Paradox & Spiritual Leadership (PART TWO)

Religion is bound to honour and disgrace spirit.

Dear reader,

Over the next 4 weeks I will be sharing the remaining parts to a work I authored for Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by

Cadell Last

and

O.G. Rose

, recently published by Philosophy Portal Books. You can find a link to the paper copy of the text here. Many excellent writers contributed to this work including Last, Rose,

Alex Ebert

Layman Pascal

Samuel Barnes

Andrew Sweeny

fraga.space’s Newsletter

Carl Hayden Smith

and several others.

You can read Part 1 here.

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II - Eight Compressed Paradoxes

These eight related statements are intended to stir contemplation in approach of core tensions which animate spiritual life. Each is drawn out to lesser and greater degrees across the aphorisms in this work, which may also speak to paradoxes beyond those compressed here.

1. A paradox of spirit for the subject is: alone we are together.
   

2. A paradox of spirit for the leader is: leadership illuminates a way that can be followed, but not by followers.¹
   

3. A paradox of spirit for the leader is: the deepest work often goes unnoticed and builds no followers. And what is a leader without followers?
   

4. A paradox of spirit in consideration of religion is: I am already a shape, and my becoming shapes the landscape of another’s possibility.
   

5. A paradox of spirit in consideration of ecology is: I am unique yet eternally recurring.
   

6. A paradox of religion in consideration of spirit is: the ritual of spi-ritual is religious, and religion is thereby bound to honour and disgrace spirit.
   

7. A paradox of religion in consideration of spirit is: when seeking to enclose the spiritual (as mystical) experience, religion makes possible lineage rites which afford profound connection, at the expense of inexorable disconnection within religion itself.²
   

8. A paradox of ecology in consideration of spirit and religion is: my nature bears a telos which remembers and foretells: sons and daughters that care for me, kill me, love each other, kill each other, die together, remember me, forget me, transcend me, but which through them: I outlive.

END PART TWO

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Read part three here.

Discernment on the Way,

1. “Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.” (Nietzsche 2003, 103) & “‘This – is now my way: where is yours?’ This I answered those who asked me ‘the way’. For the way – does not exist!’” (Nietzsche 2003, 213)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin Books.

2. I recommend readers piqued by this point (and related thought on the relation between stasis and dynamism in the context of becoming) to explore the excellent work of Alex Ebert.

Ebert, Alex. 2022. “The Sublation of Mathematics.” In Enter The Alien: Thinking As 21st Century Hegel, edited by Cadell Last and Daniel Garner, 211-249. N.p.: Philosophy Portal Books.