THE TWIN DOGS: PARADOX AND CONFUSION To move beyond our structures of knowing about money, we must confront the twin sentinels on the hero’s path: paradox and confusion. Often represented as two stone dogs at the doors of many Buddhist temples, a reminder that we must embrace these states to gain enlightenment, paradox and confusion have a lot to do with the clear-eyed, bottom-line topic of money. As we dismantle old, perhaps dearly held beliefs, it’s easy to become confused. Confusion is a state in which, for the moment, nothing is clear. It’s uncomfortable to live with because Monkey Mind so loves clarity. When circumstances are cloudy or unclear, Monkey Mind panics. We feel driven to have our questions answered and our way swept clear of doubt or ambiguity. — Psyxhology of Money
- Add unanswered questions / conflict = healthiest part to proceed wit
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Do not search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
- add brainstorming to get best questions (and ideas) out of you + choose
- make paradox and conflict it’s own phase
What I’m asking you to do as you proceed with our work here may cause momentary discomfort. You may feel confused later on as you lay open and then dismantle your money structure of knowing. Your Monkey Mind might tell you that you’re not going to learn anything new from this. Allow yourself to stay with your confusion. Your confusion will actually give you breathing room to get beyond the thoughts, judgments, memories, feelings, and other evidence that you need to leave behind. These constructs have gotten you this far, but they cannot take you any further on your hero’s journey.
Also, watch to see if paradoxes arise when you look at everything you think you know about money. A paradox is a self-canceling statement or thought that forces the mind into a sort of logical gridlock. It seems to turn the world upside down, and when that happens a new point of view has a chance to appear.
When we’re trapped in a structure of knowing, with Monkey Mind cranking out logical justifications for keeping ourselves chained in place, we’re wasting energy. Sometimes we have to step outside logic entirely to find a new way of looking at what we’re doing.
Hanging out with open questions like “What is my lesson here?” is not always easy. We feel unfinished or incomplete until they’re answered. Nothing is distinct and tidy, wrapped up with a bow, the way Monkey Mind likes it. Yet allowing ourselves to sit with our questions, confused and uncertain, moves us away from the handy answers Monkey Mind would pull out of our structures of knowing. And it makes room for what we need to know now.
Heroes develop the capacity to sit with paradox and confusion as they occur. They do not jump to premature conclusions. Allow the amorphous space, the gap, to be there, and do not try to put something in its place. In this space you can journey beyond what you currently know.
My fate said to choose kindness for my kin, and hate for my enemies. I choose both. — The Northman
By helping you with your pain, I don’t have to deal with my pain. Which is the greatest way of dealing with my pain, because helping your pain takes attention and energy away away my pain.
Leaving the relationship is both fleeing from fear and running toward self-love. Fear is love. Hate is love. There is no seperation. They are the same thing, with a different face.
BECOMING EN-LIGHTENED A paradox occurs when you consciously observe what you are experiencing. Whatever you look, see, and tell the truth about begins to lose its emotional charge. This is what clearing away your thoughts, beliefs, and ideas means. “Most people think of enlightenment as a kind of magical attainment,” writer David Cooper tells us, “a state of being close to perfection … but for most of us, enlightenment is much more in line with what Suzuki Roshi describes. It means having a quality of being, a fresh, simple unsophisticated view of things.” The key to finding miracles in your life is to develop your ability to recognize and benefit from them. The Buddhists call it “beginner’s mind.” You can enjoy its gifts at any age. To approach our lives with beginner’s mind is a major breakthrough in how we experience the world around us, and this certainly includes our relationship with money. In this respect, we are working toward a certain level of enlightenment. We are clearing away the thoughts, beliefs, and ideas that cloud our ability to see things as they really are.
St. John says, “In the beginning was the Logos,” the Word (John 1:1). “He was in the beginning with God, and He was God. And everything that came to be, came to be through Him,” and then for Him, in Him, toward Him. He is the Alpha and the Omega. We believe that God Almighty, in deciding to create through His Word by the power of His Holy Spirit, knew that the Incarnation of the Son of God would be necessary. And it would have to be an Incarnation with a Crucifixion; an execution; a being put to death, a voluntary death, so that the world could be re-created and so that sinful and rebellious humanity would have the opportunity for healing, salvation, resurrection, and a new creation; to be created again, not from nothing this time, but to be created from their own nothingness, their own sinfulness, in order to live forever with God. So we Orthodox believe “no creation without Incarnation, no creation without Crucifixion of the Son of God, and no creation without re-creation.” Christ is the God-man, the Son of God who became human, and not only human but took on the curse and death of the world.
To know God fully, you must know Godlessness. To know love, you must know lovelessness.
This is the great paradox. God’s power is made perfect in weakness. His wisdom is made perfect in foolishness. His victory is won by what appears a total and complete defeat. That is the paradox of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy’s Paradoxy. But He is divine and human.