The Mystery of Life
Everyday we see the same old things, do the same old things, think the same old things, feel the same old things. Everything can become so familiar to us that life can easily become mundane and boring if we don’t constantly find something new and interesting to absorb us. Eventually, having been everywhere, seen everything and done everything, we can lose our zest for life and become jaded.
Soon after being born we begin to learn the name of things. It doesn’t mean we know what they are, it just means we can communicate what we’re referring to. In time things become familiar to us and we want to know about them and so from about the age of three we constantly ask questions about the world around us. And so we end up where we are now - having a name for everything and knowing lots about things. However, being familiar with something, naming it and knowing about it isn’t the same as knowing what it is.
The sense of mystery that causes a child to ask endless questions is still there if we look for it, because we never got any real answers to our questions. In fact it’s likely that the answers only threw up more questions and eventually we gave up asking. Anyone who has faced the onslaught of a curious child’s questions knows how frustrating that can be. Well why is that? It’s because we don’t actually know the answers to any of the ultimate questions of life. We know lots of things about the world but ultimately we don’t know what anything is. That ignorance as to the ultimate nature of things is what a child touches upon with all its questions and if we don’t realise that ultimately life is a mystery then we can get frustrated.
So what is the feeling that we know what something is? Well I’d suggest it’s simply that we’re familiar with it and possibly know a lot about it, but that isn’t the same as knowing what it is. We imagine we know what our body is but I’d suggest that it’s just very familiar to us. Likewise our mind, we imagine we know what our mind is, but if we were to examine it we might find that not only is it likely that we restrict ourselves to a small part of our mind, but that even the part we’re familiar with is not something we know. Exactly what is a thought? Think about that! What kind of thoughts do deaf , dumb and blind people have and what do they dream of?
Everytime we imagine we know what something is we’re basing that assumed knowledge on familiarity and if we were to investigate thoroughly anything that we assume to know, we’d find that all there was behind that assumed knowledge was familiarity. To feel the mystery behind the familiarity requires us to inspect our assumptions very profoundly. On the surface it’s ridiculous to propose that we don’t know what anything is, and superficially we appear to know what lots of things are, however all that knowledge is only about things and not what they actually are.
Consciousness has the ability to understand itself but it never knows what it is - it simply is what it is - whatever it is - it’s simply self evident to itself in the same way as the fact that you exist is self evident to you. Who you are and what you are you’ll never know with any absolute, factual certainty, but the fact that “you are” can never be questioned. So in any moment relax the mental position of knowing and exchange it for the disposition of consciousness and blissful ignorance. Then simply be - where the need to know is no longer an issue or a motivating force. Know again the happiness that is ignorance and enjoy the newness and mystery of each moment.