I am sitting on my deck, feeling a slight breeze, and watching the play of sunlight and shadow on the trees and flowers that surround the lawn. It is early morning. A statue of a Buddha under a rhododendron bush is just uphill from the deck. Two cats, Milo and Max, sleep near to me. I feel a sense of peace, and privilege, even mystery, that I can be here, that this exists, that these cats want to be with me. Their lying here with such trust is somehow baffling to me, even though they have been with me for years.
The philosopher Jacob Needleman tells a story in his book, The Indestructible Question: Essays on Nature, Spirit and the Human Paradox, about how, when he was young, he met a renowned authority on the traditions and culture of China. The man was regularly consulted by governments, linguists, mapmakers, and even people seeking spiritual advice.
Needleman, at the time, was a delivery boy. He entered the scholar’s office to deliver and collect library books and found it piled high to the ceiling with books, papers, arcane documents, and diagrams. It was like a small library from another time and place. As he stared around the room, he accidently knocked to the floor an old book, which fell open to an illustration of the human body with strange symbols surrounding it. He bent over, somehow drawn to study it. In the midst of speaking a magical Taoist incantation, the scholar noticed where Needleman was staring and stopped what he was doing.
“Shut that book,” he said by way of a greeting. “Do you know what journalism is?”
“Certainly,” Needleman replied, as he looked up.
“There are three, maybe four books in this whole room that are not journalism,” that do not merely repeat what other people have said or done. “But all the rest, including that one on the floor, are journalism. … I am practically at the end of my life. I know more about Chinese religion than maybe anyone in the world. …Yet, the most important thing I don’t know. Because I have never felt the tradition” or know what it means to practice it.
“I have only begun to recognize this. In order to know what one knows, one must feel.”
We might think that understanding is just about rational thought. But rational thought travels on a road laid out for it by feeling. Daniel Siegel, MD, and professor of psychiatry at UCLA, describes phases in the process of constructing emotion. The first phase is the “initial orienting response.” It is pre-thought and can be relatively unconscious. Our bodies are jolted to pay attention and feeling is born. The second is about appraisal, attuning and connecting, using feeling to label stimuli as good or bad, pleasing or dangerous. Memories are aroused. We construct meaning and want to approach or avoid someone or something. Our experience then differentiates into full emotions like sadness, joy, fear and love.
When reading Needleman’s book, I felt a sense of mystery, and that a depth of life usually hidden was about to be revealed. I felt as if I were in that room with him, spellbound. Reading can utilize empathy and imagination to transport us to the lived experience the author sets out for us, or where he and we, or we and the words, live and give birth to meaning. Without deep attention and feeling, the meaning, the truth, never appears.
On the bookshelf in my office, near Needleman’s book, I found another that spoke directly to what was puzzling me. Did you ever do that? You feel a question inside you, and go to a bookstore or visit a friend or just look on your own shelves and find what you didn’t even know you were seeking? It was The Mystery of Being: Reflections and Mystery, Part 1, written by the Christian existentialist, Gabriel Marcel.
Marcel contrasts a “problem” with a “mystery.” When we deal with a problem, he says, we are trying to find a solution that can become “common property,” that involves technical skill and acquisition, owning.
A mystery, however, is not about an “it” separable from oneself, and cannot involve owning, as of a possession. It is where “the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning.” He describes how a scientist in his search for truth can be lifted out of himself in a literal ecstasy, ec (out) stasis (stand), so he becomes present to that truth. Presence and mystery are so tied together that “every presence is mysterious.”
Just think about how we respond to a sleeping child, who is so unprotected and, in a fashion, in our power. Because they are vulnerable, they become invulnerable, even sacred. Marcel likens this to traditions in certain cultures of hospitality, where a guest, or a sick person, is utterly protected by the host.
For Marcel, the mysterious arises when we are jolted from our habits, from “normal life”, and grasp the precariousness of the everyday, and the “bond between the precarious and the precious.”
This has so much meaning to me. Here is that feeling I have with my cats, some books and the sunshine, the trees, my wife, and anyone I love and give full attention to. How vulnerable we are. But also how strong and beautiful. When we feel the mystery, we feel the life. We take nothing for granted, and even what might be called normal becomes utterly new, ambiguous, surprising, full of feeling, present. We become both the guest and the host, the person needing care and the caregiver. That takes courage and strength.
And it is this courage and strength that we need today. We are faced not only with the coronavirus but an administration that tries to fill every space with threats, so nowhere do we feel our shared humanity and the value of empathy. So we lose touch with the strength to be open. So instead of feeling the preciousness of the precarious, we just feel the dread. We feel afraid of feeling.
To fight DT is to fight not only for our right to be heard, to vote, to see justice, but to breathe, to live as free and responsible people, and to unite feeling with words that shout out the value and truth of our interdependence with others and our world.
To feel the mystery is to feel the life.
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