Paradox is a wonderful traveling companion, if you don't let her get too surly and dogmatic. Careful hands and open heart are needed to unravel her gifts skillfully.
It used to be the her decadent children that would tantalize me: free will versus determination; Schrodinger's cat; how a man could be 100% man and 100% divine, and so on. They would start at my feet in front of the fire and and climb onto my lap; then find a comfortable place behind the frontal lobes where they could play hide and seek with my intellect as they pleased.
When the mind took care of the mind (another paradox) and the children would settle down into the heart then simply dissolve so there was no distance between us, it was finished. Like my own private koan study.
"Answers" to paradoxes are like asking how long it will take my ice cream cone to learn to play the piano. Not just absurd; meaningless. This does not mean they do not teach; the lesson is just far more subtle than truth propositions imparted by syllogisms or other epistemological models.
So it was two days ago; a stranger madly dashing the wrong way up the escalator, muttering "I always do this". It was glorious absurdity on face value - why not just turn around? She was literally three steps from the bottom of the up escalator when she made her pronouncement. She kept going, and gifted me with an observation:
It is possible to go up and down at the same time. No need to parse it with a semantic or logical Ginsu knife set; this is about the gestalt; the place where paradox relaxes with a smoke, a drink, and a tip of the hat as you take off your shoes and let her know 'ya got it'.
I now understand, at some level, what Eckhart is talking about when he sees so many shining examples of apparent duality pointing direclty back to the Absolute.
One of them is paradox, and I am happy to have her and her kids along for the ride.
Namaste.
No comments:
Post a Comment