In a recent column, I wrote:

"We can't think the unthinkable; from inside the old paradigm, we can't imagine what the world will look like from inside a new one.

I wish I knew a better term than "paradigm change" to describe our movement through a zone of annihilation -- as individuals and as cultures -- in order to experience genuine transformation. But I don't. We have to let go of the old way of framing reality in order for a new one to emerge. ...

Asked how people go bankrupt, Hemingway said, "Two ways: gradually, then suddenly."

That's exactly how transformation happens."

A subscriber to the list emailed:

"What do you mean by the "zone of annihilation?" Do you mean that all our old beliefs and ideas are destroyed by change, and then reformed "gradually, then suddenly?" Please elaborate on this."

The short answer to the question is "yes."

This week's and next week's columns are the longer answer.

It is difficult to exaggerate the real impact of personal and cultural transformation, our collective response to "the shocks and changes that keep us sane," as Robert Frost put it, those jolts to the soul that compel us to rethink everything.

Today those jolts are more and more frequent. Exponential change is a wild tiger we try in vain to tame. We speak of "paradigm change" casually, over coffee or in seminar rooms, so the facts will fit into our framework instead of our framework fitting into the facts. We want to have "it" instead of letting "it" have us.

The truth is, though ... it has us. All we can do is come along for the ride.

The fancy name for our various styles of riding through life is "spirituality." Our challenge is not to find the form of spirituality that's right. Our challenge is to find one that works.

Change can make us uncomfortable, but real transformation can be terrifying. It threatens our deepest beliefs, our notions of what's real, even our sanity.

Sanity is contextual, a consensus determined by circumstances. Beliefs and behaviors that make sense under one set of circumstances look crazy under others. That consensus reality must break down before we can cross the militarized zone, studded with land mines, that I call a zone of annihilation, and arrive at another (temporary) consensus.

It is like swimming from island to island to island. If our perspective is narrow enough, we think each island is an entire continent. As Hawaiians living in relative isolation and stability for hundreds of years discovered, however, there always comes a Captain Cook into Kealakakua Bay, and everything changes forever.

Since long before the computer revolution, too much data has streamed into our lives. We perceive much more than we "see." Henri Bergson thought the brain was a filter that screened out nearly all reality so we could pay attention to the mundane tasks of daily life.

One definition of religious or mystical experience is that suddenly flung-open doors of perception allow all that data and daylight to come in.

When our filters are overwhelmed by anomalous data that doesn't fit, we deny it, reject it, ridicule it, kill it. But sooner or later the facts will have their day. Our discomfort grows acute, and we have to pay attention.

The twenty-five year-long marriage of a couple I know was coming apart. For several years, they did everything they could to keep it together. They tried this kind of counselling, that kind of church. One night, the husband, having tried everything else, rearranged all of the furniture in their house.

It didn't work. The next morning he packed his bags and left.

We do everything we can to sustain the structures of our lives -- our beliefs -- our framework of reality -- until we finally let go and move into a new possibility. That moment has been in the process of arriving for a long time, but it often seems to happen suddenly, like a ripening pear coming off its stem at a touch.

It is happening today in our individual lives, our organizations, and our societies -- at every level of life. Naturally. Any way you cut an apple, you get apple.

A religious conversion is one form of paradigm change. Individuals going through an experience of religious conversion often feel as if they are "going crazy." In a way, they are. They are letting go of one center or organizing principle and reaching for another. It is not that the content of their thinking or their lives is changing, but the context, the means by which they hold all that content. It feels as if the ground under their feet is opening wide.

The metaphors used by different religious traditions to talk about this experience do not pussyfoot around. Jews speak of slavery and freedom, exile and return. Zen Buddhists say enlightenment is a "nightmare in daylight." Christians use crucifixion as the metaphor for transformation.

The system, whether an individual or a culture, must come to the end of itself. Things fall apart. There is a moment of freefall during which one literally does not know if things will come together again. Everything we believed true is called into question. Then everything coalesces at a higher level of organization around a new center.

Some think a psychotic break is a conversion experience that is incomplete, the fragments of the psyche in some kind of chaotic elliptical orbit.

The risks of transformation are real.

Describing the new rules in an information economy in Wired (September 1997), Kevin Kelly speaks of how difficult it is for executives who think in traditional ways to let go of what's working and move into chaos in order to reinvent new products and processes. Yet the network economy demands that kind of courage. We must let go in order to be reinvented in ways that disclose new possibilities once we are open to them.

An article on business and the information economy, sounding like a primer on spirituality? Surrender, letting go, living on the edge of new possibility?

Sounds like we're talking about faith, doesn't it?

Of course. Life on a changeable planet has always invited a spiritual response. Coping with exponential change means using traditional spiritual tools: Tools for staying flexible, effective, open to possibility in the face of chaos. Tools we had better carry to work ... except these days, life itself is our work, and faith is getting out of bed in the morning and just showing up.

Part Two: a template for using those tools and why they work.