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.