Nirvāṇa
Four Stages · Arahant
Buddha · Bodhisattva


Schools · Canons
Theravāda · Pali
Mahāyāna · Chinese
Vajrayāna · Tibetan


Countries and Regions

Related topics
Comparative studies
Cultural elements
Criticism


v • d • e

The Huayan school (Chinese: 華嚴宗; pinyin: Huáyán Zōng; Japanese: Kegon; Korean: 화엄종 (Hwaeom jong); Sanskrit: Avataṃsaka) or Flower Garland is a tradition of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy that flourished in China during the Tang period. It is based on the Sanskrit Flower Garland Sutra (S. Avataṃsaka Sūtra, C. Huayan Jing) and on a lengthy Chinese interpretation of it, the Huayan Lun. The name "Flower Garland" is meant to suggest the crowning glory of profound understanding.

Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Philosophy
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History
The doctrines of the Huayan school ended up having profound impact on the philosophical attitudes of all of East Asian Buddhism. Established during the period of the end of the Sui and beginning of Tang dynasties (c. 600-700 C.E.), this school centered on the philosophy of interpenetration and mutual containment which its founders perceived in the Flower Garland Sutra. Yet despite basic reliance on this sutra, much of the technical terminology that the school becomes famous for is not found in the sutra itself, but in the commentaries written by its early founders.

The founding of the school is traditionally attributed to a series of five "patriarchs" who were instrumental in developing the schools' doctrines. These five are:

1.Dushun (杜順), Tu-Shun in Wade-Giles
2.Zhiyan (智儼), Chih-yen in Wade-Giles
3.Fazang (法藏), Fa-tsang in Wade-Giles
4.Chengguan (澄觀), Ch'eng-kuan in Wade-Giles
5.Zongmi (宗密), Tsung-mi in Wade-Giles, who is simultaneous a patriarch of the Chan tradition.[1]
Another important figure in the development and popularization of Huayan thought was the lay scholar Li Tongxuan (李通玄). Some accounts of the school also like to extend its patriarchship earlier to Aśvaghoṣa and Nāgārjuna.

Although there are certain aspects of this patriarchal scheme which are clearly contrived, as for example, Chengguan was born 26 years after Fazang's death, it is fairly well accepted that these men each played a significant and distinct role in the development of the school. For example, Dushun is known to have been responsible for the establishment of Huayan studies as a distinct field; Zhiyan is considered to have established the basic doctrines of the sect; Fazang is considered to have rationalized the doctrine for greater acceptance by society; Chengguan and Zongmi are understood to have further developed and transformed the teachings.

After the time of Zongmi and Li Tongxuan the Chinese school of Huayan generally stagnated in terms of new development, and then eventually began to decline. The school, which had been dependent upon the support it received from the government, suffered severely during the Buddhist purge of 841-845, initiated by Emperor Wuzong, never to recover its former strength. Nonetheless, its profound metaphysics, such as that of the Four Dharmadhātu (四法界) of interpenetration, had a deep impact on surviving East Asian schools.

[edit] Philosophy
The most important philosophical contributions of the Huayan school were in the area of its metaphysics, as it taught the doctrine of the mutual containment and interpenetration of all phenomena: that one thing contains all things in existence, and that all things contain one.

Distinctive features of this approach to Buddhist philosophy include:

Truth (or reality) is understood as encompassing and interpenetrating falsehood (or illusion), and vice versa
Good is understood as encompassing and interpenetrating evil
Similarly, all mind-made distinctions are understood as "collapsing" in the enlightened understanding of emptiness (a tradition traced back to the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna)
Huayan makes extensive use of paradox in argument and literary imagery. The following quote from Dale S. Wright (1982) summarizes the range of such devices a reader is likely to encounter in a first foray into Huayan literature:

The first type of paradox is modeled after paradoxical assertions found in many early Mahayana texts that emphasize the concept emptiness (k'ung(f)/'suunyataa). Beginning with the assertion that a phenomenon, X, is empty (k'ung/'suunyaa) (that is, since X originates dependently, it is empty of own-being), one moves to the further paradoxical implication that X is not X. An example from Fa-tsang is the assertion that "when one understands that origination is without self-nature, then there is no origination."(5)
A second type of paradox is derived from two doctrinal sources: the Hua-yen concept of "true emptiness" (chen-k'ung(g)) and the Hua-yen interpretation of the dialectic of the One Mind (i-hsin(h)) in the Awakening of Faith. Whereas the first type of paradox worked with the negative assertion that phenomenal form is empty and nonexistent (wu so yu(i)), the second type reverses that claim by asserting that any empty phenomenon is an expression of, and the medium for, the ultimate truth of emptiness. The union of opposites effected here is the identity between conditioned, relative reality and the ultimate truth of suchness (chen-ju(j)/tathataa). Fa-tsang's paradoxical assertion illustrates this second type. "When the great wisdom of perfect clarity gazes upon a minute hair, the universal sea of nature, the true source, is clearly manifest."(6)

The third variation of paradox is grounded in the Hua-yen doctrine of the "nonobstruction of all phenomena" (shih shih wu-ai(k)). According to this doctrine, when the ultimate truth of emptiness becomes manifest to the viewer, each phenomenon is paradoxically perceived as interpenetrating with and containing all others. This paradoxical violation of the conventional order of time and space is best exemplified by Fa-tsang's famous "Essay on the Golden Lion".

In each and every hair [of the lion] there is the golden lion. All of the lions contained in each and every hair simultaneously and suddenly penetrate into one hair. [Therefore], within each and every hair there are unlimited lions.(7)

The common element in all three types of paradox is that they originate in the tension between the two truths, between conventional truth (su-ti(l)/sa.mv.rtisatya) and ultimate truth (chen-ti(m)/paramaarthasatya). Our task of interpreting the significance of paradoxical language in Hua-yen texts, therefore, will begin by working out an initial interpretation of the two truths and the relation between them.

[edit] See also
the Hwaeom school of Korea
the Kegon school of Japan.
[edit] References
1.^ Cook, Francis (1977). Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. Penn State Press. p. 24. ISBN 027102190X.
Wright, Dale S. (1983). Philosophy East and West 32 (3).
Cleary, Thomas. The Flower Ornament Scripture (an almost complete translation of the sutra on which the Huayen School is based)
Cleary, Thomas. Entry Into the Inconceivable (important essays by Tang Dynasty Huayen masters)
Haiyun Jimeng. The Dawn of Enlightenment (commentary on the opening passage of the Avatamsaka Sutra by a present-day Huayen master)
Cook, Francis H. (1977), Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, Penn State Press, ISBN 027102190X .
[edit] External links
Huayen webpage in English
Flower Adornment Sutra - Hua Yan Jing - Avatamsaka Original Text