Come join my Paradox club. Sign your name here........
Okay, it isn't really a club and there are no members....But you can hang out with me for a moment and we can pretend.
"The whole is a process of fuzzy transformations of imaginal forms, culminating in a state of consciousness which transcends them all. An old alchemical text says, "Whence will come the Chamaeleon of our Chaos, in which all secrets are hid in their potential state."- Iona Miller
After my last post, I decided to research and see if Iona Miller had written anything about paradoxes. Yep, she did. Of course. She was light years ahead of me in everything, so I figured I'd glean some wisdom from her.
We will be focusing on: An ASKLEPIA FOUNDATION Journal
HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE PARADOX?
Chaos Theory and Fuzzy Philosophy by Iona Miller, 1993
Fair use for educational purposes.
Here we go....
"The myths are bigger than any one of us....
Yet through Creative Mysticism we can enter the imagination, not as an exercise in "doing our own thing," but as a disintegration of the reference points that make it possible for the archetypal energies to live through us. Thus radical deconstruction of ego leads beyond the paradoxes of yoked opposites. Dogmas dissolve and merge on their own. The surety of fact melds into psychic reality. The new myth is not one of polarity, but plurality–panoply. Given these choices, each of us is faced with a struggle to acquire an authentic sense of identity. We have been saddled with a cultural mandate to "pick one" and sustain a strong ego identification at the expense of empathy, compassion, and perspective. What for one is a liberating experience is terrifying for others, or leads to the despair of cultural disenfranchisement.
Our sense of identity impacts us individually, socially, and existentially. Broadening those boundaries opens us to an expanded sense of self. In my own search for identity, I first became aware of the notion of paradox as a teenager. I was given a button with the cryptic message, "Have you been to the Paradox?" Puzzling over its meaning, I finally found out it was a music club, which I subsequently patronized. On the broader scale, I became aware of another club–a "Reality Club." I continue to visit "the Paradox" as I define and refine myself, through opening not only to the opposites but to all degrees of interpenetration between."
Side note: You can see the tug-of-war going on in Society. I'm right. No, you are wrong. I'm right. No, you're right. Who cares who is right? I'm sure we are all wrong.
Maybe join the paradox club and we can be friends.
I knew Iona Miller was wise. I'm always learning and being inspired by her. Let's find out more.
She writes: "Fuzzy philosophy is one way of affirming our oneness as humans while honoring and affirming our diversity. Perhaps it is one way of embracing multiplicity which can help heal the global spiritual crisis. This openness to many forms of validity is reflected in nature. Within the laws of organic evolution, diversity is essential to the process of adaptive change. Fuzzy consciousness cleaves neither to the Light nor the Darkness, neither this nor that, not even the Void (existence/non-existence). The void is not empty once you're there; it is intense richness. That which the outer personality calls nothing, the inner traveler calls All.
The "Fuzzy Principle" is described and experienced as vagueness, "shades of gray." There are an infinite number of gray values on the continuum between 0 and 1, an infinite continuum of gray scores like fractal solutions which spin out an infinite number of virtually random decimals places. In dynamic logic, statements can be more than true, false, or "indeterminate." Indeterminacy defines a continuum of multiple values, partial truths, probabilities. Our uncertain reasoning is "fuzzy." According to Kosco, fuzzy logic " labels an idea or family of ideas–shades of gray, blurred boundary, gray area, balanced opposites, both true and false, contradiction, reasonable not logical–and those ideas are very old and have many ancestors." - Iona Miller, Paradoxes
For some reason, this makes me think of a Magick 8 ball that I used to play with, and the answers would be yes, no, outlook good, outlook bad, indeterminate, try again, etc. How many times do we cling to the answer that we want? Or shake the ball to get a different one? I'm sure I tried.
I like what she says here about "holding tension."
"Jung and the Jungians speak of balanced opposites as the coincidentia oppositorum. They have raised the process of "holding the tension of the opposites" to a fine art. This psychotherapeutic method has to do with keeping soul and spirit "distinct but conjoined," in a combination of solar and lunar consciousness. It is the alchemical marriage of masculine and feminine principles, which are representative of all polarities.
Solar consciousness is bright, analytical, logical; lunar consciousness is dark, diffuse, relational. Their alchemical combination is a sort of " illumined lunacy," according to Hillman. Thus, the "fuzzy" domain is revealed as the realm of imagination between the spiritual heights and psychobiological depths–that limbo, or twilight zone, between heaven and hell. This imaginal perspective is neither real nor unreal, in the conventional sense. In the psychotherapeutic journey, both the unconscious and conscious are transformed through the imaginal morphological process."- Iona Miller, Paradoxes
Our club meeting is over for our new super secret members, of which probably doesn't exist, but I hope we do it again...if you enjoyed it and want to keep reading. It's free and you can leave anytime you like...unlike Hotel California, but that's a whole 'nother story. I said that for Iona, because she would have laughed at that.
"Relax, " said the night man
"We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave."- Hotel California