Unorthodox Paradox
We return here to The Thunder, Perfect Mind, a Gnostic poem belonging to the Nag Hammadi Library, discovered in the mid-twentieth century, and translated into English by George W. MacRae. The origins of the poem date back to a Coptic manuscript from roughly 350 C.E., tracing itself even further to Greek antiquity.
Employing unorthodox paradox, perhaps for the purpose of shaking us from our ordinary stupor, the poem winds up taking us through the contemplations of a mystic. A Gnostic text, it combines Egyptian and Jewish influence and appears to document a goddess or other female divinity speaking of self-revelation. We tease apart a select few of its paradoxes here.
Thunderous Clap: Be On Your Guard
Heed the thunderous clap, "Be on your guard!" A recurring exclamation throughout The Thunder, Perfect Mind is this eerie, thunderous warning. Statements surrounding such a proclamation, from one angle at least, read as almost threatening. Watch your back, one might say. Thunder warns us of lightning to come, and lightning of thunder to follow. For instance, consider the following passage.
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I amand the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband
and he is my offspring.
While no explicit threats are made in the poem, some sort of intimidation is nonetheless apparent. The speaker is everything at once, mother of her father, sister of her husband, and her husband is her offspring, no less! The paradox shines through in glaring audacity. How can one be both bride and bridegroom? Barren yet with many sons? Whore yet virgin? Honored yet scorned?
I Am The Silence
Seeming contradictions abound as the paradox further unfurls. I am the silence, she says. In speaking, she is no less silent. In silence, she no less speaks. How do we make sense of it all?
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
Perhaps such utterances are intended to shake us awake from the slumber in which we lay. The mind whose self-proclaimed duty is to make sense of it all is left confounded. This may be exactly the point. Such a mind cannot fathom the non-dual and so must be transcended. Not obliterated, not annihilated, not repressed, mind you, but overcome so that one may see from above, taking an aerial view.
Such a view is all-encompassing, much like the identity of the speaker, who continues with a series of further paradoxes.
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,
and you who confess me, deny me.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,
and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.
Here, too, the sense-making mind is at a loss. One is perhaps reminded of the turnings of thought, the process whereby the gears of logic start turning, thereby churning through a calculative process of attempted sense-making. In cases of the mystical, such an approach backfires.
Such seeming contradictions in logic aren't intended to be made-sense-of. Rather, perhaps they are intended to reorient the mind, away from the habitual tendencies of calculative thought, toward a more meditative style.
The following lines further illustrate this sort of reorientation.
You who know me, be ignorant of me,
and those who have not known me, let them know me.
For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am shameless; I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace.
In speaking such paradoxes, the speaker may be nudging us toward the non-dual.
Poverty and Wealth
Similarly non-dual in orientation, as we tread deeper onto the poem's winding path, we encounter yet another juxtaposition, this time with socio-economic ramifications.
Give heed to my poverty and my wealth.
While presumably a reference particular to time and place, we may also consider such a command in light of contemporary conditions. We are asked to give heed to her poverty and her wealth.
What does she mean?
Perhaps with poverty and wealth, she alludes to the divisions of class. Collapsing such divisions, rendering them arbitrary and without inherent substance, she demands that we give heed to both. Perhaps such an invocation is relevant in light of the ever-growing gap between rich and poor throughout much of the world today. Give heed to both the rich and poor equally, without worshipping the rich as a concrete category while relegating the poor to the wastebin or gutter, as is so often the case. The politics of power must be actively challenged. Political commentaries aside, to see beyond such divisions while at the same time acknowledging their felt realities at the very least allows for a more fluid approach to the exchanges, transactions, we undergo economically, socially, and contemplatively.
Compassionate and Cruel
Before we know it, however, we are swept into another pair of paradoxes.
I am compassionate and I am cruel.
I am senseless and I am wise.
What may initially appear cruel may actually be profoundly compassionate. Imagine a parent shouting profanities at their child who runs into the street to chase after a ball. While ideally harsh speech may be set aside, the intention in such a situation is not to hurt the child, but to protect him. Likewise, the child may act senseless at times but exhibit wisdom all the while. Perhaps the speaker is the parent and the child.
Both compassionate yet cruel, senseless yet wise, she navigates the juxtaposition by refusing to inhabit a single position. Her nature is to shape-shift. She is malleable, conforming, deforming, and reforming to the conditions she encounters rather than fruitlessly forcing a fake, fixed identity, which has no ground on which to stand in the first place.
Life and Death
She hovers above this ground, while at other times plunging deep into it and unearthing what no others dared to excavate. Life and death so happen to be one such excavation.
I am the one who has been hated everywhere
and who has been loved everywhere.
I am the one whom they call Life,
and you have called Death.
I, I am godless,
and I am the one whose God is great.
Moving seamlessly between the hated and loved, life and death, the godless and God, she again manifests her malleability. She is like liquid gold, melted under heat, capable of being shaped into any form she chooses. Once she assumes one form, she liquefies once more and dissolves before assuming the next.
I Myself Will Appear, I Myself Will Hide
In this process, she alternates between that which appears and that which is hidden. She proclaims:
But whenever you hide yourselves,
I myself will appear.
For whenever you appear,
I myself will hide from you.
Here, she seems to follow us, yet when we attempt to follow her, she vanishes. She cannot be pinned down.
Come forward to childhood,
and do not despise it because it is small and it is little.
And do not turn away greatnesses in some parts from the smallnesses,
for the smallnesses are known from the greatnesses.
Collapsing even the great and small, she razes the ground so both yet neither may occupy it.
I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,
and who is despised scornfully.
I am peace...
...and war has come because of me.
And I am an alien and a citizen.
I am the substance and the one who has no substance.
Like those that came before them, these lines are mind-bending. Perhaps the author again intentionally pulls the rug from under our feet in order to stir her reader from his ordinary ways of thinking. The line “I am the substance and the one who has no substance” in particular hints at her amorphous aspect. She assumes a form only to leave it behind, to transform.
Those who are close to me have been ignorant of me,
and those who are far away from me are the ones who have known me.
On the day when I am close to you, you are far away from me,
and on the day when I am far away from you, I am close to you.
Such lines illustrate that perhaps being too close to something prevents our seeing it as a whole. Our vision grows myopic, or rather, shrinks. The resulting perspective is limited in the sense that one cannot see beyond what is already close. We take for granted that which is already present. Those with some distance may accommodate a broader view.
Multitude of Words
In this way, by taking a step back, we paradoxically move closer to the meaning.
Referencing a multitude of words yet without speaking, she says:
I am a mute who does not speak,
and great is my multitude of words.
Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness.
I am she who cries out,
and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.
I prepare the bread and my mind within.
I am the knowledge of my name.
I am the one who cries out,
and I listen.
Indeed, a multitude of words could be employed to unpack and interpret her paradoxes, but by this point, we hope the potential intent has made itself all the more clear. In contemplative contexts such as these, paradox cannot be analyzed to any fruitful degree while preserving the non-dual import of the message. Certainly one may try to dissect the dualities, to unconfound the conundrum, but in so doing, one misses the contemplative call.
For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashions you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you, you see inside of you;
it is visible and it is your garment.
Ultimately, it seems that we are asked to dissolve the boundary between within and without, to access the divine that is present and pervasive in full unmediated immediacy.
Perfect Mind
Where does that leave us?
Embracing the thunderous silence seems to be at least one of the major themes woven throughout the lyrical cadence of The Thunder, Perfect Mind. We are left with the impression that it remains possible to see through the discriminating tendencies of the mind under siege by its own churning activity. Such tendencies otherwise give rise to perception of discrete aspects of the phenomenal world. We are left with a reality that seems full of contrasts and contradictions. Yet one may transcend this myopic perspective and thereby bring the mind to perfection. Rather than being led astray by the default tendency to dichotomize, one may consciously shift toward an equanimous receptivity to multiple points of view, without needing to attach or cling to any of them.
Such radical reorientation entails coming face to face with one's own strengths and weaknesses. I am compassionate and cruel, the poem reflects. Perhaps the poet hints that we have the opportunity to radically accept both the positive and negative at once. That's not to say we should allow cruelty to go unquestioned, but rather, we may dissolve its reputation of solidity. Perhaps neither compassion nor cruelty exist in any concrete way, being culturally conditioned constructs. Again, that's not to say we should downplay their differences, only that they're not permanent states. Clinging superficially to such categories sets us up to be disappointed. For those who understand and see through the so-called “ordinary” world, the poet asks for ignorance. And for those who are ignorant of themselves, the poet demands knowledge.
What say you?
