Aidan McCullen - Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life

1. Introduction
2. Chapter 1
3. Chapter 2
4. Chapter 3
5. Chapter 4
6. Chapter 5
7. Chapter 6
8. Chapter 7
9. Chapter 8
10. Chapter 9
11. Chapter 10
12. Chapter 11
13. Chapter 12
14. Chapter 13
15. Chapter 14
16. Chapter 15
17. Chapter 16

Aidan McCullen

This edition first published 2021.

2021 by Aidan McCullen

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ISBN 9781119770480 (hardback) ISBN 9781119817093 (ePub)
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To my wonderful wife, Niamh and sons, Josh and Jake. Thank you for all your love and support and for putting up with my crazy stories.

Out of the lumber of things we are taught, the gravel of our experience and the cement of the things we observe, we slowly erect an edifice, an unconscious, internal model of reality. We gradually fill it with the furniture of habit, custom, belief, and bias. We get comfortable there. It's our sanctuary. Through its windows, small and distorted as they may be, we view society and the world. Our internal model of reality is how we make sense of the world, and it can be a badly built place indeed. Even if it is well constructed, it may have become archaic. Everything that gave rise to it may have changed, since the natural world and human society are never stagnant. They are constantly becoming.

During the past four decades the external world has been changing at a rate enormously greater than the rate at which our internal models have been evolving. Nothing behaves as we think it should. Nothing makes sense. At such times the world appears to be staging a madhouse. It is never a madhouse. It is merely the great tide of evolution in temporary flood, moving this way and that, piling up against that which obstructs its flow, trying to break loose and sweep away the internal model that opposes it.

At such times, we experience extreme dissonance and stress. At the heart of that dissonance and stress is paradox. The more powerful and entrenched our internal model of reality, the more difficult it is to perceive and understand the fundamental nature of the changed world we experience. Yet without such perception and understanding it is extremely difficult to understand and change our internal model. This is precisely where we are today, and it is rapidly getting worse.

Deep in most of us, below our awareness, indelibly implanted there by three centuries of the Industrial Age, is the mechanistic, separatist, cause-and-effect, command-and-control, machine model of reality. People are more than machines. The universe is more than a clock. Nature is more than a sequence of cogs and wheels. Nor is it a collection of bits and bytes. Numbers are not values. Mathematics can never be the measure of all things. Words and syllables are not reality. And science is not a deity. All human knowledge is an approximation, useful at times, foolish at others.

When our internal model of reality is in conflict with rapidly changing external realities, there are three ways to respond: First, we can cling to our old internal model and attempt to impose it on external conditions in a futile attempt to make them conform to our expectations. That is what our present mechanistic, societal institutions compel us to attempt, and what we continually dissipate our ingenuity and ability trying to achieve. Attempting to impose an archaic internal model on a changed external world is futile.

Second, we can engage in denial. We can refuse to accept the new external reality. We can pretend that external changes are not as profound as they really are. We can deny that we have an internal model, or that it bears examination. When the world about us appears to be irrational, erratic, and irresponsible, it is all too easy to blame others for the unpleasant, destructive things we experience. It is equally easy to abandon meaning, engage in erratic behaviour, or retreat into fantasy. All such is also futile.

Third, we can attempt to understand and change our internal model of reality. That is the least common alternative, and for good reason. Changing an internal model of reality is extremely difficult, terrifying, and complex. It requires a meticulous, painful examination of beliefs. It requires a fundamental understanding of consciousness and how it must change. It destroys our sense of time and place. It calls into question our very identity. We can never be sure of our place, or our value, in a new order of things. We may lose sight of who and what we are.

Changing our internal model of reality requires an enormous act of faith, for it requires time to develop, and we require time to grow into it. Yet it is the only workable answer. We are not helpless victims in the grasp of some supernatural force. We were active participants in the creation of our present consciousness.

From that consciousness we created our present internal model of reality which is increasingly archaic. To change our internal model of reality will take time.