Paradox
"I once heard that to become a sovereign of Ireland you had to attach a chariot to two wild horses. One would lurch one way, one the other. You revealed your spiritual maturity and general readiness for the task by so harnessing the tension of both, that a third way forward revealed itself. The holy strain of both impulses created the royal road to Tara. A road that a culture could process down."
MARTIN SHAW
Greek “para” = beyond, “doxa” = belief
Perhaps the greatest hoodwink of our times is the conditioned belief that something can only be either ‘this’ or ‘that’. The epitome of which being: if I am right, you must be wrong.
This form of logic lies at the heart of our sense of separateness and disconnection - and the epic and widespread suffering this causes.
When we embrace life as paradox we surrender to our inherent state of inseparability with everything and everyone - and we get to celebrate the richness of it's radical inclusivity, it's kaleodoscopic everythingness and its effortlessly regenerative state of wholeness.
What’s more, embracing the truth of paradox liberates us from the zero-sum game currently fuelling the demise of our species and beyond.
A zero-sum game is essentially when we perceive that one person’s gain is another person’s loss, and implies a scarcity mindset which favours competition rather than collaboration and polarization and separation rather than unity.
It is this zero-sum game mentality that drives our individualistic culture that limits our love to those we perceive to be able and willing to meet our needs, rather than a vast love grounded in radical inclusivity and a commitment to expanding more and more into living as unconditional love of and as all.
When we start to experience life as paradox rather than as a black and white zero-sum game, we begin to taste the delicious freedom of life’s everythingness. The stuff that poets, storytellers and mythologists live and breathe. Living life as paradox unleashes life’s inherent magik and beauty. It liberates us from our insatiable need to know everything and always be right and from our debilitating fear of not getting our needs met - both of which limit our capacity to love and transform, and lie at the heart of our current crises.
How will we harness the immense cultural tension we are currently facing between ways of being fuelled by love, and those fuelled by fear? What will be the new third way this pandemic portal reveals to us in the throes of our love-fear polarity?
For more on how to embrace and live as paradox check out our musings on radical inclusivity and hosting multiple perspectives:
Image credits
Image by Marc Pascual from Pixabay
