I just felt called to write an article on spiritual Truth and spiritual paradoxes. These are frequently encountered on our journey of healing and recovery.
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation.
Paradoxes in healing on the spiritual journey are mirrors that exist between realms and various disciplines - emotional, spiritual, the psychological, etc. They are found at the intersections of the healing disciplines – the cross-over in the Venn diagram. They dwell in the area relating to the logical relation between these healing disciplines. Paradoxes are found when information crosses a threshold. They seem to be opposite, when in Truth they are exactly the same. They seem contradictory. But that’s only if we let ourselves get stuck in the concrete of our fixed beliefs. If we cultivate personalities before principles it’s much more fluid. This is the domain of timeless Truth. Metaphors are the best way around the paradoxes as these are descriptions of the underlying Truths. Then our mind can see the Truth, without using words.
Paradoxes are resolved through metaphor and expanded consciousness
We are in a new phase of evolution. Darwin has had his day, bless his soul. A peaceful, joyful life is not one based on survival. The next phase of human evolution will not be genetic, but will be an evolution of consciousness. This will lead to cooperation as opposed to competitiveness between people. Cooperation is unconditional love. We have had enough of the chaos, drama, and conflict that typifies our Dystopian dysfunctional world and perpetual aggressive competition. We will need metaphors so that we can understand and cooperate with each other, regardless of our disciplinary background.
For example, spirituality supports unconditional love yet appears to frown upon conditional love. Conditional love may be needed on a background of unconditional love to resolve wants versus needs. Otherwise children become little monsters. I knew of the child of a friend of a friend who was called Gabriel. But he was no angel – he was a terror! He had been given so much unconditional love that he was totally out of control, so his parents then started screaming at him non-stop and their love became conditional, The abundance lies in being able to hold unconditional love and give conditional love simultaneously when required. We have to able to say no to the ‘kid in the candy store’. The intimacy in all our relationships is the abundance. Humans have to be able to give both types of love. The paradox is a tension, which is painful, until we get the balance right and the pain goes away. Conditional love is what we call ‘tough love’. It is still love. It’s to avoid something that we want but don’t need. Dysfunctional parenting can be just giving unconditional love or just giving conditional love. Children need both. They need love and they need boundaries. As the Rolling Stones so insightfully sang “You can’t always get what you want”. Getting what you want and not what you need has repercussions for your adult life, like developing addictions. So, spirituality would say you should only show unconditional love. Parenting psychology supports the need for boundaries. So there is a paradox here. The ‘kid in a candy store’ metaphor speaks of a deeper Truth and resolves the paradox. Instant gratification then becomes healthy delayed gratification.
It is by using metaphors and by expanding our consciousness beyond simplistic ideas (as occurs during our spiritual evolution as we walk the path) that we are able to grasp complex Truths and resolve paradoxes.
The simplicity of the spiritual path draws our attention to the present moment. It draws our attention to the breath. It draws our attention to the space of awareness within us. These are enormously simple steps, and yet there is a great power in them. But in seeing the Truth of any present moment, we do not over-simplify. There are certain elements of life that have complication or challenge to them, and residing in the present moment allows us to see those realities. With simplistic thinking, there is a narrowing of understanding. There is a tunnel vision that does not allow someone to see life fully, and simplistic thinking tends to lead to overly black-and-white distinctions such as right and wrong, good and evil, winners and losers, and so forth. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” wrote the spiritual Master William Shakespeare in Hamlet. Why do you think he was the greatest writer that ever lived? Because he was so evolved spiritually! As you open your mind, you’ll find that narrow, simplistic thinking is not ultimately very useful. Some of it causes people to act inappropriately, or hurt themselves or blame others through projection. Just because some people view life through a lens marked fear and hate, that does not make them right. Furthermore, the more you open to spiritual Truth, you will find certain aspects of reality that are seemingly opposite to each other and yet are equally true.
Another example of resolving a spiritual paradox is: Many of you are familiar with oneness and paths of non-duality. Many of you are also familiar with spiritual traditions focused on duality and separation. I embrace both because spiritual Truth embraces both. Non-duality and oneness essentially say, “We are all one.” This is true. Duality and separation essentially say, “We are separate beings, having separate experiences in a world of separation.” Those paths also tend to say things like, “All of life is change.” These statements are also true. How can both be True? Here we see a paradox. Duality makes space for change, but in oneness how does anything ever really change? Yet we are one consciousness, all inextricably linked. Such paradoxes can endlessly frustrate philosophers who want to come up with an acceptable way to justify a paradox such as what I am pointing towards. They can create long, convoluted books in the process. Some people will then pick sides – choosing to believe in oneness or duality in this case – because the conflict seems to indicate that one must be right and the other point of view must be wrong. The need to “pick sides” is hugely simplistic and unnecessary. Life does not need you to pick sides in such an argument because ultimately only the ego is there arguing and needing a right and wrong answer.
When I am helping people to understand this particular paradox, I like to use my favourite ice and ocean metaphors. They seem like different things, but they are not. They are all water. They’re just water in different states. One is a solid. The other is a fluid. When we expand our minds around this topic, it is helpful to think of all of the Universe as consciousness. It’s so deeply bound up in everything that it is inseparable. It’s never separate. In this way, you hear spiritual teachers say that we are never separate from each other. However, we all have different shapes and forms, and so we could consider all of life like little blocks of ice (separateness) floating in this ocean (oneness). The more we let go of our attention on our separateness, the more we seem to melt into a deeper experiential understanding of oneness. We are all waves from one ocean. We are all leaves on the same tree. We are all sunbeams thinking that we are separate from all the other sunbeams.
Too often, people get stuck on paradoxes because their minds are closed. A closed mind is like trying to use the same lens to see everything. In general, we need to let go of our own need to see life according to our ego's rules and beliefs and learn to see what actually is, without a lens.
You probably will find that you have multiple kinds of lens, and they create further distortions of what you see. Because of this, our current society cannot see some of the simplest of things. Our 'monkey' mind is our sixth sense and creates a distorted filter. For example, we are all discovering how miserable a lot of people around us are. Before it was invisible, so what happened? Did everyone suddenly get ten times more miserable? No. They already were. We simply couldn’t see it.
A spiritual awakening helps you to see. It breaks those lenses (beliefs) distorting your perception and understanding about yourself and about others so that you can start to see Truth. As always, you have to do your inner work. As you do that, you see even more clearly. You start realising spiritual Truths and resolving paradoxes, perhaps through metaphor.
Spiritual realisations are not guesses or leaps of Faith. They are just looking at what is real. You see what is in front of you without a filter. That forces you to open your mind whenever you are seeing something that you could not see before or did not want to believe in. Or rather, you are offered the opportunity to open your mind, or you can cling to false beliefs. As Morpheus says to Neo in ‘The Matrix’ “I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it.” I am trying to free your mind with my articles. It's up to you to read and digest them.
Morpheus and Neo in 'The Matrix': “I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it.”
When awakening breaks your filter for life, you are suddenly deluged with a lot of information. You are deluged with unprocessed pain and emotion inside of you that comes rising up without something to repress it, and you are hit by the enormous amount of information surging at you from daily life. Most people wither away from this pain and overwhelm and run as fast as they can back to being asleep. It’s why we often want to seclude ourselves initially after a spiritual awakening. For a temporary fix, that’s not a bad idea. Finding your sanctuary to process things can be a helpful step in the short-term. Eventually, your mind can become even more powerful at processing and interpreting what’s going on around you. You also learn how to intelligently and consciously filter out things, but you retain the ability to re-absorb such information again if you need to see it. For instance, if you notice someone in pain at your office, you may casually tune out from that energy. But then later in the day, you may tune in again to see what is going on if you feel called to help. So, as we mature on the spiritual path, we can tune in and out as we so choose. To continue to open our minds to new levels of perception and intellectual understanding means dropping our need for the world to be any other way than it already is. This kind of deep acceptance opens our minds further. We are getting out of the way of a deeper intelligence inside of us, Universal consciousness, and in understanding how that intelligence actually works, the concept of a conflict – a paradox – goes away because we realise there is no conflict/paradox: That was just a concept arising from our own misconceptions.
Another example of a spiritual paradox (and there are many) is the river of life: Are we being guided by it or are we guiding it? I am speaking on the topic from a surrendered space. The unconscious ego space tries to control life to make life conform to its ideas, and that is not a surrendered state. It is a fear-based one. It is the main cause of our anxiety – that we cannot control life and fail to live in the present moment.
Are you living in the present moment?
However, we are part of this river of life. We are one with it. The more we understand this reality, the more we melt into it. We then actually have the ability to guide it. We stop fighting the Universe because we are the Universe. We can guide the river because we are not guiding it. It is working through us. But we also are working through it. This kind of paradox sounds mixed up, but as you open your mind, you will see the Truth of it. The more you go inward, the more you see the Truth and power of spiritual paradoxes. You can perceive this because you are observing and now are understanding life itself. That’s an amazing kind of knowledge, and all we need to do is to accept these spiritual discoveries and revelations as they come.
There is nothing you need to do to understand any of this. You simply need to stop trying. That is, in essence, much of what letting go is. It takes so much unconscious energy to cling to our ideas and beliefs. It takes a lot of energy because they do not exist, and that energy blinds and exhausts us to dealing with reality.
If you stop believing in your beliefs, they vanish. They are gone. They are one of the things that are the least real in this world, yet people go to great lengths to act on illusions, do they not? With spiritual Truth, the opposite is true. You do nothing, and spiritual Truths become apparent, and you tend to feel energised because it takes none of your energy to believe in them. It’s a double bonus. Spiritual paradoxes and other seemingly conflicting Truths become obvious as your mind opens. We are all one, yet we are separate. There’s nothing you need to do about that Truth to reconcile with it. It’s Truth.
As your mind comes into greater humility by observing reality, it’s easier to understand life and to take conscious action. Through that action, you become more powerful, loving, and wise than you could possibly have imagined at the start of the journey. Much of that may even seem paradoxical. You just sit quietly and observe life without doing anything, and suddenly you are gifted with amazing love and wisdom?
Life is not a tug-of-war, it simply feels that way because of our beliefs. Once you let go of the rope and stop fighting the Universe, you win. And that's the ultimate paradox.
Another spiritual paradox is that it is in giving that you receive. This appears multiple times in the Bible and is even enshrined as Natural Law as the Law of Karma.
It is by surrendering that you win is a classic spiritual paradox that is worth meditating on.
Another paradox is: When you think you are somebody, you are a nobody; and when you become a nobody you become a somebody. When you get rid of your ego your divinity arises. When Mahatma Gandhi went to London to negotiate with the monarchy regarding India’s release, a British journalist asked him: “What is your secret?” In other words, how does a tiny Hindu ascetic with homespun clothes and no shoes bring the largest empire in history to its knees? Gandhi’s answer was simply six words: “I strive to make myself zero.” By “zero”, Gandhi was referring to arriving at a place of such selfless love that each thought, word and deed was motivated wholly by the welfare and wellbeing of others, and not for his own gratification. He didn’t claim to have arrived at that place, in fact he often admitted quite the opposite, but he was striving.
Alan Watts, the author, speaker, metaphysician, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. wrote "Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully
open to receive the world."
Ram Dass said that "I can do nothing for you but work on my Self... You can do nothing for me but work on your Self."
Such are the many paradoxical realities you may yet find and learn to embrace on your spiritual journey. Enjoy! It’s going to be quite the ride.
Namaste.
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.