It really is a wonder...

WONDER’s a word that’s long carried with it strong implications of openness to joy. It’s a word that has been traced back to the origins of our English language. It isn’t a new emotion. And it’s typically our first response to the giddy depths of mystery.

Wonder has been credited with energising human curiosity, inspiring art and the origins of both religion and science. It penetrates deeply, extending the senses and animating the intellect.

Mystery energises us. Mystery gives us the appetite to strive to understand, first of all ourselves, and then in order to become what we should. Mystery makes it clear that we’re all humanity together, and that we inhabit a shared predicament. It’s one that makes us burn with awe and curiosity, so it’s good for us to talk with each other. But is also teaches us that cleverness is an illusion: it has too few dimensions to approach truth.

Mystery is neither good nor evil; it is enfolded into one human life no more or less than any other. Human lives can in turn only enfold themselves into the mystery, one at a time. The mystery is far more to be trusted than our deepest insight or anxiety. After all, as most other species seem to be aware, it’s where we are and how we all got to be here. So who are we to be picky?

The greatest gift mystery gives us is wonder… wonder’s essential to being human.

BUT, a little while ago, when I searched the word “mystery” in the “books” category at amazon.ca, the title that popped up at the top of the list was a work called: The Mystery Method: The Foolproof Way to Get Any Woman You Want Into Bed. So, expecting an tale of rejection and disappointment, I read the first “reader review”… but, no. It was glowing. And I soon had to look up “PUA” in Wikipedia. I discovered it means “pick up artist” and that there’s a “PUA” genre of “literature”.

Putting to one side the images this suggested of sullen, drooling men with low foreheads, their long, over-sized libidos slithering along behind them, I returned to amazon.ca where I discovered that, for $18.96, I could buy another favourably reviewed book called God is a Woman: Dating Disasters. Here, in a single non sequitur, was a title that simultaneously trivialised concepts of “god”, “woman”, “dating” and “disaster”. Breathing deeply, the moron images came right back.

It really gets wearisome, beating a path through the morass of mindlessness that the “rise of civilisation” has managed to generate.

We of the West claim to have spent thousands of years in the pursuit of knowledge, human dignity, truth and the “just” society… we have aimed for the stars, walked on the Moon and, inexplicably, wallow around in neurosis, vacuity, trashy dependencies, violence, despond, timidity and credulity, and the inane trivia that endlessly belches from the bowels of a global entertainment industry.

A human consciousness needs real food to flourish. It starves on trivialities and simulations. A healthy human consciousness sings with birds and breezes, weeps with a suffering friend, is grateful for goodness, needs and gives love, is distracted by beauty, seeks and values friendship, enjoys laughter, esteems intellect, is endlessly curious; it loves more readily than it hates, opposes injustice and is from time to time fired with inexplicable joy.  But it has to be fed. It can’t thrive in stasis or find peace in one place: it has to journey.

A starting point is immediately at hand: beauty.

Although “beauty”, too, is a word that’s been savagely trivialised, beauty itself is inviolate. Beauty is an experience of the BE-ing of goodness. It attracts. It inspires. And it redeems words like “mystery” and “wonder” because beauty lies at their core.

Beauty, it is commonly said, lies in the eye of the beholder. That isn’t true. Beauty is primal. But beauty undoubtedly exists, long before it is beheld.

Among the varieties of stone most favored by sculptors in marble for more than two and a half millennia — since the time of the Athenian cultural efflorescence — has been the luminously white marble of Naxos, a small island in the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea.

Its fine grain and capacity to take a lustrous, polished finish made it a prized material for temples and statues of gods. Naxian marble has a capacity to glow as though it is on the point of being animated by an inner energy. Glistening in the brilliant Mediterranean sunshine of 2600 years ago, the freshly erected, 25-foot high statue in Naxian marble of Apollo in Delos must have been every bit as breath-taking as its creators intended.

It all begins with the sea: like time, its long, regular oceanic risings and valleyings, its sharper, breaking pitching and heaving, its rush to shores and hissing retreats, and beneath the sinewy flow of currents, a dark, seeming stillness. And beneath even that, there continue the achingly slow journeyings of the earth’s mantle itself… sliding and folding under to soften and grow molten or, prised upwards, rising and hardening so that the seas toss their wrack against new shores whilst patiently gnawing away at the old.

It all begins with the sea, like the surface-parting exhalations of whales that loom for air from their ringing depths, the majestic passage of sharks, the otherworldliness of depths where colour is washed away and countless creatures live lives that shake off everything we know from our circumscribed lives on earth to inhabit a three-dimensional freedom that surpasses even that of the globe-circling albatross; the heaving, changing otherness of it, the smell of it, the taste of it, the ever-presence of it, the plunge and crackle of surf, and the lurch of a surfboard catching the wave; the yawing roll of the deep ocean swell, lucent-black under a keel, and the trailing wake that slowly vanishes; oyster-clad rocks and spray-drenched mussel beds, tresses of kelp on the rocks, the thud and thrust of a filling sail and a ship’s churning wallow through the waves, that ship-smell of tar and cordage and iodine, the glowing trails of fish through phosphorescent subtropical seas at night while overhead the stars reflect on the open water where swells rise and fall as they did for millions of human lifetimes before the first human appeared, eons of motion, never the same, never different.

The loneliness of the sea’s constant, animated companionship, its power to console or destroy… this it where it all begins. Even the marble began here because, for at least 500 million years, small one-celled creatures called Foraminifera have teemed in the seas. We need microscopes to see them, but they take up calcium salts and carbon dioxide from the water and transform them into tiny shells for themselves. Their shapes are countless and striking in their life-formed beauty.

Over the millennia, these tiny creatures have lived and died, and their tiny shells rained slowly to the ocean floor to form deep beds of nearly pure sediment. The gathering weight compressed the small shells into limestone.

In some parts of the world, beds of limestone rock were lifted upwards by the planet’s slow re-adjustments. Water, slightly acidic from decaying plants and deepening soil, seeped into crevices and very gradually mined out dripping tunnels of underground watercourses and, as each small droplet of minerals-laden water evaporated, it left a trace of calcium carbonate behind. The residues turned underground caverns into pillared, chandeliered, glittering wonderlands that can be seen by human eyes only when people make their way into these unlikeliest of places — squeezing through tiny passages, scaling sheer, underground rock faces, swimming through dark pools and crawling through fine, clinging mud — then light lights and look about… and wonder. It is still possible to be the first person ever to stand in such a place and to reel with the revelation of it all.

In other parts of the world, the deep sheets of limestone were carried far into the Earth’s mantle: to depths where the core’s intense heat melts rock. Molten, the limestone was lifted again, and as it cooled, crystals formed. In a few places, where the limestone was sufficiently pure and the crystals that formed in the cooling were small, the rising layers contained lodes of fine-grained, white marble.

Marble quarry on the Aegean island of Naxos

The neighbouring islands of Naxos and Paros rose from the sea endowed with such a stone. And, eventually, human beings stumbled upon this remarkable rock and, in their desire to honour the gods they’d moulded from the mystery, found a purpose for it that was appropriate to its worth. It is another wonder, an afterthought of nature, that placed beside the shimmering white marble are black seams of emery: the abrasive rock that is perfect substance with which to work the sculpted surface of marble to that heart-stopping polish.

A seam of black emery in Naxian marble.

My point in all of this is that beauty cannot be confined to this place or that. It permeates our world and is discernible everywhere and its discernment is a conscious act that ignites feelings of hope and “rightness”, meaning and gratitude: a “fit” with goodness.

There’s something elemental and universal in its character. The beauty of a musical note has been a part of the Earth’s acoustic capacity since the Earth was formed. The beauty we experience in various configurations of light, of sound, or form may be more of less apparent in different ways to each of us but it is there for us all. Nor does beauty ever seem to be a sufficient end in itself: it propels consciousness forward. It nags at its every beholder to take the next step, to continue the journey.

When and where did our sense of beauty get marginalised? Why? How did the idea of “beauty” get reduced to a broad-spectrum, unnecessary buzz-word? What makes us so often the arbiters and trivialisers of beauty rather than its discoverers and celebrators?

Real beauty is everywhere. Every insect I’ve ever seen, every creature I’ve seen, has been a masterpiece of dynamic design, a fusion of form and function that fascinates the mind as well as inspiring the spirit … an aesthetic marvel. Scientists estimate there are close to 10 million different species of insect. They pollinate our fruit trees and flowers, they give us silk, they give us honey, they are food for many people … and most are benign: unsung contributors to our wellbeing. And, moreover, creatures like this have been around for 400 million years, compared with our 750,000 or so.

We have a few blueberry bushes that produce delicious, health-promoting fruit. Blueberries are the sort of thing we tend to talk about “by the pound” — and there's nothing like commodification to rip the meaning from things.

But look at the complexity of one single blueberry: the seed-bearing pale flesh that tastes so different from the astringent skin. But two flavours complement each other beautifully and uniquely. And they’re not really very “blue” at all. Each berry is a gifted thing to pop into your mouth, but it’s also beautiful in its form.

So what gives us the capacity to be transported by beautiful flavours?

And sounds …

And colours …

And smells…

And textures …

And sensations …

And what does it mean? We seem to have evolved with a capacity to apprehend an infinite array of beauty, and to grow our wisdom in its “soil”.

And, primed with beauty, consciousness itself can hope to become beautiful.

What’s your problem with god?

I CAN only imagine reality as a kind of a sphere: a bowl of existence we inhabit for a time. We’re bridled by horizons. To me, “god” is a handy word that lets us contemplate and talk about the mystery that lies beyond as well as within the boundaries.

Without that word, I find it hard to talk about what “meaning” might “mean” — and, while that’s not a biological imperative, it is a by-product of consciousness that can have some big implications for how much we make of our lives.

Our experience of “god-ness” is limited to recognizing reflections of the more-than-obvious and immediate in the place we live, and those reflections are everywhere, playing with our every emotion, imagining and thought. And we can in-dwell all this experience as expectations of “god-ness”. We can helpfully think of our being, too, as a manifestation of “god-ness”, simply because existence is inseparable from stuff we can not possibly know directly. So we each, separately, can be deeply changed as living impressions of “god-ness” are formed by our search for experiential coherence.

The “god” we dare to name and think we know is necessarily shaped by our shifting discernment and experience. If we’re careless and undiscerning, we can ignore the experiences of god-ness that are everywhere available to us, and deny those we can’t avoid. Within the search for coherence, they seem too chaotic and uncontrollable. Denied, they engender fear, egocentrism and greed; denial excites loneliness, nihilism, cravings for identity, addictions, sadness and boredom. It gets easy to feel existentially doomed (or damned).

With discernment, we can learn to sense “truths”, but we certainly don’t have minds capable of understanding them. Experienced truths are not intellectual challenges. They’re be-ing challenges. The greatest teachers have always struggled for words. And their followers, forgetting what the question was, have too often missed the point and turned them into tools or weapons of control. Take them a question and you get slapped with a demand to just “believe”.

But NO amount of religion or raw scripture, on its own, gives us “knowledge” of god. The sacred scriptures of every faith are not about information: they are about transformation. It’s transformation that makes them “sacred”.

God-knowledge can only ever be partial, personal and experiential. Each of us inhabits a unique consciousness with its own particular horizons. And, without personal experience to communicate with, religion is just words echoing in an empty room: the words of our culture, faith or denomination — religious practice becomes little more than play-acting or indoctrination. This is happening when we’re told to “believe” this or that about “god”, or where the language and/or premises of religious liturgy are rooted in assertion. Trust, not assurance, is the foundation of faith. The poetics of love are its servant. Logic stumbles.

Ideally, Christian worship serves me as a sort of spiritual dry run for the week ahead. Good guidance and companionship help us to grow in discernment, and serve us well. But solitude is also necessary. As is deep reflection. Silence helps us deal with the inner clamor that ongoing experience quickly generates. We need time without inputs to re-establish the coherence that sustains our trust.

So Islamic coherence recognizes the unity and singularity of the mystery of “god” and is a “true faith”; Judaism’s coherence recognizes how wholly we’re in the hands of the mystery, and is a “true faith”; Christianity finds coherence in the mystery experienced as love, and is a “true” faith; Buddhism sees the need to pass through the curtain of “ego”, and is a “true faith”, native American spiritualties see the whole of creation as interrelated beings — equally necessary kin —and, so, are also “true”. Hinduism sees the mystery’s myriad faces and the dynamic balances between creation and destruction, and so is “true”. Daoism emphasizes the quest for harmony with the mystery, while Sikhism teaches the need to live “truth”, so there are “truths” here too. And, so it goes.

Meanwhile, the mystery continues to perplex us all… passive and remote but immediate and interventionist, granting us sensations of freedom but circumscribing the outcomes of our every thought and action; blessing us with goodness we fail to understand while frustrating our “reasonable” hopes; letting us to get things horribly wrong but being present as a strange consolation in extremity.

On the one hand, evolution is “true” as a tool towards understanding the unity and deep entanglement of life on Earth. “Creation” is also true, because, without forces that are too vast for us to understand (or at least to coherently talk about), nothing exists. The mystery lures us into dreams of permanence and security… but places us in a dynamic universe in which everything changes all the time, at it’s own rate and in its own way, but with a puzzling kind of choreographic synchronicity. Any notion of static existence is a self-refuting idea. But we can’t help experiencing some attributes of existence — meaning, for example — as enduring values.

But who are we to “know”? Surely every “known” is a hypothesis? Isn’t everything we say about “god” falsified as it leaves our lips? Don’t we base our concepts about “god” on endless fallacies? How could the question, “what is truth?” — asked out of Pilate’s legalistic intellect — possibly be answered?

Isn’t it more about “trust”… not because it pleases “god” to be trusted but because it gives us the hope of “pleasing god”? It’s for our own peace of mind that we think we act decently… that “god” will be pleased. But who knows all of the consequences of our actions? How far do they reach? How are others affected? And, if they are affected, how does that experience radiate from them? Can a smile unleash a catastrophe? Can a smile shape a saint? … or can it do both, at the same time?

All of our words and actions are participatory, interactive, and malleable. They can be silenced, re-construed or amplified in ways that are beyond our control… we need “hope” as well as “trust”.

The mystery grants us both, but only when we let ourselves be ridden with the viruses of vulnerability, open-ness, curiosity and passion. Of course: we must not judge and cannot be judged. Of course: forgiveness is an absolute necessity. Of course: the “kingdom” is both of this world and beyond it, but also within us. And of course: love is the only way we can give our own life meaning and value. “What is love?,” Pilate might have asked, and been answered by the same silence.

Love is the best we have, given our nature, culture and capacities… to give, or receive. How are we empowered to love? By immersing ourselves in it… hoping, trusting. We have to know love to become love. It has everything to do with the mystery… and nothing to do with the mystery.

I have come to understand beauty as “god’s language of love”: beauty, inspiring gratitude, raises our will to express love. It has the power to affect us morally as well as aesthetically.

I have come to understand beauty as “god’s language of love”…

Wisdom. anyone?

WISDOM is scarce and difficult to acquire.

What is wisdom? Let's say “wisdom” is the fusion of experience and gathered knowledge into core principles that, integrated into our awareness, being and behaviour, help us to live well. Living “well” means living satisfyingly, joyfully, confidently, with integrity and without harming other people or nature. It is about peace, within oneself and with the World. It is a dream, an ideal. 

In youth, we’re called upon to gather ideas in a great rush to make our way in life. Most of those ideas about the World are constructed by others. Some are great and manage to survive the testing times of life; most are, at best, expedient, and they get us through… sort of… with a bit of luck. And some are total rubbish.

They come to us through our parents and peers, our educators and employers, from society, politics, friends, economics, religion… and a lot of them are convincing because, in those particular, close contexts, everyone around us is similarly mistaken.

Along the way, we also pick up glimpses of truth, insights into reality and some genuine wisdom. We almost certainly start seeing flaws in the ways we are living, in what's offered as “common sense” and in “conventional wisdom”.

As we become growingly aware of our necessary selfhood, most of us are likely to be picking up signals that our favourite falsehoods are, in fact, false. To avoid the stress of self-examination and the effort of reworking our accepted ideas and beliefs, we might to decide to cling to them anyway and hope for the best.

Or we might feel more “wisdom” would come in handy. And that leaves us with a couple of ways to become wiser:

1. Seek more insight. This, though, means opening more widely to experience and that carries risks. It means adventuring into new (to us) ideas, fields of interest and personal reflection — and that’s hard work for which we probably have limited time and little energy.

2. Discern and ditch more falsehoods. Though this, too, means taking some risks. Can we get by without some of our deeply embedded falsehoods? What will happen when we pull one familiar prop out from under our cherished sense of who we are… then another, and another? Besides, what is all THAT wrong with us?

Or we can let life continue to simply run on by us… and linger within familiar boundaries. There are dangers here, too. The biggest is the vulnerability of trying to stand still in a changing, inherently dynamic world; our self-image is bound to become less and less tenable unless we let it shift. Placing that shift in the hands of others will leave us, in the end, not knowing who we are, feeling lonely and without “meaning”.

What might be a few “favorite falsehoods”? The list here is necessarily personal but a few I’ve done my best to eject from my own life would include, for example:

• The fallacy that there’s ever “us” and “them”.

• The fallacy that winning a war, a game or a life-contest is something to be celebrated.

• The fallacy that we can pick and choose the people we should treat decently.

• The fallacy that anyone can move on in life without forgiving completely and utterly.

• The fallacy that what I’ve done by simply earning a living hasn’t really ever harmed others.

• The fallacy that some things never change and that some things are reliably predictable.

• The fallacy that someone who’s more needy than me is somehow less deserving.

• The fallacy that hard work, intelligence and education guarantee “success”.

• The fallacy that our responsibilities end at living decently and not making waves.

ANYBODY can seek wisdom… and, for humanity's sake, everybody should. 

Wisdom has very little to do with information, data or blitzing through books… nor with genes or Myers-Briggs profiles. Nor is it necessarily archaic or arcane.

It's not about “knowing” (in the popular modern sense) — or job training — but “meaning”. And it lies around in everyday stuff: the walls we bounce off and the torrents that lift us high. It's a gift, to be sure — but no more special than our other capacities. Denied the ability to fly like a bird, we have to do our flying with our wisdom journey.

Wisdom simply has to do with cultivating an open-ness to experience and that has a lot to do with trust: trusting, for example, that whatever got "me" here today can probably also take me to where I need to be tomorrow. That trust may be misplaced but — even if it is — there's nothing gained by withholding it. As we go, discernment grows and life deepens as it unfolds.

So far, the mystery's okay by me.

To not “let go” into life is a seriously self-debilitating choice… imagine a swallow on a wire thinking “what if that stuff with the wings doesn’t work this time?” and clinging to the wire, waiting for food to come to it until  at last it dies of hunger.  

I'm saddened by the way we “elders” collectively allow the “system” to regiment young people into what’s called “responsibility” when the world — everywhere — is such an exciting, interesting diverse and dynamic place to be.  Young people would be far happier and better off with vision quests than with law and business degrees, or with jobs that eat up their capabilities and give them fretful lives of struggle to keep corporate castles in the air. A bit of irresponsibility can be a marvellous tonic.

We “elders” owe young people more than we give them… and, to be “elders”, we should be helping them to open their eyes and ears and interests and minds, and dissuading them from embarking, passionless, on some glassy-eyed, psychic sleepwalk into student debt, but to follow wherever curiosity and inspiration lead. Knowledge should be as accessible as fresh air and water. God knows, education should at least be free and available to anyone who wants it. And the idea of what counts as “education” needs to include the whole of life. 

Truth and beauty are more important than any career skill. Wisdom is a journey for which all should be allowed, or must claim, space and time. Its pursuit is to the common good.

Learning to see truth and beauty is more important than any career skill…