' Paradox '...

Paradox is the only way to view both the immediate and the ultimate at the same time.

Philosophy says that its highest teaching is necessarily paradoxical because the one is in the many and the many, too, are one, because nonduality is allied to duality, because the worldly and limited points to the Absolute and Unbounded: hence the doctrine of two Truths.

Paradox is the only proper way to look at things and situations, at life and the cosmos, at man and God. This must be so if as full and complete a truth as mind can reach is desired. To express that truth there are two ways because of its own double nature: there is what the thing seems to be and what it really is. The difference is often as great as that yielded by an electronic microscope with five thousand-fold magnification when it is focused on an ant, compared to the view yielded by the naked eye.

If we question time and matter--those foundations of all our worldly experience--for their real nature, we come up against paradox and contradiction, against irrationality and logical absurdity. The only proposition which can properly be affirmed about them is that they exist and do not exist at the same time.

You cannot put It into any symbol without falsifying what It really is. Yet you cannot even mention It in any way whatsoever without putting It into a symbol. What then are you to do? If mystics declare, as they so often do, that you should keep silent, ask them why so many of them have failed to obey this rule themselves? In their answer you will find its own insufficiency and incompleteness. For although, like everyone else, they too have to function on two separate and distinct levels, yet the truths pertaining to one level must in the end be coupled with those pertaining to the other.

Paradox is the bringing together of two elements which are antagonistic yet complementary.


-Paul Brunton