GREAT MYSTERY

I like the phrase “Great Mystery” because it allows me to describe life, the world, the universe, in a manner that is tangible yet credible. It really is A GREAT MYSTERY !

As Socrates, the Greek Philosopher said, “The one thing that I know is that I don't know”. I love that. It's honest, to the point, and true. We really don't know what life is about. And if we think we do, then that's a sure sign that we don't even know what we don't know !

Since I was a child I was awestruck by the night sky. All those stars ! I remember watching Cosmos, a television series hosted by the late, great, Astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, in the 1980's (yes, that's how old I am). I remember becoming more and more enamoured with the universe. Life became so much bigger than just my immediate surroundings. I recall Sagan saying that, when we look up at the night sky, some of the stars we see may not even exist anymore. Because of the enormous distances, it takes light millions of years to reach our eyes, so those stars may have burned themselves out long ago. What a mystery!

In Lakota spirituality they refer to “Wakan Tanka” - The Great Mystery. I love that. It is all-encompassing. It allows for the unknown. It frees me to experience the paradoxes, the mysteries, the mind boggling awesomeness of Life without having to have an explanation or a reason. Without being obsessive. When we need to know, it sometimes points to the fact that we want to control and, that is obsessive. Besides, we can never grasp the enormity of this great mystery called life with our mammalian brain.

So, “The Great Mystery” is what I use to describe life and everything in it ! The Great Mystery is my word for the spiritual aspect of life. It's what some might call 'God'. But you don't have to be religious or even spiritual. Atheists can use the term just as easily as priests. It provides a common language. A starting point. A point of departure to exploration. It unifies all of us as one living entity across space and time for eternity. It allows us to explore each other and life itself.

The meaning of life.

“What is the meaning of life?” is a deep and profound question.

I think the answer is both simpler and more unsatisfying than we might like it to be. I think the answer is: there is no meaning to life. Life just is and we give it meaning.

Firstly, we must ask, in what context are we talking about 'life'? Is a plant not alive? Is an animal not alive? Are we coming at the question from an anthropocentric point of view? Are we merely asking what is the meaning of life for humans? For ourselves? For Wall Street?

I think we need to look at the question from a much broader, perspective.

What is the meaning of life for a tree? For a dahlia? For a protea? For a sparrow? For an albatross? For an eagle? For a cheetah, for a jackal, for a snake, for a cockroach, for an ant, for a bee? For me?

When we look out into the world from our skin encapsulated body, we filter everything through our senses. Very limited physical senses of sight and hearing and smell and taste and touch. And all of this is processed through our mammalian brain; our nervous system.

Remember that our brain filters our senses. It ignores most of what is coming at us so that it can provide us with a tiny portion of information about the world that we can deal with. If everything came in, I think we might explode !

Enough information form the world comes in for us to be able to survive. Thousands of trillions of bits of information are received. Our brain compresses these to what is useful for our survival (as a result of our evolutionary process) and then it de-compresses it into a perception that we call “reality”. An infinitesimally tiny bit of the whole, yet we fall for the trap of thinking this is everything.

I feel compassion for anyone who believes this, because this is living in a box so tiny that it is suffocating the beauty an miracle of life. It's an impoverished way to live.

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams suggests that the answer to the question, “what is the meaning of life?” is ….42. This is very clever and Zen-like because this answer is equally as absurd as anything else we could come up with. Life is so vastly complex that to come up with a single answer to this question is ludicrous.

We give life meaning !

I realise that this might not be very satisfying for someone that is looking for an absolute answer, but I don't think an absolute answer exists.

Life is too mysterious, too complex, too profound for it to have a simple answer. So the best I can say is: we give life meaning. Through how we experience and interact with it. Isn't that a Great Mystery?

We are a manifestation of life. We are the universe looking at itself through consciousness.

A plant is a manifestation of life, so is a bird, a snake, a cockroach, an ant, an octopus, some unknown species of fish in the depths of the ocean that we haven't yet discovered. Some life form elsewhere in the universe that we can't even imagine. Stars themselves. Planets. A grain of sand.

All are manifestations of life and we humans are but one of these manifestations.

When we put ourselves at the centre of the universe and assume that we are solely responsible for the meaning of life, we go back to a pre-Copernican model where the Earth was considered the centre of the universe. We know that's not true and, equally, I think we cannot ask the question, “what is the meaning of existence?” by putting ourselves at the centre of life. If we ask the question from an anthropocentric perspective we are looking at things in a very limited way. We're being na?ve, foolish, ignorant, arrogant.

We are an expression of life. That in itself is enough meaning.

What we do with our lives is up to us.

And the more aware, the more mindful, the more awakened we become as a human beings, the deeper the questions we ask, the richer and more profound our experiences, the more meaning we can draw from life; the more meaning we can give to life.

It is the endowment of the human condition to be aware that we exist. We are able to develop deep awareness about our thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

This is the spiritual path !

Let me finish this article by giving my definition of spirituality (I'm going to cheat a bit here by using the definition I wrote in the preface of my book, Wild Divinity:

Life is a sacred exploration of presence: a physical, mental, emotional, and mystical journey. The true spiritual path is not a declaration of faith in something or someone "outside" of ourselves; it is a commitment to live in such a way that enables the deepest aspects of our Being to surface. It is a looking within not without; a connection not a separation.

To be spiritual does not mean devotion to a deity, dogma or system of beliefs, but to our own Essence.

This cannot arise from theory or information alone; it is a path that must be walked. It is not something that can be known or argued intellectually; it has to be experienced through a personal and intimate liaison with life.

Being spiritual is not something soft or abstract; it’s a concrete practice that requires action. It’s often painful and uncomfortable. It takes effort and great resolve.

It is worthy of the label "warrior", because sometimes, that's what we are called on to be. This doesn't mean that we wage war, on the contrary, we generate peace; inner peace, but to do so often means that we have to muster the courage to live in a manner that is at odds with the world around us.

To me, this is The Great Mystery !

? Steve Tsakiris