Creating paradox with our very being is the spiritual imperative of these times.
- Norma Wong
There is a Jewish idea that truth can be found, not in any one person’s perspective, stance, or experience, but only in the space between our points of view. And in fact, the truth that lives between what you see and what I see cannot be fully known, but through discussion, through striving to see each other’s points of view, we might find our way to a closer understanding of that truth. We call this idea Machloket, or argument for the sake of heaven. It is a beautiful practice and it requires of us a few things that the conditioning of contemporary socialization does not prepare us for.
It requires that we enter into these conversations wanting to listen and learn, not wanting to convince or win. It requires that we put down our righteousness, and center our curiosity. It requires that we release ourselves from the either/or binary, that we open ourselves up to the possibility that two contradictory things can be true at the same time - that, in fact, the only way to understand reality as it truly is, is to accept multiple, often contradictory truths.
The good news is that even though our social conditioning incentivizes us to embrace an either/or paradigm where paradox is seen as wrong, where the idea of embracing paradox is meant to feel like an exercise of magical thinking or fantasy, we all have experiences of paradox to draw upon if we open ourselves up to see them.
One of the most common, and perhaps hardest, experiences of paradox in the human condition is the choice to forgive. Forgiveness, especially of someone close to us, requires that we simultaneously hold the truth of our hurt with the truth of our love. It requires that we do not let either of those truths go, but that we look those truths in the face, hold them at the same time, and decide that we can accept them both as being true. We do not throw away the loved one that caused harm, and we do not excuse the harm either. We sit with it, we wrestle with it, and we heal through the choice to forgive, to accept the truth that this person is not one thing.
Whenever I have to do the work of forgiveness, of choosing to remember that this person who hurt me is not only that one thing, the way that I get there is to remember that I am not one thing either. When I look inside myself I know that I am full of contradictions, full of truths that if I were to line them up outside of myself would certainly not pass a consistency test, that would often fall on opposite sides of an either/or binary.
The either/or binary requires that we pretend that truth is simple, that it can be categorized, that all of who we are can be placed neatly on one side or another. And when we pretend that we can fit neatly into one side, one box, we end up cutting off parts of ourselves, we end up separating ourselves from our wholeness, we end up losing our ability to see things as they truly are, we end up living in delusion.
Wholeness does not come through separation, truth is not found on one side, healing is not possible without accepting the reality that we are all full of contradiction. The challenges that we face in the world today can only be met if we each hold a little more loosely the attachment we have to being right, and instead center ourselves in the truth that we are all going to have to figure out how to live here together, in wholeness, in full embrace of the contradicting stories we’ve been told and the contradicting truths that we hold - both among each other and within ourselves.
This, for me, has been the key to accepting as my mission the imperative of creating paradox with my very being.