Mysticism…spirituality…either way my ears perk at the thought. Now if mysticism is a ritualistic and secretive ‘handshake’ of a select few ‘special’ people…that is not what I agree with. At all.

“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of the barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us – a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.” – Rachel Carson, 1955

That “universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp” is what brings people to science. There is nothing in mysticism that can even come close to this feeling of joyous, childlike wonder.

There is a grandeur and beauty revealed by science, and it is even more profound in that it derives from the world itself, and our knowledge of it.

A scientist wrote this…

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”
― Rachel Carson

It has served me well. I find myself becoming very quiet about it all though. I used to shout it from the apex of that tree.

I never played Carnegie Hall, the best gig I could get was a piano bar.

The natural world is filled with many strange agents and activities we often call “forces”, although that is a very misleading term. You know a few, “gravity”, “electromagnetism”, and there are others as well who may be called other things, like “entropy” or “radiation”. Essentially, all of these involve matter and energy interacting in space and time. No doubt there are things like this going on we haven’t discovered yet. This is why we look for the Higgs and talk about String Theory and Dark Matter.

But these are all impersonal forces. They are properties of nature. Although we may be affected by these “forces”, they are not out to get us, or help us. They just are, and they don’t know we are here, in fact, they don’t know anything. They don’t exist for our benefit or punishment (although they often do exactly that).

Mysticism is about “forces” too, but these forces are all about us. Mysticism is always about our fate, our karma, about our life after death. I find mysticism to always be connected with us, its a me, me, me thing. As if the universe really gave a shit about us. I don’t believe the universe knows we are here at all. In fact, I don’t think it knows anything. And I don’t think we really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

I believe the only consciousness, the only intelligence, the only known self- or other-awareness in the entire universe is in our own skulls. Perhaps there are other thinking beings in the universe, and perhaps some day we will be able to make sentient machines. But for the time being, we are it. There is no god, or mystery, or providence, or karma out there looking out for us, rewarding us when we are good, and punishing us when we are not. And when we die, we die. Oblivion. Period.

Do I know this for an absolute fact? Of course not. I may be totally wrong about it all. But neither do I have even the slightest bit of a hint of any mystic forces at all. It looks to me like wishful thinking, a natural desire by humans that if all else fails, there is always one more chance to go to heaven. That seems like its too good to be true, and too easy to be right. Until I am convinced otherwise, I’m just going to say “no”.

Human beings once knew instinctively they were a part of the universe. But they viewed that universe in human-centered terms, it was filled with gods and “forces” which could be lobbied and bribed into doing favors for us, and which had to be kept happy lest they punish us. Its like everything existed for our benefit, and could be manipulated if we knew the right tricks and had the right mystic friends. The origin of all mysticism is the very human desire to get some outside help, to have a friend in the front office, to get on the good side of the neighborhood bully.

About 2500 years ago the ancient Greeks invented Nature. The Ionian philosphers, for the first time in human history, saw the world in terms of a a set of things and rules that had nothing to do with us, or the gods. We had to follow these rules, even the gods had to follow them. There was an impersonal external reality that had nothing to do with our world of dreams and thoughts, that existed independently of them. But we could learn about this world, we could understand those rules, and we could take advantage of them and protect ourselves from them. The universe could be understood, through reason and observation. It made sense.

This does not contradict the ideas I proposed in my earlier posts, that we all live in alternative universes peculiar to ourselves. There is only one external universe, one nature, the nature of atoms and gravity and physical forces. But each of us lives in a personal universe dominated by those parts of the external reality that most affect us, or that we perceive most readily. We all live in the same universe, but we perceive only a little bit of it, and we each interpret it differently. So subjectively, we live in very different realities. We do not have access to an objective reality, we have to deal with the one we have assembled in our minds with the limited tools we have available to us.

Those ancient Greek ideas eventually evolved into what we today call science. I have faith (but not certainty) that this is how the world works. It is the only faith I have.