embraced.................

 

The spark of inspiration about how to live a full life depends on the fact that it doesn't go on forever, so we must make the most of it.  And the mystery of faith is that divinity cannot be proven or disproven—as though it were a complicated problem—but must be embraced as a complex, mysterious proposition about the human condition, a supernatural love that transcends earthly evidence, the digital preservation of the soul, or even the ability to explain.

-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life

wise things in small, mysterious ways......

 

     Elias Schwartz repairs shoes.  He's short and round and bald and single and middle-aged and Jewish.  "An old-fashioned cobbler," says he, nothing more, nothing less.  I happen to be convinced that he is really the 145th reincarnation of the Haiho Lama.

     See, the Haiho Lama died in 1937, and the monks of the Sa-skya monastery have been searching for forty years for his reincarnation without success.  The New York Times carried the story last summer.  The article noted that the Lama would be recognized by the fact that he went around saying and doing wise things in small, mysterious ways, and that he would be doing the will of God without understanding why.

     Through some unimaginable error in the cosmic switching yards, the Haiho Lama has been reincarnated as Elias Schwartz.  I have no doubts about it.

     My first clue came when I took my old Bass loafers in for total renewal.  The works.  Elias Schwartz examined them with intense care.  With regret in his voice he pronounced them not worthy of repair.  I accepted the unwelcome judgment.  Then he took my shoes, disappeared into the back of the shop, and I waited and wondered.  He returned with my shoes in a stapled brown bag.  For carrying, I thought.

     When I opened the bag at home that evening, I found two gifts and a note.  In each shoe, a chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in waxed paper.  And these words in the note: "Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well.  Think about it.  Elias Schwartz."

     The Haiho Lama strikes again.

     And the monks will have to go on looking.  Because I'll never tell—we need all the Lamas here we can get.

-Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten

a name of mystery..........

 

Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, and with a rather wordy exposition of evolution. . . . There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and even about the idea.

     As a matter of fact, it is not, touching these primary things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea.  Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something.  Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else.  It is really far more logical to start by saying "In the beginning God created heaven and earth" even if you only mean "In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process."
For [the name of] God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he could create one.

-G. K. Chesterton, from here

It's a mystery........................

 

One out of 25.  No thoughts of improving that number.

an equation.........................

 

Einstein wrote an equation that says that R is equivalent to the energy of matter.  That is to say: space curves where there is matter.  That is it.  The equation fits into half a line, and there is nothing more.  A vision—that space curves—became an equation.

     But within this equation there is a teeming universe.  And here the magical richness of the theory opens up into a phantasmagorical succession of predictions that resemble the delirious ravings of a madman but all have turned out to be true.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

no idea.....................

 

. . . What am I to make of this?  Where did it come from to the weary human who'd rather parse the mysteries of oatmeal topped with strawberries, but then any kid knows that during the long night the imagination thumbs its nose at civilization as the lid of a jar screwed on too tight that has no idea what its true contents are.

-Jim Harrison, Old Times

Opening paragraphs...............

 

Brunetti found that counting silently to four and then again and again allowed him to block out most other thoughts.  It did not obscure his sight, but it was a day rich with the grace and favour of springtime, so as long as he kept his eyes raised about the heads of the people around him, he could study the tops of the cypress trees, even the cloud-dappled sky, and what he saw he liked.  Off in the distance, if only he turned his head a little, he could see the inside of the brick wall and know that beyond it was the tower of San Marco.  The counting was a sort of mental contraction, akin to the way he tightened his shoulders in cold weather in the hope that, by decreasing the area exposed to the cold, he would suffer it less.  Thus, here, exposing less of his mind to what was going on around him might diminish the pain.

-Donna Leon, The Girl of His Dreams: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

take the measure.........................

 

     The fatal flaw in deism is thus not rational at all, but emotional.  Pure reason is unappealing because it is bloodless.  Ceremonies stripped of sacred mystery lose their emotional force, because celebrants need to defer to a higher power in order to consummate their instinct for tribal loyalty.  In times of danger and tragedy especially, unreasoning ceremony is everything.  There is no substitute for surrender to an infallible and benevolent being, the commitment called salvation.  And no substitute for formal recognition of an immortal life force, the leap of faith called transcendence.  It follows that most people would very much like science to prove the existence of God but not to take the measure of His capacity.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

The wonder and mystery of it all.......

 

description and enlargeable photo here

awash..............................

 We live in a world awash with information and we’re not enamoured with imprecision, less still a clear and certain plan to live out the best of our days (whatever the consequences) and, in the process, we’ve annihilated mystery only to be replaced with (Ye Gads) Artificial Intelligence; or another way to say that is we’d rather let something else do our thinking!

-Julian Summerhayes

Pause.........................

 Detachment is the cost of our wondrous, liberating mobility, the price we pay for living untethered.  Connection to place is replaced by inhabitation of space, bringing to near-culmination what Rosalind Williams describes as "humanity's decision to unbind itself from the soil."  The tempo of travel blurs the landscape, and our vehicles increasingly enfold us in a bubble of remove. "The sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures, and smells of the city and countryside are reduced to a two-dimensional view through the car windscreen, something prefigured by the railway journeys of the nineteenth century," notes John Urry, echoing Nietzche.  The portable soundscape of the Walkman-turned-iPod puts much of life at arm's length, creating a "fragile world of certainty within a contingent world," writes Michael Bull in Sounding Out the City.  We are distancing ourselves from knowledge of our own bodily selves and our earth, as Bill McKibben observes.  We live in an era when "vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach," he writes.  "An unenlightenment."  Pause is increasingly absent in a temporal sense, too.  A culture of constant movement, in part fueled by a love of instant gratification, cannot bear the mystery and unpredictability inherent in the idea of pause.  "For the sake of speed, in the interest of not wasting time, we sacrifice the sensuous richness of the not-yet," writes Noelle Oxenhandler in her essay "The Lost While."  We live in a culture of "becoming" but never arriving.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Oops.................

 Failing to learn from others’ mistakes is one of life’s greatest mysteries. Despite having nearly unlimited access to examples of others making all kinds of mistakes, people repeatedly fail to learn from past generations.

-Ted Lamade, from here

Whence comes Santa Claus............

The shrouds of time are pretty good at hiding things. This fun post seeks reasonable explanations:

The traditional culture of those early Finns, known as the Sámi, was shamanistic. They believed that the Amanita muscaria that brought the reindeer its sustenance also brought wisdom to humans. At the time of the celebration of the Winter Solstice, the Sámi’s shamans would consume the drug and then visit prominent Sámi households to pass along the insights that they achieved through their hallucinogenic trips. In honor of the mushroom, they would dress in its likeness, in a red and white costume. The Sámi lived in yurts, which, at that time of the year, were often snowed in. So, the shamans would often pop in through the hole in the roof that served as the yurt’s chimney, bearing the gifts of their psychedelically inspired wisdom.

Fifty years ago...............

At the movies....Sleuth with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier

 

The mystery.................................

 Knowledge destroys wonder, destroys the capacity to feel awe. It makes you capable of explaining away everything. It takes away all poetry from life. It takes away all meaning from life. The knowledgeable person is never surprised by anything because he can explain everything. But no explanation is true for they don’t explain anything at all. The mystery remains. The mystery is infinite.

The knowledgeable person becomes so burdened by his knowledge that he loses the mirror-like quality of reflecting the beauty, the benediction, the dance, the ecstasy of existence. Knowledge is not going to help as far as life is concerned. The knowledgeable person is almost a dead person; he lives in his grave.

-Osho

On true art.............

 

Claude Monet    oil on canvass   Haystacks     1890

The deepest mystery of all, I think, is the one to which biblical faith points, which is the idea that we are made not only of matter that comes from the earth and stars, but we are made in the image of God.  Whatever that means.  I don't know what it means altogether, but I think it means that we bear his mark upon us.  Deep within us.  The face of Christ is within us, his thumbprint is upon us.  The world adds all sorts of things to that holy self that God made, but it still is there, and though we lose track of it in a million ways, I think it remains, if we are lucky at all, as a source of goodness, of flashes of insight, good dreams, good prayers that somehow pray themselves, of healing.

     I think that this is the place from which all true art comes, and by true art I mean art that doesn't just entertain—perfectly alright to do that—but true art that nourishes the spirit, that illuminates the mind, that deepens understanding, that deepens our humanity.  I think that what true art, and true religion, does at its best is to put each one of us in touch with that holy part of ourselves, with that source from which art and love comes, and from which all good, wise things come, so that we—by virtue of this painting, this poem, this ballet, this piece of music, this Scripture—become finally, truly, human at last.

-Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary

surprise and mystery....................

 So much beauty has grown from what at times seemed like impossibly stony ground.

-Trish Harrison Warren via David Kanigan

We love our elaborate stories.....................

 A warehouse of experimental evidence now attests to our cognitive shortcomings: our willingness to jump the inferential gun, to be too quick to draw strong conclusions from ambiguous evidence, and to be too slow to change our minds as disconfirming observations trickle in. A balanced apportionment of blame should acknowledge that learning is hard because even seasoned professionals are ill-equipped to cope with the complexity, ambiguity, and dissonance inherent in assessing causation in history. Life throws up a lot of puzzling events that thoughtful observers feel impelled to explain because the policy stakes are so high. However, just because we want an explanation does not mean that one is within reach. To achieve explanatory closure in history, observers must fill in the missing counterfactual comparison scenarios with elaborate stories grounded in their deepest assumptions about how the world works.

-Philip Tetlock

the mystery.......................

I have observed the power of the watermelon seed.  It has the power to draw from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight.
When you can tell me how it takes this material from the ground and out of its colors an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times its weight —when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.

-attributed to William Jennings Bryan

About the mind.........................

      Just as it is the nature of fire to burn, it is the nature of the mind to think and wander all the time.  The mind is comprised  of thoughts and doubts.  It constantly casts up dreams and fantasies, creating its own world and then destroying it.  It builds thought castles in the sky and then gets entangled in its own creation.  In this way, it creates its own suffering and undergoes the consequences.  Some modern psychologists believe that the mind can be satisfied if you let it run free, if you let it have whatever it wants.  But this is not the case.  The mind can never be satisfied in this way;  it will always create a mountain of desires.

-Swami Muktananda,  Mystery of the Mind