Of Paradox and a Piece of Cake

Paradox, it seems, is the central tenet of what we presume as the rudimentary set of rules that govern this world. Armiger Barclay wasn’t perhaps entirely sarcastic when he said “People think a thing’s worth believing in, only if it’s hard to believe”, for, truth has always been something that has unfailingly assumed one or more hues of varying degrees of irony, reality being one such case in point. What else is reality, if not an absolute irony that defies every existing norm, rule, regulation, expectation and belief? After walking the earth for a little over two decades, I now realize that the greatest paradox of our lives is the most unassuming ‘maxim’: “The Simplest Truths Are The Most Complicated Ones.” M.Scott Peck’s, The Road Less Travelled, for example, starts with a very plain yet compelling statement- rather a revelation. “Life is difficult”. He avers that life is meant to be difficult and there’s no use fretting over it. It was this seductively simple pronouncement that has come to form the very bedrock of his psychoanalytical thesis that has been ministering millions of souls around the world everyday. He goes on to unravel the intricacies of this lucid truth in a few hundreds of pages subsequently!

Another classical paradox could be the very obvious truism that we never grow up! We remain forever, the same old pestering, stupid, greedy, and selfish toddlers that we once had used to be, albeit with a very sophisticated mask of civility and geniality that we had been taught to put on at our schools and homes. “Gifts? C’mon dear, do you think these are really necessary?” we say, while furtively eyeing the wrapped present with all the enthusiasm of a child. Growing up, as they say, is just the process of learning to act, to camouflage those feelings and emotions and to come up with specious excuses for noncompliance against our own will.

For the philosophically inclined, there are these two worded sentences (!), by Richard Bach, who sums up the complete mystery behind life, death and the interval between, with the simplest sentences that I’ve ever come across in my life. “Life Is. We Are.” A blissfully stupefied stupid that I always have been, I couldn’t come to grips with the import of this most complicated line even after reading a complete book of his. The paradox that he propounds is that the one thing we fear most is the one thing that is not possible: We cannot die, we cannot be destroyed. Life Is. We Are.

Progression then could well be encapsulated as regression redefined. Thomas Stwell’s lines deserve a mention here, as they personify the perfect parameters of a paradoxical proverb, a universal truth at that. “It takes,” he says, “considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of our own ignorance.” It is not very difficulty for anyone with an empirical sense of prudence to appreciate the relevance of this apparent subtlety with hints of inherent nuances of what we call as the domain and the range of ‘knowledge’. Now and again, these simple truths trouble us a lot as we come to realize the flagrant lies that we had been taking solace in, from the moment we had identified ourselves with our conscience. “We don’t have rights until we claim them.” Sounds sort of tautological, isn’t it? But, you thought that rights were meant to be bestowed upon you by an angel with a magic wand, right? “Speech is silver, but silence is gold.” How many years did it take for you to figure out the significance of this adage? “Guilt is the tension we feel to change our past, present or future for someone else’s sake.” How many hundreds of times did we curse ourselves and our fate (by the way, what’s that?!!) out of guilt? And do you know that “we know nothing till our intuition agrees”?

The pitfalls of pride and prejudice, being the most epidemic diseases in the world to which a vast populace is prone to, could have propelled Paul Gauguin to succinctly sum up his regard for the virtues of objectivity as, “I shut my eyes in order to see.” And if you were under the impression that 1+1=2 is the simplest tenet of Mathematics, I beg to differ. The esoteric proofs for such equations in what is called as The Number Theory, run through scads of pages!

Sometimes, the simplest questions turn out to be the toughest ones to answer, as the possible answers for them could be very evasive. Perhaps it’s because, at those instances we try to reconcile our intuition with our reason; a very daunting task this, as intuition never knows reason! As we introspect about ourselves, we could soon find ourselves lost amidst an air of perplexity. Tell me...Who are we? What is ‘will power’? Define destiny.

Ignorance- you must be beginning to believe now, like as I do- is indeed bliss.... sheer bliss! Another paradox!

© Chaitanya CS, 2004