Paradox
Paradox: A situation or statement that seems impossible or is difficult to understand because it contains two opposite facts or characteristics: E.g. “It is a curious paradox that drinking a lot of water can often make you feel thirsty.” Cambridge.org
Paradox is an effective way of describing a unique situation or experience by using conflicting or opposite concepts to make a point. You might recognize ‘The only constant in life is change’.
Paradox is essential to the path of spirituality. It is a baseline, one concept that unlocks many. The reason is simple and profound. When digging into the great spiritual texts and teachings, when speaking of God or spirituality, the ability to bring together two seemingly opposing and contradictory concepts, and to accept that both may be fully true, is an essential step to deeper understanding. Moving beyond a reliance on logic or intellect only or is the goal; embracing paradox becomes a type of surrender, an acceptance that logic is not enough.
The awakening path requires a deep experiential knowing that we are more than just our limited human bodies, more than the mere physical matter we touch and feel, that there are truths beyond our normal comprehension of the concepts and stories we’ve been taught all our lives. This often begins with a glimpse, which alters our perception. The path requires that we begin to know something previously unknowable. Paradox.
Spiritual texts and teachings purport to share wisdom from a place ‘beyond’ human knowledge and comprehension. They offer core teachings as beacons to guide our path towards a new understanding, with the potential of peace, happiness and graceful living on offer. But how can a teaching coming from beyond human experience help guide a human to the experience of peace and happiness? Coming from whom, from where?
Most spiritual teachings refer to an infinite, immanent, un-manifest field or a supreme being which is the source of all that exists. Shiva, Buddha, Allah, Brahman, Tao, Higher Power, Awareness, God. An infinite, unbounded presence that eternally exists, from which everything is manifest, of which everything is made, and in which everything arises. A shapeless timeless infinite field of everything that comprises existence. One. This is called Absolute Reality.
The Two Truths of Mahayana Buddhism are an example. The first or Relative Truth* is that the reality we experience, the world of ‘Ten thousand things’ that encompasses all our human thoughts, feelings, actions, perceptions and experiences, is real and true. The second or Absolute Truth is that the deep expansive void of emptiness, Absolute Reality, is real and true. The paradox is that existence is both an empty void of potentiality where nothing happens, and the complete human experience of ten thousand things interacting. Absolute and Relative Realities, contradictory, but both real and true.
To understand a paradoxical explanation requires that we give up our need for a single, precise and complete definition of the truth; instead we must begin to understand that truth resides between the two concepts, in the space between the words.
Many spiritual practices aim to access that space between the words by achieving altered states, through dance, movement, meditation, mantra, yoga, plant medicine, breathwork, nature connection, silence–all ways to stop the chattering mind’s desire to name and know completely. They also help to experience a sense of stillness, oneness and wonder, extremely beneficial as true learning happens not through words alone, it also requires experience. Incorporating these somatic modalities allow us to tangibly visit the state between the words, between the conflicting concepts. It is not surprising that most eastern, western and indigenous traditions use a combination of conceptual teachings and experiential modalities exactly for this reason.
Over time, with practice, it’s possible to become more comfortable in not needing to understand the concepts in deep specificity, or to stop trying to identify the single true truth. Rather you start to accept these competing concepts as intimately related, that taken together they point at another core concept. Sitting with paradox becomes almost a triangulation, where knowing and naming two conflicting points allows you to identify a third. Getting Lost between the concepts becomes a practice. By marinating in conflicting paradoxical concepts, and by using experiential practices, you may start to see the truth within the written words, in the spaces between. Marinating in paradoxical concepts is a powerful spiritual practice!
Grasping this conceptually, you start to see the paradoxical truths pointed to within all different spiritual traditions, and maybe start to recognize and understand where they point. Once you get over the frustration of ‘knowing only through not knowing’, and trust that complete knowing is impossible for us finite beings, you begin to surrender to the wonder of sitting with the unknown.
*Relative Reality is considered an ‘illusion’…something that is real, that is experienced, but it is not what it appears to be from the perspective of a finite mind.
