Will Braun asked Christiane and I to consider the poetry of John O’Donohue when he was teaching us to dissolve the extremes. I loved the poetry and his glorious voice, but it took me awhile to figure out this fit into the concept of polarizations and how to neutralize them. He did not spell it out for us. He mainly sent a link to a glorious interview with him and some even better poetry.

John O’Donohue was a brilliant Irish poet and modern-day mystic. Please note O’Donohue also does not see awakening of life as a bad thing. He does not use the word “awakening” as a pejorative.  It is a good thing. To be awake, or to come out of a slumber is blessed. It is good to be alert. There is a time and place for sleep, but to deal with important ethical questions, for example, being asleep is not an advantage. This is contrary to MAGA right who have been adamant—and not just adamant, but fanatical—about the evils of wokeness.

Donald Trump has even tried to make it contrary to law. American Universities are now required to renounce wokeness in order to get millions of dollars in federal grants. Needless to say, they are all scrambling to get as far away from woke as they can possibly get and as fast as possible.

John O’Donohue took a different approach which was founded by an unusual idea.

O’Donohue thought contradictions were important and could be very useful. He said this:

 “Part of the awakening of any life, is the arrival of contradiction within that life. There is no sense of the other deep sides of ourselves. One of the sad aspects of the modern exploration of the self, is that it lacks all irony, that smile at us as we explore the miniscule explorations. It is sometimes in the most unusual places that you discover the gift of the beautiful.”

Contradiction is “a precious arrival” he says. That is counter intuitive, at least to me, a student of Aristotle who found non-contradiction as the philosophical foundation of the rational life.  If you arrived at a contradiction, Aristotle asserted, you have arrived at a falsehood.

But O’Donoghue said “we have demonized negativity, paradox and contradiction”. In this way we have removed irony from our lives at great personal cost. He felt that did not expand life, it  reduced life.

It took me a while to figure out how this related to extremism?  It is impossible to be extreme when you admit the opposite of your position—i.e. the contradiction—is part of the good.

To embrace contradictions you must give up the extremes!