Mystery, Awe, and Curiosity

How many times have you stood, sat, or lain, watching a sunrise or sunset? How many times have you gazed at a rainbow as it hung in the sky? What about the stars at night? Have you peered at them and wondered how many there are, how far away they are, or how big they are?

Turning to the smaller things in life: have you ever lain in a field and studied a blade of grass, or a tiny flower? How about sitting on a beach and letting a handful of sand filter through your splayed fingers? Have you seen the world, as Blake did, in each of those grains of sand?

Mysterious isn’t it? How is a sunrise or a rainbow formed? What enables that blade of grass to grow?

If we do stop to ask ourselves such questions, we are compelled to stand, sit, or lie, in wonder and awe. Life, in all its magnificent arrays is mysterious. Albert Einstein commented that, ‘the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science.’ Remember that this was a man who probably understood the workings of the cosmos far better than any other person. Yet, he perceived this cosmos as mysterious.

Perhaps, like another Albert – Albert Schweitzer – both of them understood that, ‘as we acquire more knowledge, things don’t become more comprehensible, they become more mysterious.’

Mystery invokes curiosity.

A meteorologist can tell us how a rainbow is formed.

But, a meteorologist cannot explain why a rainbow is formed. A meteorologist cannot take away the mystery.

And I, for one, do not want a meteorologist to remove the mystery.

I want to stand, sit, or lie, in awe and wonder. I want to be curious about the mystery of life and all it has to offer.

The mystery of life does not need to be explained to me. I do not need a first cause. Nor do I require, as Aristotle did, an unmoved mover.

We might want to explain this mystery by positing an anima mundi, God, Allah, the One, or even the Divine. Yet, all of these imply a first cause, as if everything can be explained if only we could trace each effect back to a cause, which itself is an effect with a cause. We could do this ad infinitum, without ever arriving at the initial cause.

Because there isn’t one.

Everything is dependent upon everything else. In the ancient Indian texts of the Vedas and Upanishads and early Buddhist writings we find the Pali word Pratītyasamutpāda which has roots in words that can be translated as to spring up together, or to come to pass together.

Simply put, when everything arises together, and co-dependently, we can only stand, sit, or lie, in awe and contemplate the mystery of it all.

Furthermore, we are part of this mystery. Jack Kornfield observes that; ‘We not only are witness to the mystery, we are the mystery looking at itself.’¹

So, next time you are gazing at a sunrise or a blade of grass, or letting grains of sand run through your fingers, or looking up at the Milky way, be curious enough to consider that you are seeing yourself.

You are contemplating the Mystery.

Note:

1. Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart, Ebury Publishing, London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg, 2008