Duncan Trussell: Live in the Mystery

My last post was about David Lynch's speech on the benefits that meditation can bring to creativity. I noticed a bit of backlash from staunch scientific materialists who refuted his "unified field theory" comment as too new-agey. This post comments on Duncan Trussell's description of what it means to live in the mystery and avoid the new-age "slippery slope". I think it seems fitting as a follow-up to the Lynch piece.

"Live in the mystery," said Roshi Joan Halifax. Don't go searching for concrete answers. Nobody's found them yet, so what makes seekers believe they will? Shunryu Suzuki, the Suzuki of lesser fame who started one of the first Zen monasteries in California, said, "If you continue this simple practice [meditation] every day you will obtain a wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special. It is just you yourself."

Duncan Trussell goes on to say, "I don't have anything to do with death anymore. I don't understand nothingness...or zero...or any of that stuff...so, uh...I don't know. I have experienced some transcendent force in the universe that just loves anything and isn't really concerned with these little blips in the universe that we call our incarnations.

"I have no proof. I'm only going on hippie instinct."

That's all that anybody has [instinct]. Of course it's not going to be the most precise thing in the world, but nobody's asking for that.

Now you're putting your head in another type of sand. Now you're putting your faith in something not provable. It's a slippery slope."

You can seesaw into another type of faith awfully quickly, a faith in the unknown. That balance between faith and understanding is a test that will last a lifetime. And maybe there's no need for faith. Like Joan Halifax said, just live in the mystery. Theories about hidden meanings are entertaining to think about, but in the end they're just simply not provable.

All of us are jewels in the net of Indra (or the net of consciousnesses). When we shine bright as souls we affect the brightness of the jewels around us, which will create an immediate shift in society...the brightness will amplify and pick up momentum across the universe, like an unstoppable wave. Whether people respond to it [in the way you imagined originally, or in a way you notice explicitly] doesn't matter a bit. It's out of our control how they respond. Maybe they respond subtly, internally, and maybe their response doesn't show itself in the material world for days, months or even years, if ever.

And so it's sometimes an ego-less act to shine our souls, for they may not be recognized as the purveyors of goodwill that we know they are.

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