by Terry Sterrenberg
For as long as I can remember I have always believed in omni-partiality. (New word for me) I have always believed that everyone should benefit and be successful: that the structures of life lean toward healing if we get out of the way. That makes my life task literally to pay attention, to listen, and to be a vehicle of that healing in whatever way I can. That being said I have also let myself throughout my life be convinced and shut down by what I interpreted as others communicating to me that what I felt inside was basically immature and naive: unnatural and impossible. My inability to communicate my inner life contributed to this as well. The present paradigm taught that to me and I bought it.
I now believe that there is such a thing as the “other” paradigm, i.e. a cooperative, collaborative, and transformational paradigm. Without fully distinguishing it I have instinctively been trying to create it my whole life. I became a christian minister and then a therapist. Both gave me glimmers of a new life paradigm. There have been moments that have kept my search going, but mostly I have felt alone and dismissive of those emotions, sensations, and feelings, thinking they do not fit in to real life. I mostly look out my window and think that a breakthrough into the collaborative/transformational Paradigm is like believing in magic. Does it really exist? Not really. By definition I (We) cannot see/experience the “new” paradigm from this paradigm. We need to dip our toe in it and absorb the energy. And literally change our minds. And yet perhaps the truth is that the new paradigm exists in the same space as the old one. What changes is in us, our vision – not a perspective, but an expansion of our ability to see/hear/feel /sense/intuit/experience a bigger or whole reality of the moment. How does it all fit together – today?
The example of citizen groups in Germany is hopeful. This is the pathway Laurie and I would like to illustrate in our screenplay. However, one problem I am having is figuring out how to create that moment of leap in consciousness when participants know the new paradigm. Is it a process or is it an event or perhaps both. That moment seems random and again somewhat like fantasy and magic. Maybe the process is and the event evolves from Dynamic Facilitation.
I appreciate the dynamic of iteration in contrast to a process of incrementation. A ubiquitous system of DF citizen groups might move us toward that “other paradigm. But how would that happen? That is what we are thinking we want to bring together in the screenplay.