I made a post Monday morning at 1:30 am entitled The Devil is the Details, an essay/personal narrative about the dangers of certainty and the need for more mystery in our lives. I wrote for hours, pressuring myself to get a post out before Monday (mainly because the forecast for the following day was nice and I wanted to spend it outside, but also because five weeks have slipped past since my last post). I don’t recommend doing this—that is, pressuring yourself for no good reason and then pushing out un-revised work. Wait until the next morning. By the fifth hour of writing Sunday night, I was out of my gourd, and when I re-read my already posted work the next morning, I was troubled by a few things and deleted the post.
In the post, I discussed a coworker who had come to me in a vulnerable state. Though I don’t consider this person a friend, I still didn’t think using his plight and bewilderment to illustrate my point was the most considerate thing to do. He was bent out of shape after “discovering philosophy” (I presumed on TikTok based on our conversation), and I took too much of a playful and condescending tone with this, made too much of a mockery of his suffering, when the whole point was meant to be that it’s easy for any of us to have this kind of reaction in the information age if we already have our mind made up about what the world is and isn’t, what is good and what is bad, etc.
The essay also focused a good deal on religious certainty and how it manifests as visceral problems in the world, the clearest example of this being the current state of things in Gaza. While I do believe that religious certainty is generally a problem, and I’m sure I will continue to believe this, I can be a bit heavy-handed and at times when it comes to religion. Forgive me, I had been listening to some of Sam Harris’s podcast episodes and went a little hard in the paint. There are many aspects of religion that I find to be beautiful, and I know that tradition can mean a lot to some people in their search for meaning. It is only my personal opinion that traditional religion is not necessary in one’s search for a relationship with God and is oftentimes constraining.
The point I was trying to make about the danger of certainty is that forming black-and-white conclusions about the world disrupts curiosity and dismantles our ability to look at the world with wonder. Einstein said if we can’t look at the world with wonder, we are as good as dead. What is the use in living if you can't experience awe? Science is also guilty of the practice of peddling "truths" that turn out later to be constructions. It is ironic that scientific inquiry is driven by curiosity but that its conclusions, when taught as absolute, stifle curiosity. There are exceptions to this of course, like questions posed by the “conclusions” of quantum experiments, but those are hardly taught as fact. Quantum Theory is a slowly opening door, revealing a new, wacky, and altogether spiritual dimension. It is one area of science that stands to remind us of an enduring truth: when it comes down to our understanding of the structure of the universe, we are mere babes. Other scientific disciplines can of course cause a sense of awe in the observer too; I don’t mean to claim that science in general stifles us, only when it’s taught the wrong way.
The point is that there is a great benefit in admitting to ourselves that there is a lot about the world we don’t know and to resist our own will to draw conclusions. I have found many times that the assumptions I make indeed make an ass of me. I am surprised regularly by people I have labelled as this or that and there are examples almost daily of situations that turn out to be the opposite of what I expected. The mindset that appreciates mystery is mainly valuable when confronting the bigger questions of life, matters of the spirit, and when approaching nature. This is one reason I have always admired philosophy, which dares not take anything for granted. I tried to make this point in my narrative about the guy who said he was confused by philosophy. He was confused perhaps because he read philosophy with a mind already made up that Christianity was the absolute undeniable truth. I’ll admit that I found this a bit funny since I had just been reading one of Kant’s early critiques in which he distinguishes between what we can and cannot know and urges us not to confuse faith with knowledge.
Mystery is a mysterious thing to write about. How do you define the meaningfulness of what you cannot know? The beauty, I think, is not only in the not knowing but in the willingness to not know. I tried to illustrate this in my now-deleted post with a little story about moss, which is generally mysterious to me. I used to be a pretty good naturalist and took seriously my ability to identify plants and other natural things in my surroundings. The other day I found myself feeling inspired when I came across some especially gorgeous mosses, which were not familiar to me, in the tree fork of an old red maple. Rather than running to find my field guide, I decided that it was okay not to know and that I could still appreciate the moss’s aesthetic quality, their spiritual quality, and that I could practice gratitude at this moment for the ability to witness such a amazing thing in nature.
The will to know is sometimes an expression of power-grabbing, an egoic necessity that allows a person to think, if I don’t know, I am inadequate. The truth is that a person is inadequate only when they are unable to admit they don’t know. The will to know is not always egoic of course; there is a genuine curiosity not tied to our base desires, a kind of virtuous curiosity that leads to discovery in nature and the discoverer to their higher nature. I have experienced both. When in the past I was employed as a field guide, I felt the need to bolster my knowledge of the environment to show off, or at least to not disappoint. One of the reasons I love solitude is because I feel less of a need to know things and more of a freedom to explore. Kant would’ve said that witnessing nature is better than naming it. Names also do not equal knowledge.
I’d love to know what you think about mystery. Are you a person who tends to ponder the limits of your understanding? Does the thought of those limits make you uncomfortable? How do you connect with the mysterious aspects of nature or spirituality? Do you find such a connection worthwhile?
As always, thank you for reading. If you received the essay in your email during the night on Monday and happened to read it, whether you thought I took an arrogant stance or not, just know, I can be arrogant, selfish, and foolish at times. The great thing about writing is taking the time to discover these things, the healthy plants and the pests, in the garden of the soul. The other great thing about writing is revision.
Much Love. I wish you a wonder-filled week.
Realness is refreshing.
I’m WAY behind in checking my email. I appreciated both posts/emails for different reasons. There’s a lot of humility in this one and for that, I’m more appreciative of the latter. Not that I’m old - I don’t feel old; I still feel like I’m 21 - but with age, I’ve discovered that there are things I’m less certain about now than I was, say, 20years ago. Some of it has been through negative experiences, but I’ve come to the conclusion (which I think we have to do, even if we have to rethink and reevaluate those conclusions) that life would be much more difficult if we tried to hold on to the ‘certainties’ that have proven to be untrue or at least unhelpful - and I know people who do. For me, there are baseline certainties about life - physical, spiritual, moral, etc - that have proven true and must be held onto while others may erode away. And those fundamentals allow the mysterious to be embraceable, even when they are hard or painful. Otherwise, with either too few or too many certainties, the mysterious becomes grotesque and horrifying and something to avoid. Flannery O’Connor wrote about dark, disruptive, violent Grace. The more carnage I/we survive, the more I’m/we’re faced with the need to discard philosophies or mindsets that don’t work. By doing so, I/we find the grace. It’s uncomfortable but better than trying to hold onto the comfortable because it’s all we know. I think we have to have the right amount of certainty to find the beauty in mystery. Finding the balance is hard and a life-long battle. And some refuse to fight it.