Skip to main content

Contradictions and Truths

I love this word oxymoron. Oxymoron is a Greek term which can be translated literally as "sharp-witted absurdity". In present day English, it is a short phrase that appears self-contradictory in a context. Some of the interesting examples are

Deafning silence
Act naturally
Cold sweat
Fuzzy logic
Friendly fire
Agree to disagree

Another word which is similar to this is paradox. Paradox is an apparently true statement that seems to lead to a logical self-contradiction, or to a situation that contradicts common intuition. The identification of a paradox based on seemingly simple and reasonable concepts has often led to significant advances in science, philosophy and mathematics. Following are some interesting examples.

When you increase your knowledge, you see how little you know. You see how much you still have to learn.
God is not all-powerful as he cannot build a wall he cannot jump

My personal view is that the truths of this world are not absolute, but are paradoxes. What I mean to say is truth is nothing but a bunch of contradictions. Simply put, truth lies in contradictions. Couple of years back I happened to read a verse from Bhagavad Gita which hit me real hard. This is a verse told by Krishna to Arjuna.

uddhareth atmanatmanam
natmanam avasadayeth
atmaiva hyatmano bandhu
atmaiva ripuatmanaha

It means "We can elevate ourselves to greatest heights and we can degrade ourselves to lowest depths. We are our own best friend and we are our worst enemy". Observe the contradictions in these four lines and the revealed truth. So true, if we empower ourselves, we can scale greatest of heights and if we disempower ourselves, we can sink in an unfathomable abyss. Let us all elevate ourselves to see how degraded we are. Hey my last sentence was a paradox.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The buzz of a busy bee

The word “ busy ” is a great savior for this mortal human world. It can get one out of many tricky and not so comfortable situations with tremendous ease. Did you intentionally or unintentionally forget to keep an appointment? No problem ma’am/sir. Promptly announce you were busy with loads of work. You can slip away like sand from all the troubles you brought upon yourself. Believe me, it works like miracle. The frustrated soul who has been waiting for you to turn up and whose frustrations have now transformed into F16 bombers to blast you gets immediately pacified like an infant who has been shoved with a rubber nipple or pacifier.  The other person’s anger melts like ice and you will be pardoned from definite death penalty and a good thing about this is you don’t even have to apologize.  If you are lucky and your nemesis is low on IQ and high on EQ, you may end up profiting his/her sympathies. If you are too lazy to tidy your house up or if you can’t make your mind to c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sweet Culture

Folks in our office are slaves to a strange culture. I prefer to call it “Sweet Culture”. We frequently get a blank email with subject “Sweets at my desk”. What the heck? I will be busy waging a loosing battle against all powerful and mighty siesta after hogging generous volume of free lunch. I will be desperately waiting for an email with some entertainment value so that I could save myself from embarrassment of being caught snoring with mouth wide open.  During such trying times I get this dead as wood blank email with a sweet subject line. Such mails bring tremendous fury and frustration in me and greatly disturb my internal peace for many reasons. Firstly, after gobbling up to dangerously high "neck level", mention of the word food can cause eruption of undigested lava from my protruding belly.  This surely degrades hygiene level in the work environment and results in loss of productivity of my colleagues. Unmindful of such a risk, some spamster crook...
1 comment
Read more