45. The Mystery of Being ⭐

Of all the solar systems in this universe that might sustain complex life, we find ourselves in this one. It took billions of years of evolution on this Earth to produce the people we now are. Our brains and bodies have evolved through millions of generations, reaching back to creatures totally unlike us, to animals so strange that we wouldn’t even want them as pets, and finally to single-celled organisms. For ages, the world got on without us. But now we’re here. And among all the possible people that could exist, we are among the tiny minority that actually do. And of all the periods in human history where we might have appeared, we live in this one, arguably the first in which it was possible to understand our circumstance in a truly universal sense. For the first time, a person’s view of the world need not be dictated by the mere location of his birth or the religion of his parents. For the first time, the barriers of language and geography have totally fallen away. At this moment, you have instantaneous access to more information than even the greatest scholar a world leader did a generation ago. And yet on some level, we confront the same mystery of our existence that Socrates or the Buddha faced. The fact that you are you, the fact that you exist in this moment is a miracle of sorts. There’s something fundamentally inexplicable about it. There’s no amount of knowledge that seems adequate to dispel the mystery of our appearance here. And whatever you know, whatever you believe, whatever you have done or hoped to do, you have this moment of conscious life to contemplate. You have this minute, this hour, this day, and it will never come again. So I want to talk for a few minutes about the intrinsic mystery of this circumstance. It really is the mystery of being. In science and philosophy, we often claim that we’re in the business of getting rid of mysteries. And there is, of course, a sense in which that’s true. If we don’t know why people are getting sick, for instance, and we discover the virus that’s causing it, well, then the mystery has been solved. But there’s another sense in which mystery never recedes. And if you pay attention, you can see that it’s an ever-present fact of even the most well-understood phenomena. The philosopher Bertrand Russell described our most rudimentary knowledge of the world as knowledge by acquaintance, for instance, the color of a table standing before you. And here’s a quote. The particular shade of color that I’m seeing may have many things said about it. I might say that it is brown, that it is rather dark, and so on. But such statements, though they make me know truths about the color, do not make me know the color itself any better than I did before. So far as concerns the knowledge of the color itself, as opposed to knowledge of truths about it, I know the color perfectly and completely when I see it. And no further knowledge of it is even theoretically possible. Thus the sense data which make up the appearance of my table are things with which I have acquaintance and things immediately known to me, just as they are. End quote. Now what Russell seems to overlook here is that this basic knowledge to which no knowledge can even be theoretically added is a place where we uncover an intrinsic limit to understanding. And we consider any facet of experience, in this case a vision of color. If we can then stem the tide of our thoughts long enough to merely observe it as it is, the fact that we’re in total ignorance of what it is can become obvious. What is the color blue? Not as a function of wavelengths of light or neurophysiology, but as it is directly perceived. We’re really left with nothing to say but that it’s blue, which of course does nothing to clarify things. In fact it’s not even blue, which is just a word. It’s a noise we’re making. But what we see before us is whatever it ineffably is. Focusing on this distance between concepts and experience is a means of sneaking up on a truth that is generally described in Buddhism as the truth of emptiness. The idea that no thing has intrinsic independent existence in the way that it seems. Now there are many ways to come at this insight into emptiness. And frankly this line of inquiry may be too steep for some of you at this point. So I encourage you to return to it after you have more experience in the practice of meditation. But it is worth reflecting on even in the beginning. The moment we suspend the conceptual associations we have with a given object or perception, or knowledge about it, our direct experience of it can grade into this experience of just pure mystery. We’re left with this wordless intuition of consciousness and its contents about which nothing more really can be said. But right now as you listen to me speak, pay careful attention to the process of listening, the feeling of sitting in your chair. Look closely at everything around you. I’d like to suggest that while you know many things about the present moment, you do not know what anything in itself is. Now look at your hand. What is it? We can define this part of your body in language. You can call it hand. You can consider the fact that it’s made of bone and muscle and thread it with blood vessels and nerves. But this is all a description about the object that you’re now looking at. If you simply look at your hand and ask yourself, what is it? You might realize in a moment of rare open-mindedness that it is an absolute mystery. It is in fact as mysterious an appearance as any you could ever hope to find. Now there are scientific arguments that can be arrayed against the mysteriousness of any object. We can point to the fact that the atoms in your hand were born billions of years ago in the belly of a star, and in fact some of these atoms may have inhabited several stars in succession. It’s even possible that some atoms that were once in the bodies of historical figures, like Churchill or Cleopatra, are now in you. In fact, it might be descriptively true to implicate the entire universe in your hand, or in any objects being what it is. But no such litany of concepts or connections can account for the mystery that looms whenever you just look at something closely, anything, however commonplace, and realize that while you might have volumes of knowledge about it, you don’t have the slightest understanding of what it is in itself. Now others have noticed this fact. Walter Benjamin, the German literary critic, stumbled upon this mystery in Marseille after smoking hashish for the first time. He distilled it in the phrase, how things withstand the gaze. And all things really do withstand the gaze. We confront the mystery of being in every moment, but we don’t notice it, because this mystery is tiled over with concepts. Now meditation isn’t about understanding things conceptually. It’s the ability to experience things more clearly, prior to concepts. It is the knowledge by acquaintance that Russell spoke of here, taken to the ultimate degree. And the more you practice it, you’ll find that it really is a new form of intelligence. It leads to another way of being in the world, and one that can allow for a kind of psychological freedom that a continuous entanglement with concepts doesn’t. There’s a famous parable from the Buddha meant to get at this difference. A man is struck in the chest with a poison arrow, and a surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work of saving his life. But the man resists. He first wants to know the name of the Fletcher who fashioned the arrow’s shaft, and the type of wood from which it was cut, and the motive of the man who shot it, and the name of the horse upon which he rode, and a thousand other things that have no bearing at all upon his present suffering or ultimate survival. So this man needs to get his priorities straight. His commitment to thinking about the world results from a basic misunderstanding of his predicament. And then we may be only dimly aware of it. We too have problems that will not be solved by more thinking.