A Skeptic’s Exploration of Mystery

I often wonder if mystery really exists.

As someone who is ridiculously pragmatic, guided by universal laws like cause and effect, willing to take in, and integrate, new information through my 5 senses, and wise enough to know that I am beyond limited in my understanding of the universe in its entirety, I find the concept of “mystery” to be a little bit like Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and The Tooth Fairy.

I realize this analogy may offend some- actually, it has, including some very close friends.

Though that it is not my intent.

I just can't stomach the word "mystery" being used as a synonym for "magic" when, as we all know, there are always concrete, logical explanations for even the best magic tricks, we just never learn what that explanation is- and I'm very okay with that.

On the other hand, I do think the word “mystery,” as a word to cover a broad spiritual concept that may include: a panacea for when we feel vulnerable and scared,  a name for the (currently) unexplainable and the (currently) unknowable, or even, sometimes, as an out when we are just too tired to dig any deeper, is definitely convenient and possibly necessary.

The “mystery” of the universe.  The “mystery” of the human brain. The “mystery” human interaction.

In fact, I love my Unitarian Universalist church services, and you can’t get through a Sunday without mention of the word “mystery” at least half a dozen times because, as far as the function of shared language goes, frankly, it works.

Except, when it doesn’t.

Sometimes, people too casually use the word “mystery” as an endpoint.  A conclusion.  The final word. 

"It's just a mystery," they'll say, "that's all there is to it," implying there is no need for us to seek or push this any further in an honest search for truth.

It reminds me of a column I read a few months ago about use of the word “evil” after a man shot and killed over 50 men and women at a country music concert in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The title of the piece was called “The Mental Bargain We Make When We Use the Word ‘Evil” by author and activist Courtney Martin.

In the column Ms. Martin writes:

Evil literally means ‘profoundly immoral and malevolent.’ In our current moment, it seems to carry a sort of metaphysical seriousness. When someone does something that we find truly inexplicable and horrible and that, importantly, we want to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for, we jump to call it evil…

We grab for the word ‘evil’ when we feel overwhelmed with the human capacity for death and destruction. When we feel grief that doesn’t know where to land. When we feel horrifically vulnerable.

That makes sense to me. We want an act like this to be considered off the understandable spectrum of people damaging one another.

The irony is that our grab for the word ‘evil’ seems all the more desperate when the suffering we’re witnessing is random. It is so uncomfortable to think that your brother or daughter or friend could die like those 50+ victims have — at any given moment, with no warning, while experiencing joy. It is even more uncomfortable, on some level, for us to admit that we could have prevented some of that death.

If it was evil, then it was inevitable…

In other words, we would rather live with the belief that evil could kill us at any moment than with the belief that we could have prevented a murder (or 50) yesterday…

‘Evil’ is a cop-out. It distances us from asking hard, important, and specific questions about how this could have been prevented and what each of us can do to save lives — actual human lives — in the future…

If there is evil here, it is complacency, and it is collective.

I want to say again, I realize even exploring the word “evil” in the context of exploring the word “mystery” may have again offended some.

As I said though, that is not my intent.

My point is to illustrate, as Ms. Martin did so well, how we must be mindful of language that leads us in a direction of narrow, reductionist explanations for our human existence- especially in the realm of our spiritual lives.  Language that puts an end to our conversation rather than encouraging more searching and seeking for transparency, authenticity and honest connection.

Language that yields the finite as opposed to the infinite.

So what, if any, room have I made in my life for “mystery,” though not in the sense of magic? 

Well, there are actually two, so far, and I’m pretty sure they over-lap in some way: consciousness and soul, and to explain, I’m going to take you to the movies.

[A side note, though not surprising I’m sure, I’m also not a fan of the words “consciousness” and “soul” either because both feel just too darn small for what they try to capture, but they are all we’ve got- for now…]

Recently, while lying sick in bed for several days, I re-watched the 2016 Australian film Lion--such a great movie, if you haven’t seen it yet, please do--and I was struck by the quantity of the movie that so elegantly conveys the depth of the internal life of a human-being non-verbally, without words.

Scenes without dialogue. Scenes of pure emotion and imagination in which the main character Saroo (an Indian boy separated from his family at age 5 who lived most of his life with his adoptive family in Australia) is seen dreaming, wandering, fantasizing, obsessing, willing, visioning, pacing and retracing the piece of himself that was lost to him over 2 decades ago, and to me, this is a gorgeous visual depiction of the mystery that exists between brain and mind, or consciousness.

In 2015 journalist Oliver Burkeman wrote an article for The Guardian newspaper called “Why Can’t the World’s Greatest Minds Solve the Mystery of Consciousness.”

In the article, which largely explains the work of author, academic and philosopher David Chalmers, Mr. Burkeman writes:

The Hard Problem of Consciousness [is] this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?

All great questions for which I have absolutely no answers.

But I do marvel.  And seek. And wonder, and aren’t all these words really just the verbs that we use to describe what many call “mystery” in its most expansive, inconclusive way?

Another film.

When I was 8 years-old my parents took me to see the 1985 film Cocoon.  Though not really a kid movie in any way (my parents were known to do that sort of thing), I actually loved the movie for all sorts of reasons.

But the reason that pertains to this reflection on the concept of mystery was the way the Antareans (those were the aliens who had come to earth in this particular plot) were depicted as beautiful, sweet, non-verbal, yellow/white handfuls of pure energy with “lifespans” that crossed millennia, and something inside me felt more kinship with this illustration of “humanity” than the actual human characters in the movie or in my own life.

Even as a little girl, though I did not have language for it at the time (words like “soul” were definitely not used in the secular home of my childhood), that visual depiction of the Antareans, to me, looked like the mysterious spiritual quality of “soul.”

Now, fast forward 32 years, and I still feel that mysterious truth each time I look into my son’s “beautiful, sweet,” almond shaped hazel eyes: the truth that “he” existed before his body was here, and “he” will exist long after his body is gone.  As will I.

Some might call that “soul,” and if that is not a mystery in its most infinite sense of the word, I don’t know what is.

So that's all I've got (for now) on the topic of mystery: consciousness and soul.  But remember, I'm a seeker, so the topic for me is wide open.

Is it for you too?