HOW TO TRUST THE MYSTERY
The unknown is uncomfortable. As we enter it, we feel exposed and vulnerable, like being outside alone on a new moon’s night with only the stars and our instinct to guide us. As humans we are curious creatures. We love to solve problems, find ways to explain things, and make things easier on ourselves. We love facts and the tactile experience. We love pretending that existence is all we can touch and see.
With all these right angles, where is there room for creativity?
Where is there room to arise, abide, and fade away into something new?
We are pressured so much to define ourselves. To be a brand. To take a shape, form, or title that will fulfill the impossible expectations imposed on us by others and ourselves. We avoid change as much as possible because we know that pain brings change and change brings pain, so we stay in our boxed-in lives even if we are miserable, even if the shapes we’ve taken are crushing us.
In many spiritual disciplines, the left side of our body is the feminine and spiritual and the right side of our body is the masculine and material. The goal is to not have one dominate the other but rather to find an intrinsic balance between the two.
With our obsession with proving and defining our worth through what we own, look like, and know… and the more modern feigned comforts of social media and search engines, we may have lost our connection to all that is inherently spiritual in us.
Maybe that is why we’ve seen such a boom in more ambiguous forms of spirituality in the past decade? We are craving that unknown part of us, the dark and unseen mystery within.
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The inquisitive human spirit seems destined to search for the divine and though many major religions have tried to prove what happens to us after we die, no one really knows. And no one really knows what happens before we are born and likewise no one really can grasp the weight or phenomena of love. This is why birth, death, and love are the great mysteries in life.
We know the divine, we can feel divinity everywhere. But what a peculiar need it is to put a name and a face to the divine. Why can’t we just embrace the feeling of being guided by something much more powerful than our own egos? Can we know god/goddess without the need to label god/goddess?
Faith is so important because it can give folks something to cling to when they feel tired, lost, and downtrodden. Faith breeds hope, humility, and wonder. For some folks, their faith isn’t necessarily a religion or doctrine. Their faith is in science or politics which is so easy to forget that these beliefs too are subject to change as new discoveries are made.
This inquiry into the need to explain the divine isn’t coming from a judgement on folks believing what they choose to. It is an inquiry into why all the discomfort with the unknown in the first place? Past patterns in human behavior show that faith and tyranny walk a fine line and the need to force others to believe what we believe to be fact has really run amuck on the ability to have compassion for each other.
Thodore Issac Rubin has a quote: “Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.”
It may be that kindness and mystery go hand in hand for it is kind to not assume you know everything about another because of what they believe or look like. It is kind to see the absolute intelligence in nature and not arrogantly assume that your search engine or some book you read is correct in trying to explain it all. Kindness has an honesty to it, it asks questions, and there is an innocence in kindness that keeps us fresh, soft, and uncalloused.
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Mystery is our potential. It is silence, it is the absence of form, it is nothingness, which means that in mystery absolutely anything is possible.
Mystery gives us the opportunity to meet ourselves with the same innocent kindness that we can bestow on others.
Who you are today doesn’t need to be the same as who you were yesterday. In mystery you are always evolving. Watch nature and you will see that nothing in nature is linear. That everything arises, abides, and fades away. We are nature so we too are always evolving, ever changing beings. It is an illusion to think that everything about us will stay the same. You were born and that was a miracle. One day, no matter the attempts to defy it, you will die and that is its own miracle.
Today you are in love, you feel the love in every cell of your being, but one day that love will change, the object of your love will die or grow in a different direction from you. Should that stop you from unfurling into the power of love now? Can you give your love permission to grow and change forms along with you?
The future is a mystery. It hasn’t happened yet which means that no one can tell what will come (though many try). This means that the future is full of potential.
Yes, our past does affect our present, but we can decide where we take our future and leave ourselves open hearted to the mystery of not needing to know exactly what we will become. If we observe nature, we can see that nature has an urge to encourage growth. Perhaps we are here to grow.
Did the acorn know it would one day become an ancient Oak? Or after being planted in the dark wet soil by the busy squirrel, does it just heed the call of water and sunlight and begin to expand? Did the mighty Oak know it would one day fall to human cruelty and become part of the bog? Perhaps we are planted here in these bodies at this time because this is where we will grow. We don’t know the name of the squirrel who planted us, but we feel an everlasting gratitude toward the gift of life we are given.
Notice how much has been forgotten, our sense of direction, the numbers to reach those we love, the key points of an article we read a few hours ago. Could it be that our need to constantly consume information leaves our brains very little room to remember? Has all of this consumption led to the loss of memory and attention spans? Could the overconsumption of ideas and facts have led to the overconsumption of things we don’t need and the inevitable destruction of our bodies and our Earth?
In old fairy tales, the dark wood, otherworld, or the deep sea were the places of mystery where the protagonist began her transformational journey into the unknown. We were taught to fear this but now look at what we have done to the sea, the forests, the unexplained ancient sacred sites.
Women are mysterious for the very fact that the female body can produce new life and the milk that is needed to nourish that new life, and life is a great mystery. Look at the way we treat the female form now, look at the ways most women feel they need to contort themselves in order to be worthy. Ancient cultures all over the world reveared this mystery of birth and the female form we see dating back 30,000 years to the paleolithic period where we see evidence of a hunter and fertility goddess. This reverie of the feminine didn’t disregard the crucial role of the masculine. The masculine was the chalice that held the holy grail of the feminine waters. But perhaps somewhere around the time of early mesopotamia, maybe from too many droughts, too many famines, and too many plagues, a deep discomfort was felt with the mystery and along with that the feminine and so birthed the praise of controlling where our resources come from, honoring the sky who fertilized the crops with sun and rain, and forgetting the earth who birthed this food for us. Thus the beginning of the one god in the sky concept.
Could the reason why women are still oppressed in many places, in many ways, be our deep fear of mystery?
If we released the need to consume so much would we inevitably find we are way more creative, productive, and happy?
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So how do we trust mystery? How do we surrender to the unknown? How do we release the fear of the dark woods? Maybe the first step is finding comfort in silence and then maybe stillness too. Then maybe it’s a comfort in saying “I don’t know.” Not a willful ignorance but an allowing of the ego to rest from always needing to be right. Maybe our worth is in our ability to be present with all that is ordinary to us so we can finally see all that we have. Then maybe we realize how very little we need to consume to feel complete.
So I trust the mystery
Because it connects me
To the rhythm of life
To which we all belong.