paradoxes

If we want more truth in our lives, we have to get accustomed to paradoxes. Increasing our comfort with paradoxes is what truth is all about. As our comfort with paradoxes increases, our contact with truth deepens and extends. We experience freedom.

So what is a paradox exactly? A paradox is a statement that seems to contradict itself, but the apparent contradiction resonates as wisdom. A good example might be how we're never more alone than when we're lost in a crowd. Read it again and consider it.

That statement is a paradox because it operates on two levels at once. The first level is literal, involving crowds and isolation. The literal implication of a crowd is the opposite of being alone. If we're out among thousands, we're not by ourself. Not literally.

But somehow we are. Not literally, but we are. That's the second level of our statement. We are more aware of how alone we are precisely because we shouldn't be alone, and we know it. The literal level says so. But that contradiction is not the main idea.

Are you wondering how this investigation pertains to spirituality? I hope so. Because every time you approach the truth with words, they bend into a paradox, almost as if we are looking through a microscope as delicate crystals form in a fathomless solution.

Here's the crystal of the day. You have a self and you don't. It's a fundamental paradox. On the literal level it's impossible. It's a senseless contradiction. But once you get comfortable with it, it's the way things really are. It's the truth refracted as you.