Paradox

     A paradox is a flicker in the corner of the Mind's eye, drawing ones attention to the existence of a higher truth. It shimmers there in our peripheral vision, only to disappear upon our directed gaze.  It is the stuff of the Nagual, of Direct Knowledge, of Symbol.

   I’m finding that a great number of profundities are apparent “paradoxes”.  For example, my goal is to be of practical importance, but  to realize the praxis I must apply myself in the transcendent. 

        This would appear paradoxical to anyone who does not place the intangible in its proper perspective as the greater reality.

        True Imagination.

        Lao Tzu said that the intangible gives practicality to the tangible.  The space in the bowl, after all, is what we are using to contain its contents.

        Another paradox: We want things to be easy, but things are usually not easy unless we apply much effort, first.  As I noted this morning in my last journal, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to achieve effortlessness.  No master of ANYTHING ever achieved that state without a concentrated determination.

        A master makes the apparently impossible look like child’s play, but the path to that mastership began with a simple thought-like the tiny seed that becomes the Sequoia.

        The building of the bridge across the chasm begins with a simple line. In the Grail quests, the participants had to DO THE WORK.  It was a self-appointed task.  In a sense they were together in that they scoured the same forests, but they had different entry-points.

        The Way coaxes and leads, but we have to take the steps. The Way is self-filtering; by its very nature it will weed out those who are not yet ready.  Perhaps this weeding-out is temporal, as with Percival. We stumble, we fall, but the pure of heart will always return to the path.

        We are all participants, actors in a Sophoclean tragedy.  We each have our Achilles’ heel.  But these “thorns-in-the-flesh” turn out to be our allies upon revelation--our motivators.  This is the paradox of Hermes.  This is the paradox of the Subconcious.  They can be psychopomp or trickster, gatekeeper or usher.   They answer to the universal laws and exemplify them.

        Like the Chinese finger puzzle they teach us to let go, a conclusion we only come to after a lifetime of struggle.

        We learn about Polarity, Rhythm, Cause-and-effect.  Communication is initiated between the objective consciousness and the subconscious mind.  The Rebus, the Phoenix, the Bennu Bird-all visions of death becoming a rebirth. Another paradox… Separate. Purify. Recombine.  Solve, Rectificando, et Coagula.  We now “walk in the Spirit”.   We become the Philosopher’s Stone.

“OMNIBUS SED PAUCIS LUCEO.”