Here’s my advice: take no paradigm too seriously, for you will slide among them much more freely than you can imagine.

I read this today while following a trail of links:

Translation is a horizontal process that offers new ways of seeing the same world. Transcendence is a vertical process that allows one to transform consciousness so that the world is understood in new, vaster ways. The first is like using binoculars to see the world. The second is like climbing a mountain to see the world.

What better beautiful explanation of the process of spiritual seeking? How much time do each of us spend looking for new binoculars, a new way of seeing, that will make the world work the way we want it to?

But isn’t the process of hopping from translation to translation necessary? For we’re scaling a mountain whose top we can’t even see. At different points in our process, in order to continue onward, upward, we need to see differently, to undergo translation.

At some point, after many translations, the truths of transcendence begin to emerge – perhaps because we begin to see that the world we thought was so simplistic, so adherent to certain laws, actually conforms to many different views, as if it were reflecting back upon us what we project upon it, as if its nature were something entirely unlike anything we previously understood.

In Buddhism this is the doctrine of emptiness, or sunyata. To say ‘it means that nothing has inherent form’ is being too reductionist; even to say ‘we’ are co-creators of existence is somewhat misleading because it is descriptive. Ahh, sunyata, like God, is a slippery thing.

Here’s my advice: take no paradigm too seriously, for you will slide among them much more freely than you can imagine. Learn what is to be learned from each translation and move on when necessary. Seek out the ways of understanding that propel you toward enlightenment and trust your judgment that you choose what you need to learn at each stage.