The Wild and Infinite Mystery

Some of us are forced by our own sensibilities to question the nature of reality.

Some of the questions are probably knowable:

• What is everything made of? What is the substrate and structure of the universe?

• What is the origin of consciousness, and how can it emerge from matter? What else could it emerge from?

• Is everything in the universe predetermined?

And some of the questions are probably unknowable:¹

• How could time ever end, but how could it not?

• How could space ever end, but how could it not?

• Why is there anything at all?

These questions leave me with vertigo and wonder—which I sometimes enjoy, and sometimes don’t. It just happened to me while thinking about this, but I don’t know if it’ll happen to you just reading about it. Maybe you have to stop and think about it. We can start with something immediate: this moment, this text, the light from your screen. And then pull back: the room, the building, earth spinning in space. The solar system, the galaxy, the universe stretching billions of lightyears. And then... what? Something gives rise to you and everything around you, in every direction you can conceive of, and that thing is unknown. And something likely gives rise to it. Onward, all the way up or down or out. But stepping back even further: none of this had to exist at all. There could have been nothing. No space, no time, no matter, no consciousness to wonder about it. No where, no when, no that, no now. And yet here's everything. What a strange reality.

Maybe it’s beyond human comprehension. Maybe the frame of conception is off. Maybe lots of things—but it’s astounding that I can’t even imagine what an answer would look like.

Over the years, I’ve developed a deep reverence for mystery. Attention to this mystery has helped me connect more deeply to nature—to myself and others and everything around me—and made me feel more at home in my existence as a human being.

Many things² pointed me toward it.

1. Podcast | The Tim Ferriss Show: Professor Donald Hoffman

Spotify, YouTube, Transcript 

When you've always favored material explanations of the world, it takes some serious work—and people with serious credentials—to shake up your intuitions.

Most of us believe that the physical world, or matter, gives rise to consciousness (e.g. a brain made of neurons and chemicals produces our inner experience of being alive). Of course, right?

But Donald Hoffman argues that it is consciousness that gives rise to the physical world.

Hang with me here:

2. Insight | The Moon’s Mystery is My Own

I listened to Hoffman’s episode late one evening in November of 2022, while driving from Denver to Kansas. In the preceding weeks, I’d been grappling with a visceral, unsettling confusion about what kind of thing I am. As I’ve written before, I felt like a random, strange thing, floating through space, tossed by forces I don’t understand.

And this confusion was directed only at myself, not anyone or anything else.

But on that November night, the swirl of theory and fatigue primed me for an experience that would help me transform those feelings at their root.

Dazed from everything I'd been absorbing, I looked up at the moon. I felt a familiar awe at how it hangs there, suspended—a reminder that we live on a rock hurtling through space. But this time, I wasn't just amazed by the moon; I was genuinely baffled that it existed. (I wish I could drop you directly into that feeling—something utterly ordinary becoming utterly mysterious.)

And then a realization washed over me: the mystery that underlies the moon's existence is identical to the mystery underlying my existence. It’s as inherent in the moon as it is in me. The moon is also a seemingly random, strange thing floating through space, tossed by forces beyond understanding. We share the same position in the universe: existing against the odds, from unknown origin, composed of the unknown.

I'm no less mysterious to myself than before, but I'm not alone in it; I'm accompanied by everything else I can think of. All of us mysterious together, united in the improbability of existence and the mystery of where we came from, what we exist in, and what we’re made of.

3. Excerpt | From the Tao Te Ching

The Tao Te Ching, one of the world’s most influential spiritual and philosophical texts, takes as its subject the Tao: an indescribable, mysterious force underlying all existence; the source of all things, formless and beyond words.

The book begins:
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name."

If we can attach any qualities to the mystery, we've already turned away from it and replaced it with concepts. I’m skeptical when anyone claims to know any specific attributes about it; I suspect that, as my friend Neha once put it, “they’ve made the infinite finite.”

4. Quote | By Anthony de Mello

In his incredible book Awareness, de Mello writes:

The final barrier to God is the word ‘God.’

UGH. Delicious.

We get so caught up in prescriptions made in God's name, and the painful associations they can carry, that we miss the underlying experiences available to us. It reminds me of Parker Palmer’s poignant words: "How did so many disembodied concepts emerge from a tradition whose central commitment is to 'the Word become flesh'?"

Growing up, I didn’t believe in God as described in any of the major religions. To my mind, they purported to know⁴ something far, far too mysterious to understand. And the frame that God is Love never quite helped me relate to religious texts or people; it still felt too definitive—a leap.

But when I started exploring the framing that God is Mystery, religious expressions began to make a lot more sense. I began recognizing myself in the writings of mystics, nuns, saints, monks—and animals and insects and trees—and space and stars (and not just for the stardust we share).

5. Poem | Mysteries, Yes by Mary Oliver

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Before mystery became central in my life, I thought a lot about determinism and materialism: I am a body of chemicals—a machine acting on programming designed to propel me to share my genes. Everything is just molecules and atoms working on an algorithm.

I believed that it’s wiser to confront reality, no matter how unsettling, than to be soothed by falsehoods.

Not only that but, to the extent that I can choose what I believe, I’d rather focus on nourishing ideas than philosophies that erode my capacity for joy, connection, and meaning. It turns out that when I'm stripped and facing fire, I'd rather know happiness than truth.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about philosophy and wellbeing:

• We shouldn’t let speculative philosophical positions jeopardize our wellbeing.

• Even if there is a definitive philosophical truth that jeopardizes our wellbeing, it may not be wise to confront it until—if ever—we’re ready to face it without much harm.

• There's so much truth to explore, and perhaps the wisest thing we can do is to seek the truths that bring us peace, allow us to live full lives, and honor the precious brevity of our existence.

To see the mystery,⁷ I needed to loosen my grip on intellectual certainty. Now, I think mystery captures the deepest truth we can express about existence—and it leaves me more open in how I think about and honor all that is.

Lucy

While making this post, I learned that the Ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander wrote about the "apeiron" — the infinite, boundless, or unlimited fundamental principle or origin of everything. It turns out that many traditions have pointed to this concept:

And, in modern science, the quantum vacuum or singularity — everything from nothing, and undifferentiated state.

1  We’ll probably always be stuck . . . in the infinitely receding horizon of our ability to know or understand it. — Anika Harris

2  Certainly more things than I could count. Taoism (which felt like it captured truth about the universe more intuitively than anything I’d come across), Mary Oliver, thinking (the sense that neither words nor science can capture reality — that reality itself is beyond comprehension), feeling (like an alien in existence; like a robot in determinism and materialism), concepts like panpsychism (that provocatively shake up intuitions), philosophy of science, metaphysics, experiences with meditation, etc.

3  (It's a little confusing, because evolution presupposes the reality of space, time, and physical processes. But he's basically saying: evolution is the best tool we have from inside the interface to understand why we see what we see. But it doesn’t mean the interface is ultimate reality.)

4  The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority. ― Paul Tillich

5  I wasn't one of those people who could believe determinism without being crippled by it.

6  And certainty is neither the spiritual spirit, nor scientific spirit as Walt Whitman describes it: “I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.”

7  Again, I’ll quote a letter from my high school Humanities teacher, Mr. Davis: “Whatever we have studied this year, it only became the ‘stuff’ of a humanities class when there was a mystery present that could not be quantified, for to quantify any object, event, experience, or person is to take the mystery out of it. Thus another paradox: we cannot be fully human if we do not analyze both the world around us and ourselves (it’s the only way we can ever construct a place for living that is even slightly tolerable); but if we fall prey to the over-analysis monster—if we take the mystery out of who we are—we make of ourselves nothing more than rats in a maze: scrawny little creatures scuttling from wall to wall in search of ever smaller bits of cheese—finding, chewing, gulping, belching—then scuttling off around the corner to do the same thing over and over and over again. And over and over and over. . . . Mystery, however, not only makes life tolerable, it makes it worthwhile. So let us praise mystery. Let us wallow in it. Let us drink deeply from the wonder that is its confusion and awe and beauty and pain and laughter. Most importantly, let us drink deeply from ourselves—for we, too, are mystery.”