Ironies and Paradoxes

Connotations and associations, derivations and explanations.

The harder you try to explain life, the more complex it becomes. In trying to describe something which is beyond words, words, both written and spoken, will fail you.

An illusion, yet it is not.

Colors, smells, sights and sounds. Our senses, that with which we perceive the world, are at once both all-encompassing and terribly limited. Happiness and grief are but a hair-breadth apart.

Extreme happiness turns into sorrow and extreme sadness yields the start of new happiness.

For everything is connected in an inexplicable cycle, one leading to another, in an intricate fashion. The patterns we sometimes glimpse and think we can grasp; quickly though, they slip through our fingers as fast as they come.

True wealth comes not from material richness but from the heart - contentment and satisfaction with one's lot. The harder one yearns for happiness, the further it moves out of one's reach. Life is an oxymoron, a paradox. To understand it, you must totally forget its intended meaning.

Similarities rather than Differences

Our in-born focus on differences, on how the person next to us is different than us, gives rise to strife and unhappiness. It is the basis of discrimination. You will observe this in nature. Individual creatures with similar characteristics and profiles group together while they shun those with differing traits. We are born with this tendency as well; we criticise those who are different than us in their beliefs, we fear those whose practices vary from the orthodox, we distrust those whose looks and behaviour differ from the norm.

What we fail to realise is that all arises from a singularity, a single point. That which we know, that which we see, feel, hear, touch, taste and perceive in other ways, they are all different representations of the same thing. Our knowledge - mathematics, science, the literary arts - they eventually will converge to the same point. Even sensitive aspects of our awareness - religion and race - are merely various forms of the same.

Religious knowledge will change over time - nothing is permanent, not even the concept of permanence itself. Yet, parallels can still continue to be drawn across religions given that most are born of the same essence and driven by the same fundamentals.

There is gospel truth in every religion just as there is falsehood. Our perceptions introduce elements that deviate from the original intentions. The individual who sits on the fundamentals will not be troubled by falsehood even as he seeks the truth. However, the enormity of truth means that one will not be able to fully understand until he is beyond the cycle and beyond the effects of the cycle. Only then can he grasp the significance of all there is and all there isn't.