Meaning & Mysticism - two peas in a pod

accepting a lack of definition helps us define the ultimate question

I keep poking at the things I don’t understand. My base programming demands it. I want to understand literally EVERYTHING. Maybe it’s a defect. When I can’t…not just that I don’t…but when I know it’s real and I can’t understand - when no amount of investigation or contemplation will solve it for me - I’ll be tortured by it until I accept it as unknowable. It’s the thought that pops up in the morning to ruin the moment when I awake from a wonderful night’s sleep and look out into the world thinking it’s going to be an amazing day. The thought that says “what about that thing? you can’t really believe it’s unknowable, right? You just aren’t smart enough to figure it out, right?”

I can’t imagine there has been any evolutionary benefit to actually knowing everything. As much as we like to think we’ve intellectually grown well beyond our biological processes, sadly, we’re still kind of meat sacks that maybe just ‘found’ consciousness. Consciousness didn’t change our biology even though it might have pushed the limits of it. We have expanded cognition that’s still ultimately bound by senses, perception, and biology still striving for survival, not philosophical progress. <le sigh> But perhaps the yearning has served a purpose.

Solutions and understanding come to me in odd ways. I imagine my subconscious toiling away at what I want to know, but without new input the guy can’t find new solutions. And new input could me anything like taking a new route to work - “aha!” I’ll exclaim as I pass by a cool house I’ve never seen. Sometimes the solutions come to me in actual dreams. LIke I dream about real life and solving the problem or understanding the thing. I wake up and it’s there, planted in my head as if it’s always been there. Sometimes it’s real spooky, other times I imagine this is when I allow my subconscious to expand, unbound by consciousness, and either finally have the full capacity of the brain or grab info or solutions from outside my perceived reality. I talk more about dreams here.

My thirst for answers and desire for understanding puts my reach beyond my grasp a lot and I can appreciate how little I really know. I have a lot of answers for my kids, but all of my peers know more than me about the things they’re really interested in. They know more, but not everything. Nobody can know everything. Even AI. Claiming absolutism with anything gets a side-eye from me. Not a “you can’t know that!!” judgement….just a side-eye cause I definitely know that I don’t know anything to an absolute. Maybe you’ve got a stronger signal. Whatevs.

Mysticism, to me, is not woo-woo. We can get so close to the full mother-fucking truth that it’s in our bones and we can cite every piece of wordly knowledge so confidently that nobody could ever possibly refute us but, like, we can’t get ALL THE WAY there. And that’s mysticism. Sure, um, it’s rooted in religion. I actually love that. The thing that has been perverted over time to motivate so much conviction and judgement as to justify genocide shares a potentially fundamental philosophical premise with what I’m claiming might be necessary to fully engage with the tension between experience and meaning. We have to accept we can’t know everything. It’s easier for some than others.

I often suck at small talk - “Hi, I’m Mason, what are your thoughts on the meaning of life? … Oh, um, I guess I’ll have the tacos.” I’m a thinker. I can’t stop.

A whole host of philosophers really pushed this thinking to it’s limits - Pascal, Weil, and my current obsession Nishitani - and refused to box or dismiss what they found. I bet it hurt, like a lot. Cause it wasn’t the answer. There were no pots of gold and unicorn marshmallows at the end of their rainbows. Whether they tried to wrap it up in a bow or not, it just wasn’t something they could understand. I wish more people were ok with that. I wish I was ok with that. Cause along the way Pascal got probability theory, Nishitani articulated emptiness, and Weil got the practice of attention - suspending the reach, if just for a moment.

“The meaning of life is not a problem to solve. It is a mystery to be experienced.” - My version of that Dune guy’s quote.

Am I experiencing the mystery good enough? I feel this inadequacy anytime I scroll too long on social media. I don’t care about people’s success or status or things they have. What gets me is all these reels about studies and knowledge that are based in so much evidence and everything I’d learned about the topic, to-date, was WRONG. it’s demoralizing to think that my whole upbringing was wrong about everything. And it’s obviously not true, there’s wisdom in tradition, but when repeated enough that it’s all wrong I can’t help but feel like I was raised by the lucky charms marketing department. Traditions are born from real benefits. Definitely some traditions have been perverted and some daily habits are born from incorrect correlations, but…but, most are real and they root us in a shared experience. And that, I think, disconnects us from the mystery.

Every time I learn something new that requires I dismiss a long-held belief it lightly challenges my sense of self and it reinforces that someone out there knows everything about a particular thing and all I need to do is scroll enough. It decays the role mysticism plays in my life. I have to actively reinforce that nobody knows everything and nobody could figure it all out even with “enough time.” There are just things we can’t know. AI is the ultimate reinforcement of this. It can know everything that everyone knows and even the combination of everyone’s knowledge. But it can’t know everything.

Recently on a trip I was playing the card game War with my kids and wife. We were at a beach resort (not checked-in, we prefer immersion, just passing by) playing at an outside table near the water with sand everywhere and our drinks dripping condensation from the humidity. Real visceral stuff. It was hard to not get the cards wet, so someone had thought ahead and made beachy playing cards that are plastic. I was having SO much fun. My daughter goes “Wow, do you really, really, love this game??” I thought for a second, realizing my full and absolute attention was at that card table even though I don’t actually like that game much cause there’s no strategy, and responded - “I love playing with y’all!” And that….That I Know. That’s my meaning. And I know it’s my meaning because of my yearning for the greater, not in spite of it.