Each of us views the world in a slightly different way. These world-views can be flexible or inflexible, open or resistant to change.

There are at least three approaches that can be taken to managing world-views.

Three Approaches

First, there are those who accept what they're told implicitly, and therefore endorse inherited worldviews. They may be powerfully influenced by the opinions of family and friends, the views of their local community, or the media. Their perspective on life may be molded by special interest groups, like religious bodies, political parties, unions or professional organizations.

The second group are those who choose to be committed to ideologies. When we cannot make sense of what is happening to us, or around us, we feel insecure. In order to overcome this insecurity, we search for explanations. It is simplistic interpretations that have the greatest appeal, because they offer explanations that are free from ambiguity. We cannot deal easily with complexity, and, therefore, those theologies we find attractive are those that appear clear and unambiguous. They enjoy added appeal where they demonize other groups, who can be blamed when things go wrong. There is a ready market for simplistic explanations [9] because they address our insecurity. Those merchandising them often stand to gain from their proselytizing activities.

While there are people who accept what they are told implicitly, and others who are fiercely ideological, there are others again, much smaller in number, whose worldviews are more flexible. It is not a matter of life and death if they are challenged. They are willing to think beyond the frame.

Openness

The openness of those in this latter category is evident in at least three areas.

First, they are willing to embrace every conceivable area of knowledge. This does not mean that they can understand everything, or tie all the loose threads together. Because there is so much that is being explored, it is impossible for any one person to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything. However, to satisfy an insatiable curiosity, we need at least a rough map of the territory.

It is always tempting to espouse a limited perspective that promises clarity, rather than living with the blurred edges of a more complex worldview. The doleful result of this preference, however, is that scholars become isolated in their narrow specialties and treat other scholars, often from different disciplines, with disdain. What further exacerbates this narrow focus is the fact that academic reputations, and therefore self-esteem, are at stake.

It is not easy to convince researchers to embrace a wide spectrum of opinion, to positively appraise conclusions deriving from premises and methodologies other than their own. Such openness is only possible when our self-esteem does not depend on the acclaim we receive for our [10]

scholarship, or our security on our maps of reality. It is when our security and self-esteem are based on relationships in which we are accepted for who we are that we can begin seriously considering opinions that complement or challenge ours. We are most free when our security and self-esteem are rooted in the reality we discern behind our maps, a palpable, almost personal Reality associated with a Spirit Presence in whom we can ground ourselves.

Four Quadrants

Ken Wilber has outlined a Four-Quadrant model of integration, involving the bringing together of diverse elements--individual/internal, individual/external, communal/internal and communal external. Wilber suggests that his Four-Quadrant model allows for increasing levels of awareness or consciousness. We can employ this four-quadrant approach at each level of self-appropriation--that is, successively, the level of the ego, the self, the bodyself, and at that level where one senses a oneness with all reality to the extent that one's experience can be described as "non-dual". For instance, when a person is meditating, at the "non-dual" level, they can describe what they are experiencing and accounts of similar meditative experience can be investigated from a range of cultures, tracing distinctive symbols, myths, languages etc. Furthermore, their brainwaves can be studied, and, at the same time, controlled experiments can be conducted to determine what systemic effect this meditation may be having on the community.

Wilber's approach, which argues that no one is completely wrong, does not exclude debate. However, it does seek to bridle the imperialism of some disciplines that would reduce reality to the parameters of their philosophy, their instruments of investigation and their methods of verification. [11]

David Shainberg, a psychiatrist, contended that there was very little openness to new insights, or "faith", within the scientific community. Wilber's approach, if adopted, offers a way out of this impasse, at least for those scientists able to risk their reputations!

Ways of Knowing

If asked how we know what we know, most people would answer that we use our senses or our minds.

However, while data received through our five senses, and insights developed through personal reflection, are two of the most important ways of knowing, there are a number of other modalities of knowing that we often neglect. For our knowledge to be comprehensive, we need to keep these additional apertures open.

It is possible for us to enhance the mind's ability to grapple with difficult issues by learning to think laterally, in new and creative ways that are not constricted by established patterns of thinking. For some people, lateral thinking comes more easily than it does for others. Nevertheless, it is a process we can all learn. Edward De Bono has suggested ways in which this can be done.

Going one stage further, it can be argued that rational thinking has its limitations, and that many aspects of life lie beyond the limits of what we can discover by logical thinking. Zen koans, puzzles that taunt common sense, are designed, by building up frustration with mental processes, to help us escape their limitations. Wilber argues that it is possible to develop a trans-rational mode of knowing. [12]

If we spend time exploring the self, particularly those deeper levels that lie beyond conscious awareness, we discover ways of knowing, which come to have an increasingly significant role to play in our knowing. These pathways to knowledge are associated with feeling, imagination and intuition; faculties that are further enhanced the more we become familiar with the language of our bodies.

Modern neuroscientists concur with Freud, and his successors, that there is much that goes on in the physiology of our brains and in the unconscious dimensions of our personalities of which our minds are unaware. Psychoanalysts, particularly those enamoured of Jung's Analytical Psychology, go one stage further, arguing that we can use dimensions of the unconscious to help us explore ourselves and our world.

Contemplatives have argued that there are three different paths to knowledge. There is the Eye of the Flesh, associated with our senses, the Eye of the Mind, which processes this data from the senses and reflects on it as well as on its own reflections, and the Eye of the Spirit, through which we have access to the Reality that underlies the phenomenological world and to the ubiquitous Spiritual Presence that sustains this Reality.

It is also important that we develop a disciplined openness to influences beyond the self that impact us. This opens up the possibility of our exploring paranormal experience, but without descending into magical explanations. If we are undiscriminating, we may find ourselves confusing fantasy and fairy tale with reality, or being taken in by ideologies that play on our fears or other primitive responses. [13]

Analysis

While it is important for us to be open to knowledge deriving from all disciplines, and to experiment with ways of knowing that lie beyond observation or reflection, it is also important to explore ways of dealing with this knowledge which will help us maintain an openness to truth.

It will be important to develop a degree of flexibility sufficient to allow us to alter our perception of what it is we are seeking to understand. This is difficult. We have much invested in maintaining mental constructions of reality that comfort us or that we have publicly supported.

It is also important for us to be committed to integrating the new knowledge we have acquired, knowledge that may sit uncomfortably with our current worldview. The difficulty of integrating alien material has been illustrated, over the past twenty years, by the Church's reluctance to digest research findings on causes of homosexuality. Sections of the Church have militantly resisted this new knowledge. This resistance was evident in earlier opposition to astronomical developments and to Darwin's theory of evolution.

If we are to develop openness to new knowledge, particularly to ways of dealing with that knowledge, it is important for us to trust ourselves and our judgment, rather than to be totally dependent upon those we consider authorities. While it would be foolish for us to dismiss out of hand the considered opinion of experts, it is also important that we realise that the experts have not always been correct, and that long held theories have needed to be revised.

This factor indicates how important it is for us to be willing, when the evidence becomes overwhelming, to change the major paradigm structuring our knowledge. In doing this, as William of Occam suggested, we are well advised to opt for [14] simple, elegant explanations. These explanations condense, rather than overlook, complexity.

Exemplars

We can gain inspiration and confidence from those who have been open to new insights and new approaches. In the world of science we can look to Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein. In the behavioural sciences, Freud and Jung stand out as outstanding pioneers. Fresh approaches to political change have been pioneered by Gandhi and Mandela. In the area of spirituality, Lao Zi, the Buddha, Jesus, and in our time, Krishnamurti, have developed novel approaches to the exploration of the realm of the Spirit.

Qualities

What is required of the people investing their lives in innovative exploration?

We cannot be open to new truth unless we feel reasonably secure. This security may derive from our inner resources, from confidence in the support we receive from others or a sense of oneness with the Universe. Those who enjoy the greatest security are people who sense, in the inscape of the Universe, a Spirit Presence, which they experience as an ever-present reality.

These investigators also need a reasonable degree of self-esteem, or self-confidence, to enable them to persist in an innovative approach in the face of conservative opposition. Another quality required of those who are open to the truth is courage, the courage to stand by their discoveries, and, in some cases, to live them. These intrepid explorers are often called upon to endure loneliness and ostracism. Socrates [15] discovered that his approach was intolerable, and Jesus was accused of heresy and insurrection.

There is a sense in which those who are open to new discoveries, or new mental configurations of reality, are individuals who are alert to graced inspiration, revelation that sometimes reaches them in dreams. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were conceived when their authors were dreaming. Elias Howe designed the needle for his sewing machine as the result of a dream. Friedrich August von Kekule's discovery that the molecules of certain organic compounds were not open structures but closed rings was inspired by a dream.

Pioneers must also be capable of living with less structure and greater simplicity. Krishnamurti illustrates this well. He argued that we need to reach beyond, not only our formulations of reality, but also our memories and experiences. We need to reach beyond the linguistic forms with which we seek to grapple with external reality and experience that reality directly.

If we are to think beyond the frame, and live beyond the frame, we must be open, reasonably secure, enjoy a healthy sense of identity, and be attuned to the Spirit, whose grace offers us fresh, and sometimes revolutionary insights. [16]

[ROI 9-16]