Persephone Arbour

After just over a week of total mind chaos, I happened upon this piece in a friend’s copy of Resurgence. I read it slowly and carefully, like a meditation. These words, translated from an ancient text, spoke clearly and kindly to me. They helped clear the chaos.

“Life is paradoxical

Reality is composed of opposites and they are related in a way that to assert the one is to assert its opposite as well.

The paradox of having is that the more one has the greater is one’s discontent.

The paradox of pleasure is that self-control is the very first condition of pleasure; the pleasure that is unrestrained kills itself.

The paradox of intimacy is that distance is the first condition of intimacy: the intimacy in which there is no distance turns very soon into resentment or even into hatred.

The paradox of sexual pleasure is that all those factors, which create sexual pleasure and sexual happiness, lie outside sexuality.

The paradox of self-interest is that the only way of serving one’s interest is to serve the interest of the other, that is to say, the pleasure and the happiness of the other is an essential condition of one’s own pleasure and happiness.

The paradox of the self is that without the other, the self will be inconceivable.

The paradox of language is that silence is its highest function.

And there is the paradox of limits, which consists in the fact that one becomes aware of one’s limits only by transgressing them; there is no known way by which one can know one’s limits in advance.

Above all, there is the paradox of life itself, which consists in the fact, even biological, but emotional and spiritual equally, that it is by dying that life is. One is impossible without the other

~ Chaturvedi Badrinath ~, from The Mahabharata: An inquiry in the Human Condition published by Orient Longman.

I read this in the exquisite magazine, Resurgence: info@resurgence.org