For the past few days I’ve been working on a presentation to a Unitarian-Universalist fellowship on the subject of mystery. Here are two excerpts:

We are born out of nature, out of some mystery. The chances of any one of us being here is so slight as to be infinitesimal. Nonetheless we exist. That’s a mystery. Everything important is a mystery. Where we came from, where we are going, the true nature of life and the universe -— where the universe ends and what exists on the other side of that boundary — the spark that created the first life, human consciousness, human  thought and the chemical/electrical impulse that determines why one thought is different than another, the leap of imagination, the creative impulse -- all the big questions are shrouded in mystery.

. . . What I describe as the magical journey is the life I’ve chosen. It is the only life for me, but I know it is not for everyone. I know that the discomfort and lack of security that is a part of this life is not what many want from their lives. Fine. If everyone was like me the world couldn’t function. We need people to work at the post office too.

With that out of the way, let me state my basic premise. There is something mysterious going on out there, but we are not meant to know what it is. I offer the following two thoughts on the subject by thinkers from radically different paths in work and life, Rabindranath Tagore, an author in India who received the Nobel prize in 1913 for literature and Niels Bohr, a European who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922.  

First, Tagore:

The small truth has words that are clear;

     the great truth has great silence.

Now Niels Bohr:

There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.

There are two principal mysteries. The first is the huge landscape inside our being — our psyche, our soul, our imagination, our inner world, our creativity — and the second is the incomprehensibly large landscape out there in the universe.

We exist, as humans, at the intersection, the boundary, the space where those two realities encounter each other.

. . .

The presentation is scheduled for tomorrow. I hope to accompany the presentation with a slide show of my art that I’ll post on YouTube. I’ll also post the entire text of my presentation on the Heron Dance website. I’ll offer links Monday.