Mystery
Updated: Aug 18
On the discomfort of the unknown, and the relief of not needing every answer.
We’ve all experienced those nights where we just cannot get the mind to stand down. Something is unresolved. A conversation that did not land right, a decision you cannot yet make, a result you are waiting on. You turn it over and over, looking for the angle that will finally let you put it down. But the information is not there, the answer has not arrived, and still the mind keeps reaching, because the one thing it cannot seem to do is leave an open question alone.
We have spent this whole series learning to name things. Attention, awareness, thought, sensation, emotion. Naming brings a real kind of clarity, and clarity is good. But there is a limit to it, and this week is about that limit. Not everything can be named. Not everything can be known, and the compulsion to know, to get to the bottom of every detail, is one of the quietest sources of suffering we carry.
Consider how the mind handles a genuinely open question. It treats it as a problem to be closed, as fast as possible, by any means available. If it cannot find a real answer it will manufacture one, a story that fits what little information it has, and hand you that story as though it were fact. We saw this when we looked at thought. What we did not say then is how restless the mind becomes when you will not let it close the loop. It is built to resolve, and the mind experiences things that are unresolved as a threat.
You can feel the machinery if you give it an impossible task. Try, right now, to name everything in the room around you that is not blue. The mind sets off dutifully and then realizes there is no finish line. The list never ends. Worry and anxiety can work exactly like this. "What could go wrong?" "What might they be thinking?" "What if?" These are questions with no last item, and the mind runs them not because it is close to an answer but because it cannot tolerate the openness. Risk, the future, the inner lives of other people. These are open by their nature, and no amount of turning will close them.
But we can learn to form a different relationship with the unknown, and this might be the most freeing thing in this whole series. The unknown does not have to be a problem waiting to be solved. It can be a space you are willing to live in. Sometimes we call it "The Mystery." The unknown is not an enemy. It is a vast world that we are living inside whether we admit it or not. You only have to notice that you have a choice in how you meet what you do not, and sometimes cannot, know. It can be treated as a threat to be eliminated, or as an openness you can rest in.
This is not an argument against thinking, or against finding things out. Curiosity is one of the best things about being alive, and many questions do have answers worth chasing. The skill is in telling the difference between a question that is ready to be answered and one that is not, and being able to set the second kind down without forcing it. Notice that the awareness we have been pointing to all summer has no trouble with this at all. Awareness does not need to know. It is the mind that needs to know. Awareness is perfectly content to sit in an open evening without any particular answers or explanations. When you stop giving in to the mind's demands that every loop be closed, you can settle back into that awareness, and something in the body lets go that you did not realize you were holding.
There is a relief in that release. Most of us have spent so long letting the mind drive the bus, believing we must figure everything out, and that not-knowing was a kind of failure. But we've never really tried allowing space for the unknown to exist. When you do, the questions remain open, but you are no longer at war with them. And in turn the mind starts to learn that you are okay with that space. It feels less need to fill every gap with an explanation, or a worry, or a projection about the future. And it isn't because it can no longer do that work. It is because all along it was just trying to be useful to you. Somewhere along the way you handed it the reins and agreed to let it lead you through life. The mind is helpful in some situations, but only in the context of working under your direction. When you redefine the relationship you have with the mind, when you let it understand that you are okay allowing something to remain unknown or unexplained, it reorients where it expends its energy.
Whenever I catch myself letting my attention get stuck inside my mind and all the endless digging and striving to explain or understand, I've grown fond of reminding myself and my mind of a simple phrase that puts things back into context. "The Mystery is my Mother." This has become a quiet little mantra that redefines the relationship I have with the unknown. In this light I can see that the Mystery is the vast ocean that I emerged from. It has always held me and surrounded me. The tiny little corner of my existence that is contained inside the box of "things I think I know" is barely visible in comparison to the infinite, expansive wonder that the Mystery is. The immensity of this realization seems to allow me to relax into the great unknown that refuses to conform and fit into a box or description of any size or shape.
And anyway, every time I think there is a small chunk of this infinite wonder that I can break off to describe and explain and place in my pocket as my own little take-home trinket, when I go to retrieve my treasure it reveals itself as a handful of sand. Where was all that wonder I thought I had captured? It used to feel so alive when I was attending to it and appreciating all of its facets. But like a single flower cut from the wild, it too withers and dies when we sever it from the whole.
A small practice for this week. The next time you catch the mind worrying about something it cannot resolve right now, try saying to yourself, plainly, "I don't know, and I don't have to know right now." Then let the question stay open and bring your attention back to where you actually are. Notice what happens in the body when you stop pulling on the thread. You are not giving up on the question. You are giving up the demand that it be closed this instant. Letting the unknown be unknown is a practice all its own, and for many people it is the one that brings the most peace.
This brings the inner-life work close to something larger. Soon we will look at how all of it, the naming and the not-knowing together, becomes a way of living, and how it connects to the deeper philosophy underneath everything we do here. For now it is enough to sit on the porch with the unanswered thing and find that the evening is, after all, big enough to hold it.
The Vocabulary for the Inner Life series
An ongoing series on the language of inner experience. The full arc:
2. Attention
4. Thought
5. Sensation
6. Emotion
8. Mystery (you are here)
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