Paradox Games

Available as a digital download

From Paradox Games:

Playing paradox games is a balancing act. On the one hand, it requires extensive visualization and concentration, maintaining various images and concepts in mind effortlessly for periods of time. It requires substituting images and concepts consciously, and then allowing the results to have a life of their own. It’s a process of fixing a structure consciously and then allowing the unconscious free play with this structure. A lot of times it’s a matter of laying the groundwork and then waiting to see what happens. It requires discipline and letting go at the same time. Done properly paradox games are not mere abstractions; they’re corporeal. They affect you in the gut.

What they're saying:

Would you like to play with the Paradox or have it play with you? That question rang loudly in my being as I studied this most distinctive of works.
-- Ian Read

Many of the seeds which the ancients planted are only now springing up. In this work they have borne fruit.
-- Edred

Waldo Thompson is that rare sort of human that sees both the insights of Rudy Rucker, Stephen Wolfram and Alex Ryan on the one hand and the Iinsights of Stephen Flowers, Guido von List and Mircea Eliade on the other. He understands how a Cosmos Needs to know through observational actors that are both of and beyond it. He understands why Seeking creates more to Find, and that the nature of the computatiable universe demands this on the deepest levels -- in fact demanded it even before consciousness emerged...
-- Don Webb

In many traditions, philosophies, occult schools, etc. there are many models and parables for ‘spiritual growth’ but there is not a lot of information on how to use those models and parables. Often there is an obfuscation that happens, sometimes due to various required levels of indoctrination (“Open your wallet and we’ll teach you the way WE THINK you should use these models.”). Other times this obfuscation is due to the fact that the ‘teachers’ don’t really have any answers, just a lot of slight of hand tricks (“Hey Rocky! Watch me pull spiritual enlightenment out of my hat!”).
-- Lothar Tuppan

In Paradox Games, Waldo Thompson offers exciting strategies for making mathematical and existential abstractions powerfully and playfully concrete. Here are riddles for reintegration, tensors that transform, and puzzles that will have you pulling some surprising and wonderful things out of your hat. Play on!
-- Ristandi

Book Review:  Become Who You Are
Paradox Games by Waldo Thompson.  153 pages, Rûna-Raven Press, 2009

To merely read Waldo Thompson’s Paradox Games is to miss a rare and genuinely unique opportunity to experiment with the structure of your personal reality.  This text represents Waldo Thompson’s Master-Work within the Rune-Gild and so unsurprisingly the content around which the text is constructed draws strongly on the Germanic Tradition.  However, the practical process of working through the challenges, riddles and exercises will be of enormous value to anyone who strives towards the goal of self-becoming.

There are a number of levels on which the reader can engage with this text and that reflects something of its message.  Not only does Waldo present us with tools to experience the paradoxical nature of the multiverse and our experience of playing with that reality, but he also emphasizes the radically individual nature of any given journey into the realm of paradox.

Many readers may initially be concerned by the deep mathematical structure that frames much of the text.  However, while there is much to reward the mathematically astute seeker, there is no requirement for anything more than a basic understanding of elementary mathematics to play the game of reality that he has so carefully constructed.  Moreover, Paradox Games caters for a wide range of thinking and learning styles.  Each step along this serpentine path is meticulously argued and for those who prefer visual representations of concepts there are plenty of diagrams to ensure that all you need to keep dancing through the maze is a willingness to play the game.

It is perhaps appropriate given the subject matter that the text itself functions in a somewhat paradoxical manner.  On the one hand we are dealing with issues that go to the dark heart of the Mystery, no text can fully unveil the true face of Rûna, but Paradox Games certainly gets within fingertip reach of her veil.  However, at the same time, the writing style is relaxed and even comic at times.  There is no earnest dogmatic lecturing here.  If you are used to the overblown portentousness of many pseudo-occult texts, Paradox Games will surprise you.  In spite of the profound nature of its message the author remains understated and has the confidence to allow the power of the exercises to speak for themselves.

Usually, a review would give you something of the meat of any book.  However, in this instance the significance of the content is dependant on the willingness of the reader to fully engage with what is on offer.  A key structural component of the text is the mytho-mathematical function of the rune Dagaz and the triad as understood within the Germanic Tradition: “two similar and one different.”  The triangular nature of the process may initially call to mind a dialectical approach to reality.  However, the genius of Paradox Games, for me at least, lies in its avoidance of both the oppositional dialectic of material dialectics as proposed by Marx et al. without falling into the equally deterministic approach of Hegelian dialectics.  Instead, we have what might be termed a communicative dialectic.  All this is hugely stimulating to those of us who enjoy philosophy, but what sets Paradox Games apart is the fact that you are invited, dared even, to dive in and experience the Mystery.

Paradox Games is informed by a number of Philosophical Schools: In the title itself we have a nod to the linguistic insight of Wittgenstein, while the sometimes aphoristic style and the overwhelmingly joyful tone calls to mind Nietzsche in his most optimistic ‘yea-saying’ mode.  Importantly, Waldo is not simply applying the existing epistemic framework of another philosopher to a new area of experience.  Instead Paradox Games extends its Odian methodology to the way in which philosophical conceptions are deployed.  Semiotics, Husserlian Phenomenology and Pure Mathematics are all used, not out of slavish devotion to any given school of thought but because they are useful.
In conclusion, this is a book that no serious seeker should be without.  It is a glorious read that takes you on an intellectual spiral dance that at times makes the mind positively dizzy.  More than that, it is a manual for the Work that we all wish to accomplish, no matter what our Tradition.  Deceptively simple, light hearted yet deeply philosophical, a spiralling journey into the Mystery, this truly is a game that you cannot help but play!

C J Sharp