Part of the difficulty with humans is that we just don’t know how to be okay with paradox. We have an impulse towards linear, black or white thinking and can’t seem to wrap our heads around two coexisting and opposite truths.
Not sure you believe me? Imagine the man who taught you to swim. Who came to every recital. Who could make you laugh when nobody else on earth could. Now imagine he is also the man who put your mother in the emergency room, twice. Watch what happens to the swimming lessons.
Or take it further from home. Imagine a woman who fostered eleven children over twenty years, who kept the two that nobody else would take, who still gets Christmas cards from all of them. Now imagine that at twenty-two she drove drunk into an intersection and killed a mother and her two small children, and served four years for it. What just happened to the eleven? Your mind may not let you have them back.
When faced with paradox in humans, this is what we typically do in order to make sense of the world we live in – we try to destroy one of the truths that doesn’t fit into our understanding of the world.
Now bring it closer in. Bring to mind the worst thing you have done. Not the embarrassing thing, the actual one, the one you would not want read out loud. Now set it beside the kindest thing you have ever done, the one nobody saw. Watch how hard your mind works to make one of them the real you and the other a fluke.
The part that does the eradicating is not being stupid. It is keeping the world in one piece. A world where the man who taught you to swim is also the man who sent your mother to the emergency room is a world you have to stay alert in, all the time, and something in you would rather delete a fact than live at that pitch.
Related to that is our incapacity to accept shadow. One of the teachings in Buddhism is that ‘life is suffering.’ The first time I was exposed to this I had such an aversion to it. I remember thinking something along the lines of “wow, that’s depressing. Why on earth would I want to be part of any religion that teaches that?” Which was a strange thing to think, because I already knew it was true. I was in my early twenties, doing all the hard work of healing from trauma, and nobody had to convince me that life contains suffering. I was living inside the proof of it. What I had was an idealized happy future, and I was attached to it, and a teaching that made suffering simply part of the arrangement sounded like it was coming for that future. That was twenty odd years ago and I understand the teaching differently now. ‘Life is suffering’ is a truth that we are resistant to believing. Suffering is simply a part of life. Unavoidable. Just as is joy, enigma, tenderness, hatred, goodness, etc.
Can you be a feminist who likes to be sexually dominated? A meat-eater and animal rights activist? Can you live a life of compassion, and sometimes be a complete bitch? Can I be deeply spiritual, and despise organized religion? Can humans be incredibly tender and sweet, and also intensely cruel and demonic? The world is both mind-blowingly beautiful and disgustingly ugly. A black hole is everything and nothing. We are the universe, and a speck of the universe.
Our inability to rest into paradox is one of the fundamental sources of our own suffering. There is a simple practice I use in order to allow my mind to rest into paradox. I notice my thought or opinion about something or someone (including myself) and then I ask myself “What Is Also True?” Or, more distinct: “What Contradiction Is Also True?” Try it on today. You will notice how you unconsciously filter out aspects of the truth that are less comfortable.
The question has a shadow. Asked about someone who hurt you, it can turn into an excuse. He had a hard childhood. She was doing her best. All of that may be true, and we may arrive at that understanding one day. But there is also a time to hold sacred rage, and this practice is not for that time. Paradox is not a reason to stay. He can be kind and he can be dangerous, and you can still leave. Seeing all of someone is not the same as excusing them.
Happy paradoxing!