Crossing the Portal: The Mindshift of a New Paradigm

Once you see, you cannot unsee.

You can see the picture exactly as it is a Man facing the camera. But when you stare you will see the figure shift. You can switch back and forth, from one perspective to the other, from one paradigm to another. (In reality from the right brain to the left brain)

I once had a dinner conversation with a physicist who told me that reality is a lot like a magic eye puzzle. You know, those images that look like static noise until — boom! — your eyes adjust, and suddenly, a hidden 3D shape pops out. Before you see it, it’s impossible to explain what’s there. After you see it, you can’t unsee it.

That’s what it feels like to step through the threshold of a new paradigm. It’s not a small shift. It’s not just seeing new information. It’s an entirely new way of seeing. A total mind shift. And when it happens, you realize something unsettling: most people are still looking at the old picture, straining their eyes at static, unable to perceive the world you now inhabit.

Horizon One sees a 6, Horizon Three a 9. But it’s not just perspective — it’s paradigm. Horizon 1 clings to the old logic; Horizon 3 glimpses a new reality. Different worlds, different truths.

The Copernican Moment

Think about Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543. He didn’t just suggest that Earth wasn’t at the center of the universe — he shattered the entire framework of meaning that had held civilization together for over a thousand years. People weren’t just wrong about astronomy; they were wrong about their place in the cosmos, their relationship to God, their entire sense of order and purpose. It took a century for that reality to become common knowledge.

Now, something even bigger is happening. It’s not just science, or politics, or finance, or technology. It’s all of them at once. We are not just changing what we know; we are changing what it means to know. We are shifting from a worldview of separateness — of discrete, competing systems — to a worldview of inter-being, where everything is connected and co-creates everything else. And if you’ve stepped into this reality, you know how hard it is to describe it to those still living in the old paradigm.

Seeing What Was Once Invisible

The first thing that happens when you cross the threshold is that you start seeing patterns. Not just small ones — big, systemic patterns that were once invisible. You see how financial systems are entangled with ecological health. You see how policy decisions ripple through cultures and ecosystems like waves in a vast ocean. You see that artificial intelligence and regenerative agriculture are not two separate things, but part of the same evolutionary leap in human systems.

It’s like stepping out of a two-dimensional world and suddenly perceiving the third dimension. Before, you could only understand things in flat, linear terms — cause and effect, winners and losers, growth and decline. Now, you see loops, cycles, flows. You see how economic models are not neutral structures but cultural belief systems that shape and are shaped by the land, the water, the air. You see finance not as a machine but as an organic system, capable of either depleting or regenerating life itself.

In the shadows, one sees a square and a circle. Both are certain, both are incomplete. Zoom out, and the cylinder is revealed — reality beyond illusion. Paradigms shape perception, but perspective transforms understanding. The wider your view, the clearer the truth: beyond beliefs, a deeper reality emerges.

And you start to wonder: how did I not see this before?

The Language Problem

Here’s the second thing you realize: you’ve lost the ability to fully communicate with people who haven’t made the shift. It’s not that they lack intelligence; it’s that they are speaking an entirely different language. The old paradigm is built on a foundation of individualism, competition, extraction. The new paradigm is built on inter-being, mutualism, regeneration. When you say “value,” they think money. When you say “wealth,” they think GDP. When you say “growth,” they think more, rather than deeper.

So you find yourself in the same position as Copernicus — or Galileo, or Einstein, or any of the people throughout history who have suddenly seen reality in a way that others couldn’t yet perceive. You see the earth moving under your feet, but the world is still chanting, “No, no, it is the sun that moves.”

The Unraveling and the Unfolding

The old world is unraveling, but the new one is not yet fully born. That’s what makes this moment so disorienting. If you are standing in the new paradigm, you see the collapse of extractive economies not as a failure, but as an inevitable transition. You see the crises of climate, finance, and politics not as separate problems, but as symptoms of a deeper evolutionary shift. You see that the old world is clinging to itself, trying to hold together an illusion that no longer works.

And here’s the hardest part: you realize that many people will never make the leap. Some will double down on the old paradigm, building higher walls, bigger portfolios, more rigid ideologies. Some will fight to preserve a way of life that was never sustainable to begin with. And you will have to decide — do you keep trying to pull them through the threshold? Or do you focus on building what comes next?

The Great Inversion

There is a moment in every paradigm shift when the impossible becomes obvious. When people stop asking, “How could we possibly do things differently?” and start asking, “How did we ever believe in that old way of thinking?”

It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s coming. There will be a time when people look back at the way we structured our economy — built on infinite extraction from a finite planet — and shake their heads in disbelief, the same way we now look back at geocentrism or bloodletting. There will be a time when inter-being is not a radical idea, but a given.

Right now, we are on the cusp. The threshold is here. And stepping through it is exhilarating, terrifying, and irreversible.

Once you see, you cannot unsee.