Trailmarkers: Pathways As A Guide To The Paradigm Shift
What do you find when you open and peer into the vibrant pages of Pathways magazine? Are you taking in only the individual content, or do you see each article as part of a greater whole?
Do you wonder what New Science advocate Bruce Lipton has to do with Food, Inc., or a mother’s personal experience with artificial food colors? Or can you sense something exciting and revolutionary, a hopeful context, emerging just beyond phrases like “spontaneous evolution,” a “21st century manifesto for parents,” and “the art of self-care”?
If you are like most people drawn to holistic magazines, you probably know there is a global paradigm shift afoot, a shift that is moving every human, individually and collectively, from a fragmented, industrial worldview to a holistic, life-affirming one. This shift affects every aspect of our daily lives and individual choices, whether we acknowledge it or not. And in return, we are affecting it.
There is good news in all of this shifting. The key components of these two worldviews, one in rapid decline and the other emerging at light speed, are moving us (and science and culture) from a short-term focus to sustainability, from competition to cooperation, from separateness to connectivity and from outward-directed to inward-directed awareness. As the book Spontaneous Evolution states, it’s imperative that humans stop believing the old storyline that we are here to “live by the law of the jungle,” and instead, embrace the scientifically-supported and spirituallyintegrated truth that we exist to “live in balance with Nature, recognizing that all life is connected.” (You can read an excerpt on page 52.)
It’s the “all life is connected” part that is the shimmering context supporting each story you read in Pathways. It is this same missing context in the fading industrial worldview that has allowed, as Food, Inc. reveals, consumers in a consumer-driven culture to not question (and therefore ignore) that their often tainted food is dependent upon animal cruelty and environmental degradation. How could we not know where our food comes from? Because an industrial worldview keeps us too busy and distracted by the content of our lives to inquire after the context. (Pathways’ Facebook fans voted Food, Inc. as the must-see DVD of 2009. Read about it and nine other DVDs on page 58.)
A holistic worldview, however, confers the understanding that it is imperative to protect all interdependent parts of the whole of nature. And more important—because there are no divisions or separations between energy and matter, thought and action—each individual choice we make affects the whole. No energy is ever wasted; no thought or deed lost. We can, therefore, always choose to make a difference with confidence and chuck the old, sad song of “all is lost.”
As you listen to the voices in these pages, remember to listen for your own inner knowing and common sense, and you will find:
Courage, in the roar of fierce fathers like John Breeding, as he beats his chest and exclaims in his “21st Century Manifesto for Parenting” that he will protect his children from the harmful lies of the industrial paradigm (page 8). Honesty, in a mother who confesses that, while our best-laid plans for our children can be lost in the rubble of life’s challenges, they can be found again, and we can heal (page 25). Defiance, as another father, Thom Hartmann, rejects the tired, old tales that castigate our children as defective through labels like ADHD, and instead instructs factory-modeled schools “that we are not interested in our children being the villains in [your] dramas any more. It is time for us to give our children back their humanity and their hope” (page 16). In this issue, you will also find safe, alternative approaches to healing that might be as simple as taking a walk in the park (page 48) and permission slips to make self-care an art (page 40).
If worldviews create worlds, what will the world we seek to create for our children look like? As we continue to find our footing in the midst of an epochal paradigm shift, where will we find the courage to break with tired traditions that do not serve our families and, instead, confidently follow our inner wisdom— the knowledge that we are never separate from one another or our earth? That is the purpose of the empowering stories and images you’ll find every season in these pages: to gently guide us toward our own pathways to family wellness.
