Obvious Absurdities
PD Ouspensky, in the first chapter of In Search of the Miraculous
I have long felt the same way and it is not such a good thing. As one example, I have a repeated experience where I meet someone, like them and make an effort and they don’t want to know. When I back off and wash my hands of it they go ‘full-on’. This is clearly absurd. On other levels too it is easily encountered - in work I can almost guarantee that if I spend, say, 5 hours painstakingly producing something and putting my ‘soul’ into it then it will be seen as inferior to something that could be dashed off in half an hour with little attention given (not that I would ever test this in the ‘real world’ heh). It’s not just a matter of taste - the ‘inferior’ product is seen as the result of greater care and attention.
Clearly, the idea of ‘Obvious Absurdities’ has much in common with how the mystic sees the world - both in a metaphoric and literal sense. It draws a dividing line between the world as we are told it is and how it may seen to be in rare glimpses of deeper insight. In Ouspensky’s case, the book he read as a child presaged almost exactly Gurdjieff’s teaching as he would later encounter it in Russia - though one never knows how much of a filter Ouspensky is looking back through.
It seems to me that this concept is central to developmental studies. Certainly the Mulla Nasrudin stories are very much in this vein. Consider the following two:
The Mullah’s neighbor wanted to borrow his cloth-line. Nasrudin said “sorry, I am using it to dry flour.”
The neighbour said, ‘how on earth can you dry flour on a cloths-line?’ The Mullah replied, ‘it is less difficult than you think when you do not want to lend it’.A man saw Nasrudin in the street bent double beneath the weight of a large door. “What are you doing with that door Mulla?” asked the man. “It is the door to my friend Arif’s shop - I called there and he said he had to pop out for 5 minutes and asked me to watch the door for him” Nasrudin replied.
It is quite obvious to cite stories such as Nasrudin and other Sufi or Zen tales as examples of ‘Obvious Absurdities’ but there are many other stories and ‘things’ that also fulfill this function that do not have this reputation (perhaps the book Ouspensky read as a child is one) and this seems intrinsically linked to the development of the ability to discern the ‘false’ from the ‘real’ which is another way of framing the conception of travelling ‘the path’. Idries Shah in Knowing How to Know
I would place the Bible in this category. Clearly, any serious and objective reader will become aware, even in the first pages, that it features certain contradictions that are not reconcilable. On reflection these are seen to be absurd. I am not referring to historical contradictions which exist but rather the logical ones which are in some cases old chestnuts like ‘where did Cain get his wife’ or ‘how did Noah fit all those animals in the ark’.
Moreover, there are more explicit contradictions - which I contend must be deliberate - such as the two conflicting creation stories in Genesis. There are many, many examples even continuing to the New Testament (Christ cursing the fig tree, Christ ordering his disciples to purchases swords en route to Gethsemane etc) and I will not list them all, not that it is possible. the fact is that there are so many that we are left with two possibilities:
1) The original authors, many compilers and later redactors were all remiss - ie that they either did not notice these contradictions or that they left them there without trying to ‘adjust’ them to comply more fully with their Orthodox Church beliefs. This latter would be a possibility if we had evidence that the Bible survives unaltered. Unfortunately we do not - on the contrary, we have a mass of evidence that proves alterations and adjustment since the earliest periods.
2) They are there for a reason and the original writers or later compilers were responsible for them being there and were aware of the purpose.
I would obviously incline to the second view. To assume that generations of scholars over two millennia missed these contradictions or did not take the opportunity to adjust them is to both question their intelligence and to impart to them an integrity regarding Scripture which they clearly did not possess.
In a sense, religious scripture viewed in this Absurdist light is a kind of litmus-test (and I include other Holy books in this also) where a position is presented to someone but a position which cannot be believed without suspending the intellectual and critical faculties. Personally I believe that the motive behind this is to say something like “If you want faith or mere belief then you will need it to follow this literally - but if you want to think, to make effort, to develop yourself then here is a means by which you can transcend: questioning - even questioning the unquestionable. Do you make the grade?”
That is my opinion as to the purpose of the contradictions. of course it may be more sinister - it may be just a device to instill faith at the cost of suppressing questioning. But I don’t think so and it really doesn’t matter - in either case we can learn to question. Question and use our God-given capacity of reason.
