Paradox

a gap of comprehension

between me and myself

i wander in the lands of pretension

to know what’s in the shelf

a gap of comprehension

lies there when a kid shouts

noise of attention

to find mother’s whereabouts

a gap of comprehension

exists in teaching and learned

a welcoming of opposition

to get what was yearned

a gap of comprehension

is there whenever i write about God

a scribble of solicitation

to get away from societal nod

-js

Reference: Dali-esque Surrealist Art by Vladimir Kush (Russia)

Consider this Turkish proverb that resonates deeply with the surrealist landscapes of Kush:

"The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the Axe, for the Axe was clever and convinced the Trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them."

“In chaos, there’s habitable order and in order, there’s possible chaos.”

— Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change."

— Carl Rogers

“Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.”

— Carl Jung

A seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which, when investigated, may prove to be well-founded or true.

Since childhood, we have heard clichés such as “Save money by spending it” or “This is the beginning of the end.” Even the greatest of philosophers, Socrates, had a defining realization that was itself a paradox: “If I know one thing, it's that I know nothing.” So, from where did this paradoxical thinking emerge within us? I’ll formulate that it took us thousands of years to realize that not everything can be determined or said for certain. It is like digging—the deeper you dig, the more profound revelations you have. And these so-called revelations are, by their very nature, paradoxical.

We often tend to solve things in the simplest way possible. For instance, consider that your car breaks down in the middle of the road; you will try to fix the car rather than buying a new one. What does this say about paradoxes? From the example above, you may draw a similarity and say that one sees a paradox as an eternal question that doesn’t have a definite answer, so we accept it as a truth rather than spending endless time contemplating over it.

If we accept that paradoxes are eternal truths in our daily lives, what happens when we look higher? When we look past fixing a broken car and instead look toward the divine, paradox ceases to be just a philosophical puzzle—it becomes a profound spiritual teacher.

As I wrote in the poem, "a gap of comprehension / is there whenever i write about God." If a divine reality could be perfectly understood by the human mind, it wouldn't be truly divine. Paradox teaches us intellectual humility. It forces us to drop our arrogance and accept that some truths—like the sacred and the infinite—are simply too massive to fit neatly into binary, either/or thinking.

Spiritual growth often operates in reverse to worldly logic. To find peace, we are told to let go of control. To find strength, we must embrace our vulnerabilities. As Carl Rogers noted, accepting ourselves exactly as we are is the prerequisite for change. Paradox shows us that true transformation requires surrendering our usual methods of trying to force an outcome.

We naturally want to solve things in the simplest way possible. We hate cognitive dissonance. But theology uses paradox to teach us endurance. It asks us to hold opposing truths—like the existence of profound suffering alongside breathtaking beauty—in tension, without rushing to resolve them just to make ourselves comfortable. It teaches us that the extraordinary is intimately hidden within the mundane.

Perhaps the Axe and the Trees will always be locked in their tragic dance, and perhaps the gap of comprehension will always exist between 'teaching and learned.' But rather than trying to close that gap, maybe our true purpose is to simply stand within it, embracing the chaos and the order, the questions and the silence.