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This is an experiment in paradigm shifting. It is a manifestation of the insides of my head and as such, you may wish to check back regularly because my head has a tendency to rattle around. I removed the idea that this is a “current” manifestation of my head. It had been there as a statement, bold as brass but then my head did this:
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It’s not current any more than the present moment is always current. So, to press the currency of these word is both unnecessary and pedantically irrelevant. What I write is—as it is written—obviously current. This particular paragraph was scribbled on 3rd March 2025, three days following the Oval Office outburst, and so most of what I am thinking is wrapped in that debacle, about how hierarchy once more imposes it disastrous power. To bang on about being current in days of such daily developments is both pointless and untrue. So, what I write makes sense as I write it. My head then flips and unsettles me. I then remove any mention of current truths, leaving just the words. You make your own mind up. Go figure.
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It’s not that I am fickle so much as that I cannot settle on a single idea for too long. Some like to suggest this is a manifestation of attention deficit disorder. I prefer to auto-analyse that I am idealistic and easily bored. This blog is a written example of my behaviour: a thread through the middle, but sheer muddle everywhere. To claim you are shifting a paradigm is itself a pretty arrogant stance, and I don’t mean to be. Even so, the rattling in my head won’t go away and this is how it sounds. The basis of how it is all set out bears witness the core of the problem: life is a contradiction of arrows and circles. Our daily journey from dawn to dusk is so clearly (common-sensically) a linear experience. The clock ticks and the moments pass as we move from early to late, youth to aged, birth to death. It reveals a predictable and obvious linearity. Nobody would question the power and shape the linear path has over all our lives.
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If I was a better priest I’d take time out during the linear journey to say all of the Daily Offices. As it is I generally only manage Morning Prayer. On Sundays there may be an evensong to bookend the early morning Holy Communion, but mostly the power of the clock draws me from bed to bed with only a minimum of piety.
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Our lives are so obviously linear that it seems silly of me to introduce a challenge to this pattern, but this blog is just that. Our deep experience of linearity—the “paradigm of the linear” one might pompously name it—as we grow from birth to death, is so overwhelming that we impose it as a theme upon all we experience. Ideas and histories, relationships, art, faith, science… the list is so often linear. I wish to challenge this obsession. I am not suggesting there is no aspect of or value to linear living, but that in adhering to it so completely we have missed a trick in how we can live together in ways that draw on the eternal essence of existence.
The paradigm I hope to share, however, is as far from linear as I can imagine in a world of four spacial-temporal dimensions. As we walk the surface of the earth and throw our heads back to consider the heavens, I introduce the spherical into our thinking. We need to see our lives not as linear but as spherical. It might sound rather esoteric and contrived. It may never get out of the starting blocks for you. But I hope, in these words, to carry the paradigm forward in ways that will benefit someone, somewhere, somehow. This might even be you. We leap, in this world, from a linear, one dimensional temporal journey towards a throughly four dimensional one and in doing so we leap the spectral straightjacket of 3D living. Spheres are four dimensions and importantly, they can have neither up nor down, and without up and down we cannot either have tight or wrong. Only relatedness. Read on.
The paradigm of the Spectral Spheres is also a paradox. Reread the paragraphs above and you will see they are littered with linearity, with the mycelial idea that time works in one direction. I cannot escape this. And I am not actually trying. What I hope to achieve is a place to reflect that the whilst there is a linear reality, the world of thought and idea is spherical. Our understanding of ourselves and even the capacity to perceive the souls of others is a spherical exercise. Experience isn’t just a matter of time and space but of the inner universe of ideas.
The paradigm of spectral spheres is mostly concerned with how we relate to one another. Blogging lends itself to this paradigm because there is no continually imposed linear journey. Instead, you are encouraged to look around and encounter the inside of my head in your own way. At your own speed. Perhaps.