Hey, this is Leo for Actualized.org, and in this video I want to talk about the importance of embracing paradox in your self-actualization journey.

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” – Georg Hegel

Paradoxes are cool. Not only are they cool, but they are also a necessity of life if you’re going to be going through it and self-actualizing. They are really not the problem that some people make them out to be. Here, we are going to talk about what we mean by paradoxes, why paradoxes are not a problem, why they are a great asset to you if you’re able to embrace them and we’re going to talk about how to go about embracing some of these paradoxes.

Personally, I love studying paradoxes. There are paradoxes that I have discovered in science, mathematics, linguistics and in personal development. I am going to give you a whole list of personal development paradoxes in this video, so that you get a really good idea of what I mean by paradox.

The reason I wanted to shoot this video is because of this. Now that we are getting into more advanced personal development stuff with Actualized.org and covering more advanced topics, what I am seeing is that some people are having difficulty with accepting kind of contradictory notions. This is especially when we’re starting to talk about spiritual enlightenment and how that connects back to the more basic personal development work that we do.

When you’re looking at both of these things, they seem contradictory. When this happens, what then happens after that is you basically use this as an ego defense to avoid looking deeper into resolving these contradictions, or even just accepting that these contradictions are there as a part of reality. This blocks you and prevents you from achieving the most advanced results that you can achieve with personal development.

Just to put everything into perspective for you, I talk about this in a lot of my other videos. Basically, what I am hoping you’re getting from everything that you are getting from my videos is this big picture understanding of reality. To me, this is like an endeavor that you do and undertake in your life as you say this.

“Okay, I’m really interested in figuring out how all of the pieces fit together on a big picture level. I want to know how my psychology works. I want to know how my life works and I need to know every little facet of that so that I can put them together and create this giant jigsaw puzzle. Each little piece I put into place helps me see the larger picture.”

The Big Picture Understanding Of Reality

That is what we are trying to do here.

The value of having this big picture understanding is that you then have the wisdom to create whatever kind of life you want. You then also have the wisdom to live a virtuous life, rather than living a shallow life.

When I see people living shallow lives, it is mostly because they don’t have this entire jigsaw puzzle assembled, or at least even a good junk of it. What they do is they waste a lot of time in their life. They go down a lot of dead ends because they don’t really see what is happening in life and what life is.

They don’t understand it. They don’t understand themselves. In order to resolve it, we start putting it together, piece by piece. As you start doing that, one of the problems is that you get pieces that don’t seem to fit. You get a piece, you try to fit it in this corner over here, but then you see that it doesn’t fit in this corner.

You scratch your head and you wonder this. Where should this piece go? Maybe you will try the other corner and it doesn’t fit there either. Then, you have to try in the middle and maybe it doesn’t fit there either.

Then, you just have to put it off to the side for a while, until more of the puzzle gets completed. Then you will say – “Oh, it was supposed to go here all of this time.” This is like a process, like a multi-year long process. This is really a lifelong process of doing this.

The puzzle is never fully complete. You always keep discovering new stuff. Sometimes, the stuff you discover is very intellectually challenging. It challenges you intellectually. It jostles your preexisting notions. Maybe this means you have to rearrange certain aspects of this puzzle.

Maybe you thought you had this part figured out, but you get this new piece and you’re like – “Oh, well that means that this whole part is wrong. I have to reconfigure it.” Some people really have a problem with this.

They do not like doing this because their ego likes to be certain. It likes to be concrete. If you are not able to go through this investigative process and keep your mind open to the possibility that you maybe don’t have it quite right, maybe these two pieces don’t fit because there is something in my understanding that I will figure out three years later, if you don’t have that kind of open mindedness, you’re going to get stuck.