ABSTRACT
A human being is a part of the whole, a part limited in time and space. For humanity to accomplish a profound shift in attitude, the skin-encapsulated model of the self needs to be augmented by the realization that the individual is an integral part of Nature, no more isolated from the environment than a cell in the body is isolated from the human organism. One of the classic examples of a paradigm shift is the Copernican revolution in astronomy. Willis Harman, a futurist at the Stanford Research Institute, has referred to the shift of consciousness as the ‘New Copernican Revolution’. In the original Copernican Revolution, the geocentric model of the physical Universe was turned inside out. The old model can be incorporated within the new model. This is what happened with Albert Einstein’s revolution in physics, where Newton’s laws of motion were retained as a special case of the Theory of Relativity.
