Gore & Gold

We live within the confines of our own personal worlds of direct experience, private constructions built over collective agreements that have been infused with both illusion and fact. No matter where we have originated on the planet, life in a human body demands a dual process of understanding and accepting paradox: the unifying spiritual task of embodying a divided world. On one hand we need certainty, stability, the knowledge that tomorrow is coming while, alongside this necessity for linear, structural awareness, we tread an ocean of unknowability, subjectivity, and the collapse of absolutes. In these waters, many will drown while others will only float the shallows; yet, mastery is a cultivation of diving and surfacing in any-and-all currents, however wild and treacherous their crash. 

Each of us contains within us a continuum of truth--dividing ourselves into good and evil, light and dark, virtuous and violent, holy and profane. On an individual level, we may even prefer to lean into either side of this seesaw, whether accidentally or with great deliberate commitment; however, a razor’s edge of non-dual truth is always present beneath the oscillation of our contradictory behaviors, opinions, personas, and aspirations as we collide with ourselves at every turn. In choosing one stance, we are automatically not choosing another. In sum, we are the grand reservoirs of many conflicting yet fervent viewpoints and allegiances. 

To embrace paradox is to resist taking sides within our fragmented experiences but to rest in the tension of opposites; it is an art by which dedication, practice, and reverence leads one into insights that exist beyond duality. One man’s gold is, to another man, gore. In the end, reconciliation is only possible when one is willing to endure the suffering that he will surely encounter in the collapse of whatever, for him, has been resolved.