We got our kids presents this year again. We may be helping them apply for college or get to practices so they can keep advancing their sports performance. Let me ask you a question. Did you spend much time over the holiday helping them go deeper into the mystery of life and this season? Oughtn’t we put life’s mystery and meaning above cool presents and better times?
So much mystery is in the air around the holidays: the Christ birth story the major one in the West, but other faiths have their rituals and mystery talk, even including the light at New Grange in Ireland, a 5,000 year old Celtic mystery that still fascinates.
What is all this mystery doing in homo sapiens world, where rationalistic, modern thinking rules, where analysis and data, and AI-based, code-enabled futures are about as mysterious, promising and scary as our minds can take us. As Gordon Sandquist, a minister in Colorado said at the Episcopal service I was attending, said on a December 24th service, “Have we so muzzled the mystery” that we can’t be surprised by the movements in life beyond our ability to explain.
Let’s hope we have done enough mystery muzzling, even as we productively pursue science and accumulating knowledge, so that we truly become sapiens, wise in Latin, and keep from blowing ourselves up and despoiling the planet.
Seems as though we, many of the sapiens masses, aren’t about to let mystery go just yet, even though some would like it this way. The mystery negating camp often equates mystery with superstition and ignorance and for sure there is some of that. But many of us, me and you included we hope, are mature in many ways and we still seem to gravitate to mystery, and even miracles (How many years has Miracle on 34th St. been running all December?)
I have a proposal here for 2024. Let’s de-muzzle the mystery and ramp up our wonder and awe and appreciating the mystery capacity. Below are three how-to’s on ramping up the good stuff. Recent science can help the de-muzzling of mystery, and re-enchanting the world to the place where it belongs.
1 – We slow down our mind chatter by bringing in the right hemisphere—take a walk, a deep breath, be grateful for something, meditate, visualize a loved one, feel the caring, and send an inner love bomb their way; appreciate the beauty of a song, a poem, a plant, a painting. And if you want to understand the brain’s role in all this, take in Iain McGilchrist, neuro-imager and Oxford trained: “The left hemisphere is principally concerned with manipulation of the world; the right hemisphere with understanding the world as a whole and relating to it.” (page 28 of The Master and His Emissary, 2011)
2 – Still our analytical minds. They are great gifts but we let them work overtime. Observe our thought trains many times a day and see how devoid of mystery, deeper observing and appreciation, we settle for.
3 – Read the right sources and books. Scientist and author Dacher Keltner asks:“ How can we live a life enlivened by joy and community and meaning?” His answer, find awe (the question is from the introduction to Awe: the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life, 2023).
Poets use language to de-muzzle our perception. Poet and friend Fred Anderle says:
Cacophonous our mind’s production…
until we pause to recover
our whole, calm spirit (from “If I Knew” in Every Instant Offering Grace)
Let us think differently. Re-structure our consciousness. De-muzzle. Re-enchant.
I write more about these ideas in my 10 series blog post on Linked In. I will post #6 next week. Here is the link to post #5.