Recognizing Mystery

In this life, we are able to see what we are pre­pared to see. A closed mind lim­its our expe­ri­ences. Tak­ing things at face value alone cheats us of deeper real­iza­tions. One day an old Shep­herd sees a bush burn­ing in the desert, but it refuses to burn up. He climbs a moun­tain to see what is going on. The rest is the his­tory of the Exo­dus. He could have just writ­ten it off as an anom­aly, but his holy curios­ity would not let him rest until he checked it out.

We are not intim­i­dated by our lim­i­ta­tions but by our poten­tials. Some­thing inside of us keeps one foot on the expe­ri­en­tial brakes. It is more secure to go through life pre­tend­ing that every­thing has a cause-and-effect expla­na­tion. In time, we are able to blind our­selves (through sheer habit) to the mys­ter­ies all around us.

Today that tree over there is going to move a bar­rel of water thirty or forty feet up — against the forces of grav­ity — and not even strain doing so. There has yet to be a final expla­na­tion on how it does that. Sev­eral the­o­ries cir­cu­late about osmo­sis, but the bot­tom line has to do with mys­tery. A tree is no ordi­nary phe­nom­e­non. The closer you look the more amaz­ing things you will find. To write it off as merely a tree is to cheat your­self of embrac­ing your own ver­sion of the mys­te­ri­ous burn­ing bush. Let­ting your mind gen­er­al­ize it away is a pas­sive response to the bril­liance of creation.

Get out of your dull trance. The hundred-billion-per-second bio­logic inter­ac­tions you com­monly call your life may be the most cre­ative show around. Your unique set of genes and expe­ri­ences may be the great­est mys­tery yet. Never take the com­bi­na­tion for granted. Do not miss who you are by com­par­ing your­self to oth­ers. Rec­og­nize that the mys­tery most worth pur­su­ing may be you!