Heeding Einstein’s Admonition : A White Paper on Regeneration’s Significance

By Carol Sanford, Founder, The Regenerative Paradigm Institute

Einstein gave us what may be the most important caveat for our task of seeking to make the world better, to make the work we do in the world more whole, and the work on development of human beings deeper, faster and more likely to succeed. He wrote his admonition repeatedly and I found it shows up over a dozen times — with few variations in the message. He clearly knew it was one of his most important capabilities and wanted others to be able to engage in the same way he was imploring us to consider. Here are five examples.

· “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”

· “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

· We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

· “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

· We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

The question is, what is Einstein’s intentions here? What does he mean to direct us toward? And, how do we learn to do this? Here is a plausible interpretation and how it relates to our thinking processes, and regenerative thinking specifically.

Taking Thinking, About Thinking, Seriously

We have to begin to understand Einstein’s underlying intention, if we are to begin working with Einstein’s Admonition. Most of his emphasis in the statements is on ‘thinking’. And then “levels of thinking” and finally, “changing our thinking.” Einstein was, presumably, able to make this shift for himself routinely, that is, change how he was thinking, even though he seems to have been less successful in teaching others what he meant, given that none of his students passed it down. He has no students that reference having received such guidance. This may be because his work was primarily as a research faculty member rather than teaching faculty. Or maybe it was so normal to him, he could not articulate how it worked in his own mental processing.

With all humility in attempting to understand a brilliant mind, I offer some potential ways to consider it and point to the path that we as humans are on now…