Interpretations of the world that form the boundaries of our thinking. These background phenomena are transparent and linguistic in nature. The Cartesian paradigm is the prevailing, dominant paradigm in the world today. It is a mechanistic, reactive, deterministic worldview that provides no access to possibility or leadership as a creative act. In this paradigm, human beings are objects in an objective reality; “truth” is separate from the observer; the mind is an entity, usually “in the head”, whose primary function is understanding and having the right model; and all existence is conceived as either cause or effect.