What prompts this letter, specifically, is Nathan Talbot's article in the January issue of The Christian Science Journal and the reports in the Journal of the "Spirituality & Healing in Medicine" symposiums held in Boston in 1995 and 1996. What I want to do is present an idea that has been evolving in my mind over these past months. To present the idea, I need to place it in a context, and that requires that I start by referring to a book that came out over three decades ago, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) In the 1970s I read it, and it had a profound effect on the way I thought and the way I presented ideas in the classroom (I was then teaching at the college level).
Kuhn's thesis is that scientific revolutions do not come about because of one great development, but because over the years there have occurred a number of relatively small, sometimes almost insignificant changes that cause or allow, when the intellectual "critical mass" has been achieved, a vast shift to take place—a shift away from one pattern of thought to another, different pattern. He refers to this as a "paradigm shift." A paradigm, of course, is an example or model for the way things ought to be. Kuhn is concerned with those cosmic or universal patterns that shape in large measure the world we accept and the kinds of questions we ask of it.
Once a shift takes place, we are then able to see things that were, before, invisible, so to speak. It allows new ideas to be expressed and entertained, new and different kinds of questions to be asked, new patterns of behavior to be developed and followed, new modes of healing, if you will, to be regarded seriously and practiced more and more broadly.
