One way of describing what I’m writing about here is as a rational awakening to the mystery.
This contains a few seemingly contradictory elements: mystery, awakening… rational?
Mystery: the mystery is not just something that “hasn’t been solved yet,” either through the scientific lens, or through the lens of the meditator obsessed with penetrating all appearances.
“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
This mystery does not spread its legs or bear its secrets in a cute aphorism. It is always arriving, passing and remaining. This mystery lies at the heart of who you are. You can share in it by becoming apperceptive: aware of your awareness.
The work of contemplation is precisely to make this mystery explicit and so to reveal your full stature.
Awakening: a coming-to and recognition of a bigger context of which in which you were already situated, just as you awaken from a transient dream into a wider world which was always already the case. One awakens to the mystery of being.
This awakening is a rational process: the tracing out of a deeper, implicit order dormant in your very being. This order helps put things in place, to situate yourself in relation to the sacred.
This line of enquiry takes on a philosophical flavour, as it did in ancient philosophy. It rewards clarity of thought and eschews superstition and speculation.
1 Jan 2023