We Live in Mystery

 

We Live in Mystery

August 17, 2023

 

Exactly one month ago, on July 17, 2023, I wrote what follows, or something much like it, in a journal I sometimes keep. I rarely reread my journal entries, The reason I do them, if there is one, is just that there is some value in the doing. That value, whatever it is, does not require rereading. But I just reread this one, and it struck me as something worth writing up and posting on this blog. It rambles of course. It wasn’t written as polished. I was perhaps feeling a bit cynical when I wrote it. Whatever. For what’s it’s worth, here it is.

 

July 17, 2023

 

I’ve been wondering just what it is that I think or believe about the most profound questions of life. What is life? What is consciousness? Is there a reason why we’re here? If so, what is it? Does life have any meaning? If not, why keep on living? If it does, what is that meaning? Who or what are we humans? Are we good, or evil, or both? How are we to live? Does it matter how we live? to ourselves? To anyone else?

Some of these questions have no answer. Or if they do have an answer, it is only an answer we assign to the question, nothing more than that. To some of them the only conceivable answer is God. Maybe that’s why we come up with the idea of something we call God. God at least answers the questions of where we came from and why we’re here. Or, as I have written elsewhere, the concept God doesn’t so much answer those questions as it transcends and obviates them. Do we come up with the concept of God for reasons other than it gives us a way to deal with unanswerable questions? I think the answer is yes, but I can sure understand the skeptic or cynic who says no.

The question of why anything at all, including ourselves, exists rather than there being nothing (assuming that something more than nothing in fact exists) truly is unanswerable. We don’t and can’t know why what we observe as reality exists. All we can do is acknowledge that something we perceive as existing appears to us to present itself to us. What we take to be reality is simply a given. It is simply there. It does not tell us why it’s there. It just appears to say here I am, take me as real. It doesn’t tell us why we’re here. It just says accept that you are here and leave it at that. We say there is a reality and that we are part of it because—God. We can live into what we call God and experience God as real, but we can never prove that our answer has any objective reality or that it is anything more than an answer we cling to because we have to have an answer. I’ll say that we have to have our existence mean something. If we think it doesn’t we cannot avoid despair.

Is God real? I think so, but I can’t prove it. And God doesn’t really answer all of our questions. Where did God come from? Was there a time before God? All of these unanswerable questions boil down to one profound existential truth. Our search for answers to all of our most profound questions leads us inexorably to mystery. To something that isn’t just unknown but is unknowable. One of life’s existential challenges is to learn to live with mystery rather than answers, with the unknowable unknown rather than with knowledge, facts, answers, knowledge, and certainty.

Almost everyone, except perhaps true mystics, resists that answer. We keep seeking that which we can never find. If life teaches any wisdom at all, it is that our call is to live with mystery, with the unknowable unknown, and to be satisfied with not knowing. Our rational minds and our eyes scream No! There has to be more than that! Well, there isn’t, and we’d be well advised to accept that reality rather than to maintain the futile quest for more than that.