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This is an experiment in paradigm shifting. It is a current 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. 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 the is a manifestation of attention deficit. I prefer to auto-analyse that I am idealistic and easily bored. This blog is a consequence of my behaviour. You decide.
To claim you are shifting a paradigm is itself pretty arrogant and I don’t mean to be, but 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 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. 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.
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 (and I am nothing if not pompous)—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 is founded on the 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.
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.
The basics (if you’re lost somewhere on the sphere)
The Linear distraction
The surface of a sphere
Combing a hairy ball