A Mystery
How, Where and Why to seek Truth. 📍Kathmandu, Nepal 🇳🇵
A worldview is like a blanket. It feels cozy to lie under, but ultimately it weighs on us. Under its cover, we find what is true. We’ve forgotten how and where to seek Truth.
The “how” is stuck in the mechanisms of science and religion. Theories and beliefs are considered facts, not as inquiries into the mystery of life. Any true inquiry is extinguished by the authorities of the institutions behind science and religion. Control is accumulated out of the lack of wisdom and the gathering of consensus under which the suppressor can lead.
The desire of authorities is to amass a following that doesn’t question or inquire for themselves, because if people discovered their own answers, they would no longer need an authority to lead them. Their control would be lost.
The “how” comes alive again when we begin to take life as a question and an inquiry in which we remain open and unattached to our discoveries. The “how” is a journey into the mystery of life, not discovering answers but more even more questions. It keeps the excitement alive that we feel as children, while allowing us to mature into deeper thought, cleaner emotions, and a body that holds experiences and, therefore, the source of wisdom.
The body, interestingly, is denied in most practices of science and religion.
In science, we take the body apart into small pieces. We look at it not as a whole but in parts, the same way we look at Earth in parts rather than as a whole, interrelated ecosystem. We view it as an ego-system instead, where it’s all about “me.” Part of the “how” of truth-seeking is to look at the whole and the relationships that exist within that whole. That means to look at our body as a whole, to acknowledge and give it its right place as a carrier of experience and therefore a source of wisdom, and also to view Earth as a whole as a carrier of experience and therefore wisdom. This acknowledgment is key to our seeking of Truth, as we begin to learn not from authorities, but by our own experience.
In religion, the body is denied its rightful place through doctrine, belief systems, and so-called moral duty. Our physical needs are suppressed and made wrong, even evil. Unheard, the body enters into darkness. Our needs are met in hiding, and our desires become twisted.
Celibacy is presented not as a personal choice, but as an inevitable path for the spiritually committed, which ends in suppressing our ability to create life and pushing sex into the dark.
The authorities of religious institutions also suppress Earth by putting their doctrine first. The word of God is presented as more important than the sounds and movements of nature, which is where our ideas of Gods came from in the first place. Books are described as “holy” and nature as a byproduct, rather than the main thing. We don’t recognize our nature as sacred. Beautiful, sacred forests are cut down to build churches, temples, and mosques. Their sacredness is literally locked into houses owned by religious institutions, which are not genuinely interested in the sacred but in moral righteousness and power.
So then, “where” do we seek Truth? An attempt to answer this question has already been made in my writing so far. We seek Truth in our experience, connecting that experience with understanding and insight into what happens as part of experience: how we work, how humanity works, and how planet Earth works. All is in relationship. We remain open in our view rather than fixed in a single worldview, allowing us to see what’s truly there and discover the treasures of our experiences, our bodies, and our relationship with Earth.
It’s not about going back to indigenous traditions, but indigenous traditions have a role to play in inspiring us to experience relationship again, with ourselves, one another, and Earth. We shall not continue to deny the role of indigenous people. We shouldn’t apply their answers, but their way of seeking Truth.
Truth is not an answer, but a lived, direct experience in which every moment is alive, not static and solved.
We talk about wanting to “solve the mystery,” which is the colonizer’s mindset (even the world implies a fixed view: mindSET). We want to “solve” nature, “solve” the wilderness, but the Truth is, mystery exists for a purpose. It keeps us in awe and wonder, respecting the miracle we call life. When we think we solved the mystery, we lose all sense of purpose and meaning, and our life becomes mechanical: a means to an end.
We do not need to “solve” the mystery, but to enter it completely. And so, although I’ve never related to the term “mystic” and would never have described myself that way, maybe that is exactly what I am—a mystic, a mystery.