Embracing Paradox: A Guide for the Times

"Love is the answer. Philosophy is the practice. Paradox is the portal. These sentences sound sweet & simple. They're not. Learning to orient through them is the most urgent task we face."

This is Book One of a short guidebook series published by Making Ways. I sent the book as a pdf in a previous post as part of Waymaking, but I wanted to make a version of the full text available here too, in a more readable format.

Embracing Paradox is the philosophical skill of the future—the ability to hold seemingly contradictory ideas in mind at once, and in so doing, discover an expansion of thinking and feeling that aligns towards the Complexity of Love in the face of immediate and difficult challenges.

The Love & Philosophy project is one way we try and do this, but the idea was given that it would be good to have a guidebook that distilled or simplified some of those conversations. This one offers some practical ways to notice and change some of the habits of thought behind some of our confusion and anxiety in our current Complexity of Optics.

For the hardcore scientists and philosophers, this might seem a bit light, but in fact, it is the hardest work we have right now, and spans all our lives and fields of practice. The idea is best expressed in the quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald that I’m so often referencing:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

To be clear though, this is not about being ‘first-rate’ but rather about learning to survive, connect, and feel into meaning.

The book gives you some tools for how to do this, as our current ability to function seems to depend upon it. A free downloadable pdf of the little book is attached at the end of this message, but this message contains the text of that book. It is about holding the tension of opposites.

Holding the tension of opposites is an idea rooted in many traditions, from Daoism to Jungian psychology, and part of this living project is as an index of some of those sources, so you can make your way with whatever resources speak best to you.

This skill is not only one skill, but many. We each find our way. Still, all our skills are also our skill together as we make meaning and explore ways into a wider life. If we can embrace paradox as a philosophical practice, we can have agency as our future. We can move together into the Complexity of Love rather than only feeling the numb pressures of the Complexity of Optics. This is not a sentimental quest, but it is important to let ourselves feel and discuss this part of ourselves, our feeling, even as scientists and philosophers.

I discussed these terms of Complexity in a previous post (Threshold Visioning) and Book Two of the Making Ways series is about the terms directly, but the basic idea can be felt immediately: Optics is an orientation to receive the ‘desired effect’, and Love is an orientation towards ‘mutual knowing’ or ‘feeling and making as multiplicities.’

Embracing Paradox is a living, collaborative text towards holding the Complexity of Love even as we are recognize the fascination of Optics. I invite all your contributions. As you read, if you think of other sources that resonate, please send them and we’ll add them to the reference list in the book and at the end of this post, so everyone can find them.

Recognizing that we now exist in a paradoxical condition and being aware of how we orient within our use of it, and within its use of us (for an exploitation of paradox is indeed happening all around us now), we can determine how and where we go together in our shared future. At the moment, this way of thinking is being used ‘on’ most of us rather than ‘by’ most of us: If we can all recongize it, we can orient it, rather than being oriented by it. Either way, it is currently orienting our future.

Introduction

Love and philosophy have long been the two guiding words of my life, but they do not always go together easily, even if one is at the root of the other.

People have long wondered at my propensity to discuss love as the answer, but over the years, I’ve learned to let this wonder flow towards new discovery regardless how unruly or dissonant it may first appear. I’ve come to understand that it may be jarring at first, but over time, the patterns make themselves present, and in being present, the future reverberates.

This might be our initial example of holding paradox:

When we feel our complexity and live it, which is a daily practice, the results are immediate, regardless how long they take.

What you feel during your days right now is the future. If you don’t like it, the first step is to learn how to hold it alongside what you do want. This is the way the future can change.

In that same sense, embracing worlds that do not always go together easily—like love and philosophy, and how they relate to words like ‘academic’ and ‘everyday’—teaches us how challenging it can be to take a stand and remain open to other irreconcilable stances in the same moment. Life opens when we figure out ways of doing so. It can also close, however, when we are presented with situations that are paradoxical on purpose so as to confuse us, or to cause us to feel we must take a side, or simply to overwhelm us and ‘flood the zone’ such that we are exhausted. Learning to hold paradox at different levels, starting with everyday situations, can help us get our balance and take a new stance towards this onslaught.

This is because Embracing Paradox is the skill of embracing our ongoing intersubjective relation with others without losing ourselves. It is about learning what love is through an acceptance of our own irreconcilable ideas, and through looking at those ideas philosophically—noticing them as if we do not yet fully know them yet. This is all towards realizing there are no parts, only processes. Philosophical action is a practice towards improving our connection and clarity from within these patterns.

Embracing Paradox might seem simple, but the underlying message is urgent: We are in the midst of taking a Cognitive Turn, a shift in our orientation towards one another and what it means to be alive, which means at this moment we are choosing and setting the parameters for how we will think and feel in the future, and for what will be possible for us to think and feel in the coming years.

If we are to have a future oriented towards love and meaning, the crucial skill we have to learn and practice together is the skill of embracing the contradictions at the heart of our current epistemic landscape, letting those be irreconcilable, and practicing philosophy and critical thinking towards expanding ourselves through the Complexity of Love. All this is a fancy way of saying that we are learning how to hold these irreconcilable ideas without going crazy, which will itself open entirely new layers and paths that we cannot yet see from where we stand—it will open us to multiplicities.

Doing this philosophical thinking, but not staying in that space for too long, is the practice of understanding our thoughts as different stances we have learned to take towards the process of our lives. It means coming into a view of these thoughts as ways we have developed to cope with all that we have been given, or all that has been forced upon us. We have all been faced with challenges unique to us, and we have developed ways of thinking so as to survive them. But these thoughts can change; they are not who we are, they are ways we continue and change ourselves.

You are not your thoughts, you are the process having them.

Moving to understand this means employing both philosophy and paradox, whereby ‘paradox’ means understanding, without judgement, that we hold contradictory features. Together, this allows us more agency and a way to choose our thoughts rather than fully identifying with them—we can ‘take our thoughts’ as vehicles so as to find portals into more sensuality, feeling, community and clarity. We can also be the complex people we are, and we can understand that there are very few either/or situations in life, even in how we feel about the most sensitive issues. Optics is always an either/or, which is why it can be so entertaining, but is never meaningful. The idea here is not to do away with Optics, but to stop confusing it with meaning, and to stop looking for it there.

To do this means experiencing yourself as your everyday self, but also as what is beyond that self, sensing your ongoing encounter in its intersubjectivity, in its dynamic relations at levels that do not scale up and down but unfurl through fractal layers of multiplicity. That sounds wild because it is beyond our current media-based habits, which start us off on the assumption of either/or tensions that we must choose between. The Embracing Paradox approach is not to choose between them, but to explore what holds them, which is to move through the portal of the third.

In my attempt to learn how to stay in a healthy and loving place, and in my ongoing practice of trying to do this regardless of external Optics and needs, I have learned that the real power in life is in a simplicity that is also complex. It is so simple that it is very hard to articulate, and even harder to trust, unless you’ve experienced it. And even after you have experienced it, it can at times be hard to find again, unless you have a community helping you. Community is essential, even if it is a community of music, poetry, or books. Find words and images that speak love with you and excite you towards connection with yourself and the wider feeling into of life.

Writing is a form of community. It is my offering to you. Not only my own writing, but all of the conveyances I have read which have gone into this, and your suggestions and ideas, and all the many coming paths into and out of these ideas and future threads.

The Patterns that Connect

In well over a decade of study in neuroscience, philosophy, technology and world heritage, and in many decades of a nomadic but grounded life, I’ve noticed some common patterns connecting diverse realms. To express these patterns, I’ve come up with the following little mantra. It may sound a bit sweet at first, but it is, in fact, almost too potent. Still, even with that overwhelm at its raw heart, it helps me slow down in the moment and remember what life is all about. It helps me deal with the noise, with the pressure of Optics and how I cannot always look the part, with my own worries, and with any fear over what might happen in this exhausting time of change. I want to share it with you, and then I would like to discuss each sentence in more detail. I hope you find something in here that will help you. Here is the little mantra:

Love is the answer.

Philosophy is the practice.

Paradox is the portal

At first glance, these sentences, let’s call them embraces, are pretty simple. They might even strike some people as too simple, too sentimental. I can assure you, however, that these three sentences, when taken together, hold within them the most challenging experiences we have been given to feel, and the most rewarding. The raw beating heart of the interconnection expressed by these three sentences gestures to what cannot be named precisely, as it is dynamic. Still, it can be expressed in patterns, and that is what we are going to convey and feel together here. Think of it as a dance.

The main work is in finding some way of that expression that will speak most to you, and in continuing to find other ways in community. For this reason, I am writing numerous books from various angles to try and talk about this pattern—one expresses it through a narrative of complexity science, another through research relative to a part of the brain known as the hippocampus, another through story. And so on. The little book you are holding (or viewing) now tries to express this pattern through the resonances and vibrating strings of these three embraces. Three embraces I now send to you as sentences, sentences we will repeat so as to get used to them as we go:

Love is the answer.

Philosophy is the practice.

Paradox is the portal.

But before we go into these in more detail, I would like to say once more that these are not ‘my ideas’, but rather my way of expressing lines of thought that many have been giving us for as long as there has been writing, and many others continue to give us now. We can all create our unique ways of walking and making them for one another.

We all do this, and it is urgent that we do, but it is also important to understand our work as connecting us, as the continuation of lines many others have been walking for as long as people have walked, and as a world we are weaving together.

The simplicity of the ideas, in part because of the immediacy of their power when put into practice, might make it seem as if they are easy and came quickly. In fact, they are ideas that have taken lifetimes—the lifetimes of those of our greatest writers and thinkers, everyone from Lao Tzu to Rachel Carson—and they continue today, in many living voices and works, many of which are collected in the reference section of this book.

From the beginning, it’s also good to know that these three sentences, these embraces, are ways into actions and processes that are never ‘done’ or ‘ready’ or even ‘adequate’—they are cues into helpful momentary stances. Still, these three embraces can do real work for us, if we remember them in the midst of each moment. And if we let ourselves feel them as a true embrace, for that is how they are offered.

Why is this an urgency?

Because we are now at risk of losing our ability to decide our own stance. If you look deeply into yourself, you will feel that something is shifting in the world and that this shift is changing everything as we once believed it to be, everything as it once was taken for granted. Regardless what you think that change is, or even what sort of valence you might give it, this book is here to give you strength and new perspective towards what is coming. That said, and to state it one more time, how you find your way into this pattern might require you seek out some of the other writers and potentials of this book. Think of this as one path into the discovery of what will speak to you best, and how you can discover ancient paths as well as present ones.

On that note, I want to share to start by sharing one practice which is life-changing, and easy to understand. It might take a bit of attention to get into it, but it becomes much easier, the more you do it. Here it is:

Catch yourself.

When you feel something like judgement arise, when you feel something like anger arise, don’t try and stop that feeling, but catch yourself in it and let the embraces hold you.

Put your attention on the feeling or the thought. Let yourself feel it.

Let yourself see it as part of your thinking, but at the same moment, realize that you are not those thoughts, you are the one having them. You are not those judgements, even if those thoughts and judgements are orienting you. Once you have realized this, but only then, you can decide if you would like to change this orientation.

Many find it helpful, upon catching themselves, to say out loud or just to themselves: ‘That judgement is not me’ or ‘I am not this feeling’ or ‘I am not this thought.’ The more you try this, the more real power you feel, and the more you begin to live into your fullness and connection as wider life.

This can be helpful with our relationship with technology, too. When you are looking at someone’s Instagram or Facebook feed, practice this. When you are watching videos on whatever platform you choose, stop a moment and realize that these have been sculpted to give you a certain impression. What is that impression? What are they trying to make you feel and why? What is behind the Optics? How might you rather feel and what might you rather was the sign of beauty and power?

Love is the answer.

I want to address this word Love from the start. I want to ask us to look at it with our deepest senses together here. This is not only romantic love: Romantic love is one ripple of a wave, and we are feeling ourselves as all the waves, as the ongoing ocean. What we are going into here together is the verb of wider living. Love is the connective actions of our lives. The degree to which we feel it is the degree to which we have embraced a wider life, living which is always participatory, always shared, even when we have trouble being social.

One way to think into this depth of Love, and to understand its inability to be demarcated by our own bodies or lives alone, is to think of it as the choice to live.

None of us chooses to come into ourselves as living beings. We are born, and the choice of life is made for us. But that is only true in part, for at some point, we begin to have at least a bit of agency about the ways we will live, and about living itself. As we become adults and grow into our sense of life, our living is partly in our own hands; it is a choice we are making in our actions, our words, our thinking and all that we take into ourselves.

It is also in all that we give. Each day, in all we do and think and consume and offer, we are creating the future of that living. At the same time, all those around us are creating it. It is always co-creation, but we begin to feel the real power of our lives when we realize this is something we at least touch.

Love is in our relational choice—the choice we are making as part of it, and the choice that is making us as part of itself. This is deeply frustrating because we cannot control it, and yet, we are part of what steers. The reason it is so hard to put a finger on this is because there is no end or beginning to it, so long as there is life. Love is the way-making as it realizes itself. Love is what we make together, it is the energy that sustains and holds us as living relations.

There are always different degrees to which those actions are choices, but they are choices we share with ourselves and with others. The ways we make with other beings are also ways we are making for them, and ways they are making for us. All this path-making is direct and indirect at once—it is in how they care for us, and how we care for them. It is in what they choose to do with their lives, and in what we choose to help them do, and in what we do for them. It is in what we bring to our communities, and in how we create and share the opportunities we create for behavior. Love is a word that points to the richness of the razor blades upon which we walk. The more of this choice and its relation that we can feel and express, the wider those blades grow, feeling more like bridges, and the easier it is for us to dance upon them, and even to build connections between them and widen them of our own accord. Eventually, we may even be able to walk across to a world that we may have once believed impossible.

Love is at the heart of every other part of this book, and it is ‘the answer’ because the answer is in how we relate and what we are going to make of it. We will continue to discuss love as we move into these longer sections of the next two embraces because love is our communal extension into them.

Philosophy is the Practice.

Some friends in the academic philosophy world have admitted to me that at first they found it ‘too sentimental’ or ‘a bit cheesy’ to see my favorite two words together as the name of the project Love & Philosophy, even if the subtitle was Beyond Dichotomy. On the other hand, there have also been friends and family who have found the whole ‘beyond dichotomy’ and ‘epistemic’ (knowledge-oriented) part of it hard to understand, but everyone seems to be coming around to understanding that the point of it all is to embrace these very contradictions, to stay with the tension of what feels strange, to hold the paradox.

Love & Philosophy, Beyond Dichotomy (a podcast, blog, channel, and gathering) is the name of a project whereby I try and find ways to practice philosophy that holds the space of Love as expressed above. This is quite an ambitious project, and I understand the pushback. Still, it is part of why I chose that name, and also part of why I welcome comments such as these from friends. This is how we recognize the tension, and learn better how to hold it. It has not been easy, however, to learn how to step out of my usual reactions to criticism (or even to fandom, for that matter) and not get swept up in trying to defend or change the project, or myself.

I mention this here because it has been part of the practice of philosophy for me. You can likely find examples in your own life that might be more fitting for you. Perhaps, for example, the way you have had to hold the demands of your boss in mind at the same time that you hold the demands of a family member who wants something that cannot be reconciled with what work demands of you.

Philosophy is the practice of taking a critical look at our own cognition, so as to give ourselves a bit of space from it. We look at our own thoughts, feelings, and movements, and from this place, we can look at how they might resonate with others who have done the same. Philosophy is, simply put, the process of finding community, which is the process of finding those who are expressing themselves in ways that resonate, or that make us want to grow and learn and debate—and to become more intimate with one another through our thinking, feeling and movement.

Philosophy is not a word often paired with Love, though the word ‘philosophy’ actually has love in it, as philosophy is from the Greek phil for love, and sophia for knowledge.

The reason these two words are not so often put together is because ‘philosophy’ is usually considered to be ‘in the head’ or only the thinking part of us, but thinking and feeling are full body actions, and philosophy is a full body activity because it changes how we make our way. It really is love in action.

Still, there is no denying that ‘love’ can seem like something of a cliché in the way this term is most often used today, at least in English, but that is not how it powers philosophy. As with any cliché, however, there is truth to why it has become one, and it has different levels of power depending on context.

Love might be the most overused word in our vocabulary precisely because of how much it means to us, and how much we long to feel it. So, in that sense, it is the very root of our knowledge because it is the relationality we are trying to come into awareness of together and learn better how to co-create. It is the ways we are making, and philosophy is one community of practice in which we make way.

This is why understanding philosophy as a practice, or praxis, is such an essential element in this orientation, whether individually or as a community. Because we all have a practice or a praxis, but without thinking about it philosophically—without turning our attention to it in a community—we don’t realize that we have it; we don’t realize how much it is shaping our parameters for cognition and for the ways we make love.

So while ‘Love is the answer’, we are making the ways of that love with our thinking and feeling, which is action; philosophy is how we come into a better understanding of these cognitive movements that shape our lives and worldviews. We do philosophy as a practice in many ways, some of which we will explore in this book, some of which you can find more about in the Philosophy as a Practice posts, on in writings on Way-making, but the important point here is that part of the orientation is one of thinking critically about our own cognition, understanding that we are not our thoughts but rather the life having them.

Thinking philosophically is not about Optics

There are many ways the skill of critical thinking, of doing philosophy, is essential for us today, but one of the most important and least obvious has to do with the relation of philosophy and what we lump together under terms like ‘self-help’ or ‘new-age’ but which have increasingly become a matter of Optics (of deliberate sculpting of how something looks) rather than of transformation or help.

Again: What do I mean by Optics?

I mean trying to control how living looks. And I see these Optics as deeply entangled with ideas we might call Self Help and New Age, and with how those have been influencing the most important parts of (especially American) society over the past few decades. Somehow the messages of these, though helpful and with good intentions, have distilled into a message of control. This message, which is not the message of any one book but somehow comes through in many of them, is the message that we can control our reality by willing ourselves to be powerful.

You see this message everywhere now, and it is making a lot of people rich. But what is really behind it? And does it really give us power, or are we confusing ourselves?

I think we are confusing ourselves.

Having nice things and lots of money is great, and we should all have as much as we want, but these are not real powers. The point is not to shun wealth (Don’t worry, I fell for that trip too at first) but rather to embrace it, and to do so knowing that it is something other than real power.

For decades, or at least as long as I have been an adult, the message that has been coming through loud and clear has been the opposite of that, however; no wonder this has confused us. The message we have heard instead is: Those who look like they have won are the winners.

That is Optics.

And there are at least two things wrong with it.

First, to win is always and only temporary and always and only as good as the game that is being played, and no game is the only game. Second, to win is not to be powerful but to have played well, and when the games we are playing are unhealthy, to win is to be the most unhealthy of all. Unfortunately, the game of Optics has gotten very unhealthy, and right now (just look around you) most of the people who have been playing it by its rules, through no fault of their own, are now very unhealthy, too. Things have gone so far off the rails that being unhealthy is now sometimes confused for being powerful. Indeed, this is a crisis.

I am not saying that we have to equate success with disease. We do not have to equate those, and they are not the same. This is part of what embracing paradox is all about, learning how to pull these many threads apart. Still, there are those who have been walking this razor blade with grace.

I have good friends, for example, who are wealthy and successful in what they do, but the ones who are happy or who feel real power (which is love and connection based) are not playing the games by the rules of Optics, even if they enjoy the Optics in times of play. They have other people doing their social media accounts, for example, and they do not keep up with all the gossip going on about them. While they do take care of themselves and care about their bodies, they also find ways to appreciate and recongize and disucss the process of ageing and the natural stages of life. This is not the game that Optics shows us these days, however, which is why many people who look like they have won by the rules of Optics are actually very anxious, unhealthy, and prone to hurting themselves and others. Not because they want to, but because the gilded cages of Optics would make any of us crazy.

This is so tricky because the Optics look so good, and because that is the whole point: We all think everyone who has good Optics must also be living a good life. We think people who look like they have money and good facelifts and an expensive haircut must be feeling powerful, because they show the Optics of power, but inside we are all dying and have no idea what the point of it all really is. We are lost in the Complexity of Optics, all looking at manipulated images and trying to live up to them, but there’s nothing there, nothing at the core.

The social media messages of Optics (and they are not every social media message, but they are the trend) are about controlling how a situation or community or person looks to others, and how desirable what they have looks to us. Unfortunately, this idea of power is not real power. No matter how many cars, houses, or facelifts we might get, there is no way this can ever really feel powerful for more than a few minutes or days, which is why it constantly perpetuates itself. People who have what others think is powerful have to keep acting as if they are powerful because others seem to think they are, and so it goes.

This is inherently related to the ‘always needing more’ mindset of our stock market and of the overall systems of our attention economies. It is all built around Optics these days, and because those need constant care, many of us have built ourselves into hamster wheels. And in this, we are near losing ourselves. Not because there is anything wrong with looking good or putting on a good show, but because we have drifted off into its complexity for the answers of meaning and given our agency over to the technologies we created around them. Nobody’s running this show.

This means we are dramatically narrowing our parameters for sensuality, connection, and creation because we have confused out ability to sculpt and automate representations of ourselves (via technologies) with our living selves. We now tend to think the representations, the Optics, are where the meaning, living and community are, because we have confused representations with what they represent.

This might shock you but—there is no community in an App, and there never has been. It is like looking for the meaning and community experience of a meal within a refrigerator. The community and the meaning is in the intersubjectivity. In such ways today, we now relate via Optics, which means we sculpt manipulated representations of ourselves, which then interact with sculpted, manipulated representations that others have made of themselves. What is lost in this? Our intersubjectivity, because the chord has been severed from the regularities of our living and those of how we have presented that living to others.

What does this have to do with self-help? Or with all those ‘10 steps to a Better Everything’ books and personalities? A lot. Because the message of many of them has become: Just create the Optics and you will get the Optics, and that will be enough. But anyone who has been there knows, it is never enough. What we forgot in all that is that the Optics don’t satisfy or touch our soul precisely because they have been removed and manipulated to represent what is not actual. In other words, we manipulate photos of ourselves and then cannot live up to them in real life, so we don’t show up in real life, or we are debilitated by our insecurities about not living up to what was never real.

There is a lot of good in all the genres and technologies hinted at above, and they do help us a lot, and they have helped me, but we are in a new place now. The Complexity of Optics is not about them; it is about how we have given our agency over to ‘looking like we are x-y-z’ rather than actually allowing ourselves to be seen. It is about how those genres and technologies are sleepwalking us into habituations that generate more and more of the same sculpted regularities at the expense of what they were actually created to represent. It is about the sense in which the drive for good Optics has become divorced from the critical thinking skills and messiness that keeps life meaningful.

One big sign of how this has gotten confused is that in today’s world, we often consider the word ‘love’ to be cheesy or weak rather than a word expressing our greatest power. Many of us might use the word ‘powerful’ or ‘successful’ today to mean something like having good Optics, whether we know we are using it that way or not. As popular people and popular books now show and tell us, to be powerful (though it is not real power) means being a bully, or making others bow down to you. This does not fit in so well with what we think we mean by ‘love’ and so love gets ignored, though it is at the heart of what all these same people are wanting, which is why Optics have become so unhinged and unhealthy.

What those people don’t tell you is how very un-powerful that experience actually feels, because it is not built on truth and meaning but on Optics and intimidation. If you look at these ‘powerful people’ you will see signs that they are insecure and afraid—they have to show you what they can do, and real power never has to prove anything to you, much less talk about itself nonstop. Basically, if someone has to tell you how powerful and great they are, they are deeply worried you will see that they are not. This is obvious to those who look at it this way, but very few people in the world see past the shiny wrappers. We are so caught in the complexity of Optics that we go along with it, at least in the world of our Apps.

We will discuss this idea of the Complexity of Optics (and how we reorient through the Complexity of Love) more later, but the basic definition of the word ‘optics’ as I am using it here comes from the way it has been used in the United States over the past few decades. In this use, it means something like ‘creating the desired effect’ which means so long as things look one way, even if they are in reality another, it still gets the desired effect, and so it must be ‘the winner’, but what this has been doing is stuffing all the garbage out of sight. This is not real power—it is not affirming life—nor does it ever satisfy those who are using it, and yet it has become the tool of what we now call power.

What is missing?

Our beating, living heart. Our bodies and all the powers they really have, powers we are ignoring. There is so much more possible! And yet, to really understand this requires the next part of our orientation, an understanding of the very important role that paradox plays in this world of Optics, or even as this world of Optics, and how it is now a skill to be understood and practiced from another side, in the other direction, if we are to find our balance again.

Another way of illustrating this is as follows…