The Wheel of Experience

I have been thinking lately about the concept of “paradox” in Jesus’ teachings.  Of course, there are few things commentators like better than to pronounce upon this or that as being some divinely-ordained “paradox.”  Often this seems to be linked to Paul writing about “foolishness,” or “weakness,” or some such.

It is, however, usually insipid to seize upon this or that aspect of Jesus’ ministry as being “paradoxical.”  Jesus’ ministry is delivered to us as we stand on the quintessential, foundational paradox—we are going to die (as we believe), yet we cannot for a moment conceptualize anything but the continuance of our experiences of life, and (ridiculous as this may sound) we actually have no reason for absolute assurance in the inevitability of our death.  Somebody of the ancient Greeks opined that death is the only cause for our indulgence of philosophy—if we did not face a self-acknowledged certainty of death (or of the possibility of death) we would not concern ourselves about such transcendent matters.

So we are convinced that we are going to die, and we prepare for it.  Or we come up with some philosophy (or cultivated predispositions of thought, though perhaps not deserving so refined a term as “philosophy”) that we use to avoid or forestall our contemplation of death.  In any event, the prospect of death constitutes the initial proposition of our metaphysical thought-lives—we “believe” in it.  Death is the first (or at least initially-appearing) god in our pantheon.  Even a child given a beginning in religion has not been given a lesson of substance unless he or she has been informed of the possibility of punishment (as close to the concept of death that the child can imagine) at the hands of the deity.  Until the notion of punishment has been introduced, any “god” that the young child hears about is no more than an invisible sky-uncle, believed in or not (or alternately believed in or not) at the merest whim.

We can be told stories or histories about a time before our individual selves, and we can understand that our experiences began around the time of our birth, but such understanding is not “true,”—it is believed to be true.  What is “true” is that we have never lived in an existence other than that which we remember—all else is conjectural.  All purportedly before that is conjectural.  What is “true” is that our experience of our experience-realm being continual and necessary for any existence we might have makes it impossible for us to consider a time when we might not exist.  We will always “live,” yet we resign ourselves to dying.  We “believe” in dying, in death.  Death is our first god.

The teachings of Jesus, of course, take as unquestioned the existence of a reality beyond the experiences of his listener.  Most crucially, however, the teachings of Jesus do not presuppose in the listener an ability to survey the full scope of time and existence.  There was a time before humanity, but that is not the same as to say that humanity exists on some segmented part of an understandable time-scale.  God created man in some certain way, and then the character of man was understood by God as unsuited to the original—as we believe—intent of God for untrammeled communion with man.  Man comes to be described in the narrative as needing other things.  “Man” as an element of the universe changes over time, culminating most notably in the experience of the first couple in the “Fall,” though it must be reckoned that the character of humanity is described as changing even further along in the Genesis narrative.

The upshot of all of this is the fact that our theology cannot plot events over a comprehensive time-scale.  Indeed, the idea of “time” as something that we can understand is as ludicrous as “death” as something we can understand.  We in our flailings-about to understand our existence rapidly and persistently deify both time and death.  In our attempts to understand (or to prime ourselves to be “awed by”) God—the God who exists always and everywhere—we make ourselves ridiculous in imagining we can understand time and space.

The foundational paradox of our relationship to the teachings of Jesus is the fact that the very premise of our attempts to understand is a premise of limited time and space.  Our lives pass on a scale that is foreign to our “understanding” of the timelessness of God, and our lives occur on a scale of dimensions that only in our conceit can we grasp as linear infinities.  Really our lives occur in the fleeting balls of balled-up experiences that each of us possesses.

Our relationship to God is experiential—yet we must acknowledge God as transcending all experience, and we must ask God to grant us experiences that must exist on planes that we cannot begin to imagine.  We are not asking for more and better, we are asking for we know not what.  Even a notion that we are asking for a state reminiscent of Adam’s original relationship with God is predicated—if Genesis as an origin-story is taken seriously—on our being granted a set of characteristics inherent in God’s original design for man—a design not described in the narrative of Genesis, which has the story of Adam begin narratively not with a perfect original state, but with the quandary of Adam needing other people.

So the whole idea of “paradox” in the teachings of Jesus is itself paradoxical.  Everything in the teachings of Jesus can be seen to cancel out some other element of the teachings of Jesus.  (How often do we hear, “But Jesus also said . . . .”)  Ultimately, however (“ultimately” being a paradoxical term here) the teachings of Jesus are meant to be applied to our experiences—and in the realm of our experiences—and our experience-states change.  Our experiences cancel each other out.  In the rushing, overlapping cycles of “rousing, readying, and reaping,” we are dipped as though on a wheel into experience-states for which in their particulars Jesus’ teachings are suited.