The Library/Key II
What a paradigm is, and how to catch yours in the act
A paradigm is not a belief you hold. It is the set of habits that runs you when you are not deciding anything, which is most of the day.
- Source
- Hill on habit and the subconscious; Haanel on the world within; Bob Proctor as a teacher in this lineage
- min read
- 2
A working definition
A paradigm is a multitude of habits fixed in the subconscious that controls conduct without consulting you. Hill calls the mechanism habit and the subconscious mind; Haanel calls it the world within. Bob Proctor, teaching in that lineage, gave it the name most readers now use.
The practical consequence is the part people miss. A paradigm does not argue with new information; it ignores it. This is why reading a third book on the subject produces agreement and no change in conduct.
You cannot think your way out of it either, because the thinking is being done by the thing you are trying to leave. What you can do is observe it, in writing, in specific moments.
Where yours is visible
In money, at the amount you find normal to earn and the amount that feels absurd for you specifically. In work, at the task you have rescheduled more than three times. In speech, in the sentence you say about yourself that you have never once examined.
It is most visible in the gap between your stated aim and your calendar. Look at last week: the aim was written, and the hours went somewhere else. Whatever allocated those hours is the paradigm.
The method: catch it in the act
For seven days, write down each time you avoid something you had decided to do. Record three things only: what you avoided, what you did instead, and the exact sentence you told yourself.
By day four the sentences repeat. Three or four of them will account for nearly everything you avoid, and reading them in your own handwriting is a different experience from believing them silently.
That list, not a book, is the object of the work. A paradigm is changed by repetition and attention over weeks, not by insight in an afternoon. But it cannot be changed while it is invisible, and this is how it becomes visible.
Man is a mental being, and mind is the creative principle of the universe. Thought is the vital force with which we can accomplish results.