May the Great Mystery
make sunrise in your heart.
—Sioux Benediction
We start life at the periphery of the unknown, for everything is unknown—we are aflame with possibility. But as we get comfortable with the world, we move to the interior of the envelope. Only when intimations of mortality begin to disrupt our normalcy do some of us return to this same terra incognita, the interface with eternity, where “the souls of men form, in some manner, the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God.”
For the rational mind, there is an insatiable desire to push back the borderline between known and unknown, to extend the domain of the intellect until there is nothing on the other side. The high priests of our age are the elite minds of science. Theoretical physics seeks a grand unifying theory, connecting the very smallest aspects of the cosmos to the very largest and explaining everything. Some scientists, while acknowledging a spiritual component of reality, have sought to simply incorporate it into a more sophisticated form of materialism. For example, the Oxford professor Roger Penrose has proposed a model for the soul based on quantum mechanical processes occurring in sub-atomic scale structures within brain cells. If matter and energy are all that we can comprehend, it is natural to try to pull everything down to the level of matter and energy. Others endeavor to keep science and religion in separate compartments of their lives, like matter and antimatter that would explode if brought into too close contact.
Eventually, however, science’s expedition into the unknown must come upon a precipice—the fundamental question first posed by Leibniz: “Why is there anything, anything at all?” One approach to this problem is to simply avoid it by describing a physical cosmos that is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, beginning or end, and no need for a creator. In The View from the Center of the Universe, Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams use the ancient image of Uroboros, the serpent devouring its tail, to represent this idea. According to the late celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking, “God is unnecessary” because the laws of physics require no lawgiver.But isn’t the system of physical law itself a “something?” Again, we are confronted with the same question—
“Why is there anything?”
In The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough confronts the question of existence directly. Her response is to invoke the elegant phrase, “a Covenant with Mystery,”— abandoning the need to answer the “Big Questions” and instead embracing Creation with wonder and awe. “I have found a way to defeat the nihilism that lurks in the infinite and the infinitesimal. I have come to understand that I can deflect the apparent pointlessness of it all by realizing that I don’t have to seek a point.” Another proponent of mystery in the context of science is Bernard d’Espagnat, winner of the 2009 Templeton Prize. He has observed that “Mystery is not something negative that has to be eliminated. On the contrary, it is one of the constitutive elements of being.”
Goodenough acknowledges that some might equate this Mystery with “God,” but she refuses to do this herself, inhibited by all the baggage of anthropomorphic images and manufactured theologies. However, I think that the mystery of existence with God is a means of rekindling a faith in the Divine that has, for many, been quenched by the dogmas of conventional religions.
Actually, the concept of a Covenant with Mystery is not incompatible with Western religious traditions, and especially with the doctrine of the Trinity. The Old Testament covenant between Jehovah and the Israelites involves the physical plane of existence—the attainment of the Promised Land, the prosperity of the tribe. The covenant of Christ is more concerned with the individual soul or psyche, dealing with issues of sin and forgiveness, damnation and salvation. But there is also that highly elusive third aspect of human experience—the truly spiritual. What better term than “mystery” could be used to describe mankind’s relationship to and covenant with a manifestation of God that goes by the name of “Holy Ghost?”
Mystery also permeates much of Eastern spiritual practice. Mircea Eliade, in exploring the teachings of Samkhya Yoga, emphasizes the distinction between “the motionless and eternal (spirit) and the flux of psychomental life.”
“The (spirit) is inexpressible…
The first stage in acquiring this saving knowledge consists in one thing: to deny that spirit has attributes.
To say I suffer, I want, I hate, I know, and to think that this refers to spirit is to live in illusion and perpetuate it.”
Meditative techniques aim to shut down this “flux of psychomental life” and the distractions of physical input so that the presence of the mystery of spirit is all that remains.
The unknown is not just a consequence of our temporary boundaries. Any rational answer to the question —Why is there anything, anything at all?—seems to require the existence of a something before the choice of something over nothing is made. This is the paradox that reveals the limits of our perception.
For me, the only answer to the ultimate conundrum of existence is “God.” The eternal, ineffable deity is perhaps the single concept that meets the criterion of Occam’s Razor:
“No more things should be presumed to exist
than are absolutely necessary.”
My physical environment, my thoughts, my feelings, my very consciousness may all be illusions. My only certainty is that there is something going on, and that the source of that something is God. This ultimate source cannot be expressed not because of some fiat or sense of our humbleness, but because God is beyond words.
“All those who want to make statements about God are wrong, for they fail to say anything about Him.
Those who want to say nothing about Him are right, for no word can express God.”
—Meister Eckhart
If we are to hold an idea of God in our minds at all, it must not be as an image or likeness, for God is not a “something.” Perhaps all we can do on a rational basis is to ascribe to God a process, the primordial choice of something over nothing, self-named in scripture as “I Am.” This choice was the trigger of the Big Bang, and it continues as the principle that maintains the mystery of the unfolding of Creation.
“God, to me, it seems, is a verb.”
—R. Buckminster Fuller
The universe sprang forth from the “Great Mystery” that is God. In Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith suggests that in the Big Bang, it was actually “the Infinite Omniscience” that exploded. God exists in eternity—omnipresent, omnipotent, and unknowable—but in the context of time God has been fragmented, and it is the task of all Creation to lift itself to a reunion with the out-of time God.
In the first chapter of Genesis, God assessed the fruits of the six days of creation, and declared that they were “good.” Every “Let there be…” was a step in the ascendance of the cosmos. This then is the definition of “the good.” It is a movement, a vector. The good is an act of will, a choice that moves us closer to God, as individuals, as a species, and as a part of the whole of Creation. Evil, then, is the opposite vector, the intent to pull backward our evolution to union with God.
“Evil is Genesis backwards
Sucking out spirit to make life only clay
Light and dark unseparate to gray
Animals unnamed devour their kill
“eB erehT teL ,eB erehT teL” 18
Rational, scientific endeavor cannot solve the mystery of existence, but it is a good action in that it can lead us to the recognition that mystery is “one of the constitutive elements of being.” The next step in our spiritual quest is to embrace the mystery, the covenant idea put forth by Goodenough in The Sacred Depths of Nature. But this, as well, is not the endpoint of our journey. Ultimately, the path becomes that of the mystic, seeking a union with the Great Mystery that is God.
Today
I truly fall away
From future and from past
I hold the fruitful moment
Let its skin slip from my grasp
Take in its scent and flavor
Let its seed sow unto me
Savor it the way
A drop of rainf
a
l
l
i
n
gTakes in the sea takes in the sea takes in the Sea 19, 20
Notes
- Judy Martin (Editor), A Modern Book of Hours, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1989, p. 19
- Annie Dillard, quoting Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in For the Time Being, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999, p. 122
- Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams, The View from the Center of the Universe, Riverhead Books, New York, 2006, p.165.
- Jane Bosveld, “Soul Search,” Discover Magazine, June 2007.
- Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2001, p. 31.
- S.W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: from the big bang to black holes, Bantam Books, Toronto, 1988.
- Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams, The View from the Center of the Universe, p.165. To me, the image of a serpent devouring its tail is an expression of futility. It seems ironic that the authors use it as a positive representation of their theory of everything and of a kind of new religion based on science.
- S.W. Hawking and L. Miodinow, The Grand Design, Bantam Press, New York, 2010.
- To be fair, Hawking has also addressed this question in quite a different way, stating: “If you like, you can define God to be the answer to that question.” (Barbara Bradley Haggerty, Fingerprints of God, Riverhead Books, New York, 2009 p.244). More recently, he has said that he is “mystified” by the question “Why is there anything?”(Larry King interview 6/28/16).
- Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998, p. 167.
- Ibid., p.11
- Tom Heneghan, “French Physicist d’Espagnat Wins Prestigious Templeton Prize,” Reuters, March 16, 2009.
- Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 2, Trans. W.R. Trask, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982, p. 57
- The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd Ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979
- Meister Eckhart—From Whom God Hid Nothing, ed. David O’Neal, Shambhala, Boston & London, 1996, from the Forward by David Steindl
- R. Buckminster Fuller, quoted in The Quotable Spirit, ed. Peter Lorie and Manuela Dunn Mascetti, Macmillan, New York, 1996, p.9
- Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters, Harper San Francisco, HarperCollins, NY, 2001, p. 261
- Fragment from the poem “Perfect Stranger”, copyright 2010 by Richard Krepski
- The image of a drop of rain taking in the sea appears in The Wisdom of Faith, Bill Moyers’ television interview with Huston Smith. Smith uses it in a discussion of the mystic path in Islam. Copyright Public Affairs Television, Inc.
- Fragment from the poem “Falling”, copyright 2010 by Richard Krepski. The repetition of the last line is meant to reflect the triune character of reality (physical, psychical, spiritual), and should be whispered like a meditative mantra.
