Developing a ‘lens’ for seeing mundane life ‘mystically’

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed looking at life through a ‘lens’ of secular mysticism.

This week we will move on to seeing how the skills of ‘listening’ and ‘seeing’ can play out in human life

The Skills of Listening and Seeing

Teilhard suggests a simple and secular approach to developing such a skill.   To him, understanding the resonance between what is there and what we understand about what is there requires such a skill.  His ‘lens’ of such understanding was simply the context of evolution.  He starts with the assertion than to understand anything begins with the insight into where it comes from.  As he puts it, addressing the phenomena of the ‘cell’

“…the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (ie incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future”

   Applying it to our exploration of ‘the footprint’, a good start to understanding something is to see it in the context of ‘past to future’.

Take the humble ‘spreadsheet’ for example.  A spreadsheet is nothing more than a two-dimensional list with one set of categories listed in ‘rows’ and another set listed in ‘columns’.  In a spreadsheet about ‘exercise’, for example, the rows could list ‘days of the week’, and the column ‘miles walked’.  The ‘metadata’ extracted from such a spreadsheet could include ‘trends’, and the trends would become more highly articulated as the spreadsheet grows over time.
More metadata would emerge if a new column, ‘weight’, was added, and a new perspective on one’s health would slowly take place.  As a result, any decisions about changes to the exercise plan would be better grounded.  This exercise of extraction of insight from observation is one small example of the ‘peering into the space between what is there from what we think is there’.

One of the more powerful tools that can be used to analyze ‘data’ to form ‘insights’, are plots.  Reformatting the rows and columns of spreadsheets into plots, with ‘rows’ on one axis and ‘columns’ on the other, offers a more comprehensive insight into the data, showing such things as peaks, valleys, frequencies, and trends in a more intuitive way.  It is not that the basic data is meaningless, but that the organization of the data, first into rows and columns, then into plots, allows us to grasp the underlying data more meaningfully.  With these two new modes of presentation, we engage the data at different levels, affording deeper insights.  With the plots, for example, we ‘see’ things like peaks and valleys as visual constructs, not just data to be integrated in our minds.  This approach becomes more powerful as the data becomes more complex.  In our example, correlations between weight and exercise durations can be more clearly seen, and optimum durations can be explored.
But is this mysticism?  How can such activity possibly be in the same category as, say, that of St. Rosalie, engulfed in ecstatic swoon as depicted in Anthony van Dyck’s painting?  How can relatively mundane data analysis lead to the profound emotional experiences of a St. Rosalie or a St. Therese of Avila?

A partial answer lies in the combination of depth and width that we discussed above.

We saw in our examples of evolution in human life how the use of such ‘mundane’ techniques can be employed in addressing one of the most significant phenomena of the human species: human evolution.  In this example, we saw how Johan Norberg amasses a stunning ‘pile of facts’ into a format that allows such a ‘burst of intuition’ which clearly shows not only that we are evolving but how it can be objectively seen that we are doing it.

As far as comparing what was seen by Norberg to the ecstatic visions of Rosalie and Therese, imagine their reaction had either been able to see a future in which the miseries of the poor everywhere would have been so significantly alleviated, or the pains of the hungry abated, or the risks of childbearing so wonderfully minimized.  If their souls could have been so ecstatically moved by experiences of the nearness of the divine, such tangible evidence of work of the divine in human life would have added an even deeper dimension.
And could not an argument be advanced that, even if Norberg’s insights were truly mystical, they did not reflect the intimacy with God that is common to all mystics.  If we look at Norberg’s phenomenal results in his light of human progress, how could it be denied that whether or not we are aware of it, we are, as Teilhard puts it, “carried by a current to the open sea”.   Teilhard takes this insight one step further when he asserts that this current can be seen as the two ‘hands of God’.

“- the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   Thus, whether or not we recognize it as such, we are being made even as we make ourselves.  The true miracle is not that it is happening, but that we are so unready to acknowledge it.  Perhaps an ecstatic state of eyes upward isn’t called for, but ‘eyes fully opened’ to the miracle that is gifted to us by the process of universal evolution certainly seems appropriate.

Next Week

This week we began to carry our look into mysticism into how it can be seen in the natural current of human life.

Next week we see how such natural manifestations of mysticism can be seen in the same context as that experienced by the great Western mystics in history.