Spiritual Paradox

​

A paradox is a statement, situation, or concept that seems to contradict itself or defy common sense, yet may still hold truth. Some paradoxical statements are merely rhetorical or playful, while others highlight genuine challenges, including those encountered in spiritual teachings that express opposing views. The mind struggles to resolve paradoxes because its habit of linear, either/or thinking cannot easily accept the possibility of conflicting truths.

​

At some point in our pursuit of spiritual understanding we encounter teachings that seem to represent opposing beliefs or points of view. Some teachings suggest that we need to make efforts in order to experience self-realization. Other teachings dismiss spiritual practices and suggest that all you need to do is ‘wake up’ from the false reality (illusion) to realize who you truly are. In the seeker’s mind such apparent contradiction appears as one of many spiritual paradoxes that may create stumbling blocks of doubt and confusion.

The journey to self-realization is not a linear path; it involves the gradual integration of new insights and understanding. A key to accepting paradoxes is often found by recognizing that multiple perspectives can be seen as being equally valid. What seems confusing or contradictory at one stage of awakening becomes revealed at another level, or dimension, of experience. The wisdom of paradox lies in its ability to push us beyond familiar ways of thinking, encouraging us to discover deeper, existential truths at the core of personal transformation. Spiritual progression often involves cycling between different states of awareness until new knowledge is fully integrated. This process of spiritual maturity takes time.
 

Quotes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.
~ Deepak Chopra

A paradox is not a conflict with reality. It is a conflict between reality and your understanding of it.
~ Neale Donald Walsch

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
~ Soren Kierkegaard

Affirmations are like screaming that you're okay in order to overcome this whisper that you're not. That's a big contrast to actually uncovering the whisper, realizing that it's a passing memory, and moving closer to all those fears and all those edgy feelings that maybe you're not okay. Well, no big deal. None of us is okay and all of us are fine. It's not just one way. We are walking, talking paradoxes.
~ Pema Chodron

 

. . . the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean.

~ Ken Wilber

We are on a journey of becoming that which we already are.
That is the impossible paradox of our lives.
~ Adyashanti

The Divine Paradox is that even with the total expansion of the self to include everything, an identified, yet uncontracted self remains...nothing is lost!
~ Wayne Liquorman

It's only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
~ Ram Dass

Why have spiritual teachers over thousand of years pointed to the idea that we are not the body?
It isn’t because you are not (now come on, your obviously here). It’s because with body identification, we forget the spirit part. We forget that we are pure consciousness. Identifying ourselves as purely body, the mind takes itself as only form, the experience of being separate from the whole results, and suffering ensues. This is for the most part, the human condition . . . .
We are both form and the formless. We are the body, we are life, and we are pure consciousness, awareness, which everything is made up of. We are the resolution of the paradox.
We are both, as One.
~ Susanne Marie

The curious paradox is
that when I accept myself
just as I am,
then I can change.
~ Carl Rogers

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.
~ Tom Robbins

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering?  No, it wouldn't.  They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things.  Suffering drives you deeper.  The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. A lot of it is caused by the ego, although eventually suffering destroys the ego-but not until you suffer consciously.
~ Eckhart Tolle

Live at the empty heart of paradox.
I'll dance with you there, cheek to cheek.
~ Rumi

Ramana taught that we simply need to “be as you are”. This is the spirit of unconditional allowing that is truly loving. It helps us accept the paradox of our divinity and humanity. If we can open and embrace everything – things unwind back into the substance from which they came, and ultimately everything comes out of the great mystery.
~ Miranda Macpherson

The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

 

 

The I casts off the illusion of I and yet remains as I. Such is the paradox of self-realization.
~ Ramana Maharshi

You know, all mystics - Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion - are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
~ Anthony De Mello

 

By our very nature, we are a human paradox. We are a human being. The being is infinite and the human is very finite. We walk around like lightning in a bottle.

~ Mark Nepo

 

Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it.

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

In this realm, more than any other even, the paradoxical marriage of both openness and scepticism is essential.

~ Jacob Needleman

 

As animals, we walk the earth. As bearers of divine essence, we are among the stars. As human beings, we are caught in the middle, seeking to reconcile the paradox of how to make our way upon earth while striving for something more permanent and more profound.

~ B.K.S. Iyengar

All major mystical traditions have recognized that there is a paradox at the heart of the journey of return to Origin.
Put simply, this is that we are already what we seek, and that what we are looking for on the Path with such an intensity of striving and passion and discipline is already within and around us at all moments. The journey and all its different ordeals are all emanations of the One Spirit that is manifesting everything in all dimensions; every rung of the ladder we climb toward final awareness is made of the divine stuff of Awareness itself; Divine Consciousness is at once creating and manifesting all things and acting in and as all things in various states of self-disguise throughout all the different levels and dimensions of the Universe.
~ Andrew Harvey

Life will always touch you in some way .. but who you really are cannot be touched.
Opening wide to allow the paradox of this means you become vaster than who you think you are.
And in this vastness, you live from the space within which everything happens.
Now you are free of your story.
~ Amoda Maa Jeevan

Now here is the paradox.
At the human level nothing really exists,
yet at the same time things begin to work for you.
This is why this teaching is beyond words and thoughts.
Do not attempt to analyze these things as I talk to you.
Do not attempt to figure it out in any way. Just let it happen.
Reality, as consciousness, exists and you don't.
Yet when you say “Consciousness is the only power,"
something happens to your humanhood.
You become happy. You couldn't care less
if they dropped an atom bomb on your head.
You couldn't care less if the doctor did tell you
you've got two weeks to live and you've got cancer or whatever.
Or you've been promoted to president of your company.
It's all the same. You feel alive.
You're not alive as most people feel. It's a universal aliveness.
You sort of feel that your cells, your atoms, are connected
to the entire universe. And you do know that all is well.
You feel wonderful.
This happens just by saying “Consciousness is the only power.”
~ Robert Adams

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
~ Mother Teresa

The world is not what you think it is.
The world is exactly what you think it is.
Find the place within you where both
these statements are true.
~ Mooji

All of you are perfect just as you are . . . and you could use a little improvement.
~ Shunryu Suzuki

The enlightened man is capable of perceiving both unity and multiplicity without the least contradiction between them.
~ Huang Po

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
~ Walt Whitman

Any wise pondering of life eventually reveals that there are-- most paradoxically-- three simultaneously true levels of the one Nondual Reality, one of which is "Absolutely True," the others being "pragmatically" or "relatively true":
Conventional truth: The world exists ("stands out") as phenomenal appearance, vividly, palpably experiential, filled with distinct bodymind persons or sentient beings, some of them are well-behaved, some ill-behaved. One is advised to "be good, not bad," and promote justice where there is injustice, kindness where there is cruelty, integrity where there is corruption, and so forth.
Psychic truth: In this Divine dream-play of manifestation, all beings, all souls, are growing more subtle and "ripe" for spiritual awakening, and—though for some souls it may take many lifetimes—they will eventually ALL awaken to the One Divine Self, for there is only this One Self. Hence whatever happens for souls in this world or any world is perfect, Divinely meant to happen (otherwise something else would be happening).
In the highest heavenly soul-realm or psychic planes, we are all intermingling, interconnected buddhas, so whatever happens "down in the mortal realms" is dream-like limitation, an evolutionary Divine play of "Perfection perfecting Itself perfectly" (i.e., the process of the One Self transforming all selves into buddhas). In/as heavenly perfection, all of us gazillions of souls are made of the One Divine Love, Light, Joy, Peace, and Power!
~ Ramesh Balsekar

 

We are on a journey of becoming that which we already are. That is the impossible paradox of our lives.

~ Leonard Jacobson

 

The words of truth are always paradoxical. To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

~ Laozi

 

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.

~ Eckhart Tolle

 

It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations.  

~ Nikola Tesla

There is neither creation nor destruction.
neither destiny nor free will.
neither path nor achievement.
This is the final truth.
~ Ramana Maharshi

​

Nothing is like it seems, but everything is exactly like it is.

~ Yogi Berra

​

BACK