Living Tension: A Five-Point Response

Abstract

I would like to express my gratitude to all the respondents for their thoughtful and thought-provoking remarks on our presentations. The issues they raise continue to challenge those of us who, through some wondrous working of grace (or could it be karma?), have foolishly wandered into some uncharted and tremendously fascinating domain and have somehow found something reassuring enough to stay on and feel at home in it (domain = from the Latin domus = home?). John Keenan's reference to coincidentia oppositorum in particular strikes deepest chords of resonance as I reflect on what is happening, as I continue to live and deepen my awareness of their yet uncharted domain. I would like to take this as the axial point of and springboard for my own response to the respondents, noting that this mode of praxis across traditions1 that I was privileged to be able to give an account of in my original paper indeed brings me into a realm of conflicting opposites, and involves a conscious acceptance of five points of tension in my own life. But I am also able to admit that these tensions are not of an overbearing kind that one would want to do away with as soon as one can, or avoid as undesirable, but are precisely the sources of the creative energy that keeps one on one's toes and keeps challenging one's praxis. This is what also keeps one from yielding to either of the opposite sides, finding relief there and thus eliminating the problem altogether. I will now note down these five points of tension and describe the particular challenge they bring for praxis. 1. The tension between language on the one hand and the ineffable on the other is of course at the root of all the others. And one does not solve this by a quote from Heidegger or Wittgenstein or even by resorting to a Zen koan; one can only take this fundamental tension of our mode of being and work one's way through it, continuing in an endless attempt to give expression to the ineffable, and accepting the living contradiction that it entails. Credo quia absurdum.