Mystery

Mystery might be the only real certainty. We cannot fully trust ourselves. How many times have we felt completely confident of such and such only to later discover we were self-deceived? We are often most ignorant of what is closest to us, Nietzsche noticed. There is so much we do not know. And there is so much we will never know before time swallows us whole. What lies ahead for us is largely unknown. Where we come from is also unknown. Origins and destinies are dark. And for every thing once dark brought to light, there remain countless other entities still shrouded beyond our gaze. Is it hubris to think that we might one day acquire a scientific theory of everything or spiritually to attain enlightenment? The fact that we cannot really answer these questions only serves to further underscore the mystery of the moment and the certainty of our uncertainty. To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make, Freud observed, and being completely honest means acknowledging our basic ignorance: the mystery that permeates. If we feel this mystery to be unsettling, we may be tempted to conjure a belief, proffer an answer to the enigma, or at least ask what we can do about it. But authentic mystery must remain mysterious, Derrida rightly said, and we should approach it only by letting it be what it is in truth, namely, veiled, withdrawn, dissimulated. That our very lives are riddled in mystique can be so much more than only unsettling: an occasion of awe and wonder, beauty and reverence, fear and trembling. Strangeness surrounds, and so creates an opening for humbly beholding from afar what lurks underneath consciousness, over the edge of space, and at the frontiers of our fragile framings and terribly tentative assumptions about the known and unknown.