The Grand Option: Personal Transformation and a New Creation (Gethsemani Studies in Psychological and Religious Anthropology)

Rating:
Summary: An interesting challenge for our minds
Review: Beatrice Bruteau tells us about a possible new social order based on the change from the current domination paradigm to a future communion paradigm.
In the domination paradigm, individuals are more like objects identified by a number of attributes with which they tend to identify themselves and which make them different from other individuals.
In the communion paradigm, persons are made in the image of the Trinity. They are indescribable subjects, who continuously give and share their life with others and live by the life of the whole.
As far as I am concerned, I think that the most enlightening idea she puts forward in order to help us understand this fundamental change is the shift from the particle metaphor to the field metaphor.
In the domination paradigm, she compares individuals to particles that tend to live an autonomous type of life, where they fight or ignore one another, or sometimes associate, but always remain external to each other.
In the communion paradigm, she compares persons to fields, in the sense of interacting patterns of energy. This image makes it easier to understand the mutual indwelling of persons, which she claims to be the basis of the new communion paradigm.
When you add to this, the fact that she identifies this radiated energy with pure unmotivated creative love, you have a lot to meditate in order to tune your own mind to this radically new way of thinking ourselves and our world.