Paradox – A Canticle of Reality (1)

Paradox

 

Commentary

Paradox is the nature of Nature.

A paradox is a contradiction resolved by construing a complement. A complement is something which completes or balances a system. A paradox conceptually sustains an abiding polar tension.

Inyō is Japanese for complementary opposites which comprise an interconnected dynamic. A better-known word in English is yinyang. Inyō and yinyang have the same ideograms.

An ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a dragon or serpent eating its own tail. An ouroboros traditionally signifies the eternal cycle of incarnation. As a gnostic and alchemical symbol, ouroboros expressed the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which perpetually change through an eternal cycle of creation and destruction.

To recap: a paradox is a conceptual system that holds polar constructs in enduring tension. An inyō is a dynamic with entangled opposites. An ouroboros is an endless cycle of instantiations.

Nature is the perceived exhibition of existence. To understand that exhibit, the mind construes contrasts via comparison. Via comparative contrasts categorization arises. Categorization affords recognition. As such, paradox, inyō, and ouroboros are integral facets of comprehension.

From chaos comes order.

Chaos and order are perceptual inyō. Perception crafts comprehension: molding chaotic sensation into meaningful information. In relying upon conceptual poles for recognition, perception works via paradox.

Longing is for contentment.

Longing is a synonym for desire. Contentment is sated desire. The desire cycle is an ouroboros.

As an inyō, desire defines living. Only by and through desire do we live and want to continue to do so. Indeed, the primal desire is for the experience of living.

Inyō underlies desire in what wants are pursued and those which are forgone.

Dying begets birth.

Living is an endless ouroboros. Consciousness is an incarnation of an eternal soul which cycles through lifetimes. A new life begins after the old one ceases to be.

In transmigration, the inyō tension dynamics of a previous life are reflectively carried on in the next. This provides for evolutionary continuity.

Transmigration has been a spiritual tenet of most cultures worldwide since antiquity. The term reincarnation is used for someone who remembers a previous incarnation. Abundant evidence of transmigration comes from reports of reincarnated children who recall places and speak languages that they could not possibly otherwise know.

Vitality depends upon stillness.

Consciousness is the faculty for awareness. Though consciousness is an interested witness, awareness itself is quiet, like still water. Mentation generates waves upon that stillness. As witnessing requires a show, consciousness and perception are a paradox of tranquility and activity.

The vital energy for living emanates from the will of consciousness, which instantiates in the mental process termed willmind. The mind powers itself by the energy of consciousness. The willmind process is an inyō.

Perception is deception.

You experience Nature as a dualism. Your mind informs you that you are an individual amid an external world. As reality is instead a monism, dualism is deceit.

Dualism is proven untrue because there is no way to reconcile intangible consciousness and mentation with tangible physicality. A mix of mind and matter is inexplicable. No one in history has devised a science that upholds dualism. Despite this, many researchers, lacking a grounding in philosophy, ignore this seminal issue and blithely assume dualism.

The duplicity of dualism has been known to sages since antiquity. Sagacity is a product of high awareness, which may be starkly contrasted to the iğnorance that defines the lowest level of consciousness. Possessing inner clarity, sages perceive past the deceit of the mind.

The mind’s dualism deceit presents a paradox of why it arises. That paradox is resolved by understanding that dualism imparts a sense of realism that is essential to treating living as a meaningful experience. Why deception is integral to living is elaborated in the “Perception” chapter.

With dualism downed, existence must emerge from a singular reality: a monism. Either matter makes the mind (matterism) or the mind makes matter (energyism).

Science has thoroughly disproven matterism: the idea of matter constructing consciousness and mentation. Like the mind-body problem that dooms dualism, no one can explain how matter could concoct the intangibility of awareness or the intricacy of mental activity within us which is verifiably certain.

With matterism dispatched as a ruse, the opposite must be true. The mind manufactures the subterfuge of tangible materiality: energyism.

The physical is metaphysical.

The central tenet of energyism is that the material world is a mirage of the mind. Physics avers energyism in 2 distinct ways.

The creation of energy from matter and dissolution of matter into energy are processes respectively termed fusion and fission.

Stars turn matter into energy by fusing atoms, creating tremendous energy which lights and warms the planets which orbit them via radiation. Stars prodigiously feed off hydrogen, the simplest element. Atomically, hydrogen is the seed of all matter. Stars manufacture heavier elements through fusion.

Conversely, matter dies through fission. Atoms release tremendous energy when they decay, as atomic bombs explosively testify.

Matter is born of energy and releases energy thunderously in its death throes. By the paradoxical processes of fusion and fission we see that matter and energy are an ouroboros.

Energy is an inyō in being measurable only by its perceptible effect on matter. That matter is made of energy and energy is only known via matter is a scientific circularity. Squaring that circle into physicality as reality is as impossible as the ancient Greek geometry problem from which the idiom arose.

Working with the geometry of polygons, some ancient Greek mathematicians convinced themselves that a circle could be squared. In the late 5th century BCE, Antiphon argued that inscribing regular polygons within a circle and repeatedly doubling the number of sides eventually fills up the area of the circle. This mathematical technique is known as the method of exhaustion.

Any polygon can be squared: a polygon reshaped so that its area matches that of a square. Exhaustion suggests a circle can be squared.

Even the renowned English physicist Isaac Newton believed so. Newton discovered calculus, part of which is geometric integration (integral calculus).

The impossibility of squaring the circle was proven in 1882 with the observation that pi (π) is a transcendental number. π is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Since π is not the root of any polynomial with rational coefficients, no dimension can be given to a square that would have an identical area of a circle.
Every measure is mathematical. And what is mathematics but a system of symbols?! Looking behind the numbers related to physicality resolutely resolves to ideas. The same may be said of whatever comes to mind.

In explaining his now-proven equation of matter-energy equivalence (E=mc²), physicist Albert Einstein declared “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it.” Physicists readily admit that energy itself is nothing but an idea. Carlos Calle plainly stated that “Energy is an abstract concept.”

There is no escaping that energy is entirely conceptual, and thereby, matter is a perceptual ruse of the first order. The primal paradox of existence is that the physical is metaphysical.

The absolute becomes relative.

This inyō indicates that an absolute reality creates the relativity that characterizes existence. Whereas reality is absolute, the perception of Nature is of relatives, by way of contrasting conceptual absolutes. Ideas themselves are purities which get tainted by association with their opposites.

Modern physics emerged by creating an inyō of classical physics. Isaac Newton, classical master, famously declared space and time “absolute,” albeit conceding that they are perceived as relative.

Einstein diminished space and time into perceptual relatives. Einstein’s relativity theories have been experimentally verified at the cosmic scale. What relativity means is that perception is integral to Nature itself.

Though germane, physics is an aside from the intent of this passage, which intends that the transaction by which existence is fabricated moment by moment is by an “absolute” becoming “relative.” Whereas reality is absolute, existence – which is gleaned by perceiving Nature – is relative.

Solid is fluid.

The mind portrays a world of particulates. This ruse is belied by the ongoing construction of existence, which transpires via moment-by-moment assembly from the quantum level up in a symphonic coherence. Continuous process belies the appearance of solidity.

Perception is deception in the large by obscuring the monism of reality for an existential dualism. In the small, perception deceives in depicting a world of objects when, instead, Nature is a flow of activity.

As all is process, the term “mind” is a misnomer. There is no mind. There is instead mentation: the effervescent spinning of symbolic fields.

The common tongue reflects a culture of iğnorance, which is obsessed with objects. When “mind” is used herein, translate the word to “mental behavior.”

From nothing comes everything.

This passage posits an ouroboric monism: that the phenomena of existence (“everything”) emerge from a noumenon (“nothing”), which is a singular nonexistent force. This monism gives rise to the mental presentation of dualism.

Diversity disguises unicity.

Underlying the diversity which characterizes existence is a reality of oneness: a monism. This is the fundamental inyō which is also a paradox and an ouroboros.

Reality cannot be.

Reality is what is needed for existence to manifest. But reality is distinct from existence. Reality is outside of existence. Reality does not exist.

The double entendre “be” in “reality cannot be” refers to 2 expressions of existence: beings, which are living entities, and beĩng, which is pure awareness. Beings have beĩng.

There are no beings in reality. God is an impossibility. A popular fantasy, the idea of an incorporeal supreme being is absurd. No one has ever had a decent scientific explanation for a God mechanism (how there could be a God), nor why there would be a God, nor why there would be just one God instead of many: monotheism versus polytheism.

The notion that God judges human morality but does nothing about its transgression is ridiculous. The twist that consenting sexual acts have moral implication is perverse: a philosophic obscenity. Knowing the evolution of the myth of God reveals the ruse at its roots.

Monotheism was enthusiastically approved by authorities as a means of social control. Moralizing ideologies gelled across the world during the Axial Age, between the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE, during an early wave of global conquests.

Moralizing religion came as states evolved from the tribal level to culturally diverse societies. The idea of a judgmental God was sold by the dominant tribe to pacify conquered subordinates of different cultures. Violent victory resulted in dogmatic false morality that had as its prime objective obedience to authority. That it worked so well testifies to the gullibility and domestication of ordinary people (the Collective).

The reality/existence axis is paradoxical, as are the inyō dynamics that underlie physics, chemistry, and biology. The next chapter further distinguishes the conceptual poles of reality and existence.