Tip-Off #116 - Closing in on Mystery
"May my silences become more accurate." - Theodore Roethke
Your house is talking to you. Give your plants the gift of silence (or soothing music) for healthier growth. Your chair just moved again: composite particles are never at rest. Your desk is listening, not just Alexa. You, too, could love an octopus — see the stirring documentary “My Octopus Teacher.” I exorcised an evil spirit from a parishioner's garage. It was making so much noise at night it scared the family senseless. The police were useless; I just wanted to be helpful. It worked. (And yes, this happened.)
Sci-fi pulp magazines, such as Amazing Stories, used to feature this kind of content under headings like "Weird Science." Now, scientific journals highlight the "new weird" as worthy of research, like ghost-busting. The paranormal is almost expected. Reason is not what it used to be. Err on the side of wonder.
A growing number of philosophers and neuroscientists consider that consciousness could extend to all matter and perhaps beyond death, existing independently of a physical body. Panpsychists believe that consciousness is not merely a subjective experience but the nature of the universe. Even elementary particles and simple forms of matter possess rudimentary consciousness or experiential qualities. From another angle, cosmologists are investigating the mysterious substance that holds the universe together. The awe that initially drove philosophical inquiry finds renewed life in astrophysical discoveries, leading some scientists to experience a feeling akin to mysticism. "
Diverse spiritual traditions have long perceived the world as filled with a vital force, including the seemingly inanimate. Indigenous cultures are rich in stories that endow the sun, moon, stars, and other natural elements with spirits and personalities. Almost a millennium ago, St. Francis prayed, “Praised be You, my Lord, with all Your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, Who is the day through whom You give us light . . . Sister Moon and the stars . . . Brothers Wind and Air, and all weather’s moods . . . Sister Water . . . Brother Fire, full of power and strength . . . .”
The concept of the "Book of Nature" has existed for centuries. This metaphor sees the natural world as a text written by God, revealing divine truths. Every aspect of life deserves reverence and respect, reflecting an intrinsic sense of the sacred and the family of life.
Perhaps one day, like the Dalai Lama, I'll be able to consider mosquitoes family, and instead of swatting them, try to wave them outside where it's safe. (Not yet.) Research projects analyze the mosquito genome and compare it to humans to better understand the genes related to disease transmission. Our genetic code unites us with the entire web of life on Earth. Divinity is not always divine in a monotheistic sense; it encompasses a sacredness inherent in the world, regardless of its name.
What can nature itself tell us about how to live within it? How would society and politics be different? The modern era has been full of efforts to humanize nature, making it safe and useful. What might it mean to naturalize humanity? We need not a human answer to an earth problem but an earth answer to an earth problem.
Think only of the natural pluralism that sustains the ecosystem. Human societies are similar. Biocentrically and socially, monocultures are weaker and dysfunctional. Diverse societies with a blend of cultures and ideas are more innovative, adaptable, and ultimately stronger. Hybridity didn’t begin with GMOs and multiculturalism. Political arguments often revolve around the polarity of ideologies mindless of nature’s ingenuity.
Mystery has turned into metrics and life obstacles to overcome. As a critic put it some time ago, “When reason displaces awe of the unknown, denunciation of what is deemed reason is the greatest service reason can render.”
The real lack of faith today comes not from a lack of belief, but from a loss of wonder. All of creation has a soul and a song, sometimes silent or hard to hear. It's up to us to give it voice.
The wind rocks with my wish; the rain shields me;
I live in light's extreme; I stretch in all directions;
Sometimes I think I'm several. . .
What came to me vaguely is now clear,
as if released by a spirit,
or agency outside me.
Unprayed-for,
And final.
— Theodore Roethke
Notes and reading
"May my silences become more accurate," Theodore Roethke, On Poetry and Craft: Selected Prose (2013), 95. - “The wind rocks with my wish…” from “What Can I Tell My Bones?” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1966), 165-167.
“Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” how noise and quiet appear in our communities and the world. Xochitl Gonzalez is a staff writer for The Atlantic (September 2022). One of J.Lo’s biggest hits was “Let’s Get Loud.”
“The new weird” - see The Weird and the Eerie - Mark Fisher (2017). "Once quarantined as a subgenre associated with sullen Goths and arrested-adolescent readers of H. P. Lovecraft, the weird and eerie have slithered free of those confines and now leave a trail across the internet, on the page, and in mainstream TV shows and movie screens." - Los Angeles Review of Books. - Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2022). Capitalist ideology shapes our ability to imagine anything different.
"Panpsychists believe... " - Philip Goff, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023), Chapter 6, “A Conscious Universe.” - Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (2023), chapter 7. A key challenge for panpsychism is explaining how complex consciousness emerges from simpler elements. Goff addresses this with “Russellian monism” in Consciousness…, Chapter 6, “The Elegant Solution.”
Cosmologists… - “Mystery of Galaxy’s Missing Dark Matter Deepens” - NASA Hubble Mission Team (June 17, 2021).
Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon - St. Francis of Assisi (1224).
“The Book of Nature” - Arjo Vanderjagt, Professor emeritus of the history of ideas - (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History (2006).
Chickens, chimpanzees, and you - what do they have in common? “We are 98.8% genetically similar to chimpanzees, 75% genetically similar to chickens, and even 60% genetically similar to banana trees.” - Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (July 1, 2020).
“What we need is not a human answer to an earth problem…” - Thomas Berry, ecotheologian, The Dream of the Earth (1988). “Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of being human. It is to transcend not only national limitations but even our species isolation to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and value.” (42).
Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness - Evelyn Underhill (1911; 2002). Direct encounters with the immanent transcendent. See for sure the Substack “The Pragmatic Mystic” by Addison Hodges Hart and the interview with AHH at “The Skeptical Mystic” in Comment (February 23, 2024).
"The real lack of faith...the loss of wonder" - David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (2022), chapter 6. Available in a Kindle edition. The theology is formidable, but the Introduction alone repays attention. - From Chapter 6: “As we age, of course, we attempt to banish that wonder from our minds and to master the mystery of Being in comprehensible ideas or projects."
“When reason helps us overcome awe of the unknown…” (abridged) - Max Horkheimer, leader of the “Frankfurt School,” Eclipse of Reason (1947, 2013), 132. Horkheimer argues that the shift in reason has made modern thought more vulnerable to fascism. He also discusses how the Nazis were able to present their agenda as "reasonable."