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Saturday, August 16, 2014

Let the Mystery Be?


Iris Dement sings that, while everyone wants to know where we came from and where we are going, she is happy to “let the mystery be.”  I tend to agree with her at one level, but at another I am just too curious, I guess.  I am at an age where the curiosity is becoming more immediate.  It is one thing to wonder in June what Santa Claus will bring; it is another to be listening for reindeer hooves on Christmas Eve!

We have many different creation myths around the world.  I don’t take any of them literally.  They are all attempts by people to understand their world and, especially, that part of their world that they cannot experience through the five senses.  Today, of course, we know that there is much more out there than we can know through the five senses.   We know that there are three—maybe four if time really is one—dimensions; but what if there are four more that we cannot quite sense?  We can experience matter, but science tells us that there is an equal amount of anti-matter all around us and in and out of us.  Is there one universe or do we live in a small corner of a multi-verse?  

Increasingly, I feel like a caterpillar just about to start making its cocoon.  Does a caterpillar know, when he is making the cocoon, that he will transform into a butterfly?  Perhaps this life of ours is just the cocoon-building part of things, and we will wake one day into a new dimension or into an anti-matter world.  Or not.  It is more than a bit humbling to know that we can't perceive the totality of this vast reality of ours. 

Regardless, it is just a bit more fun to explore the mystery—even if we can’t know the truth—than to simply let the mystery be.

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