Mystery

This Sunday Sam guided the discussion on Mystery, centering our discussion on aspects of the path that defy easy categorization.

Sam began with some quotes, reproduced below, and followed with a recorded talk.

“Nothing is more fruitful – all mathematicians know it – than those obscure analogies, those disturbing reflections of one theory in another; those furtive caresses, those inexplicable discords; nothing also gives more pleasure to the researcher. The day comes when the illusion dissolves; the yoked theories reveal their common source before disappearing. As the Gita teaches, one achieves knowledge and indifference at the same time.” – Andre Weil

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” – Albert Einstein

“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” –Thoreau

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”
— Richard Feynman

Here is a link to the talk that we listened to, given by Brian Lesage: http://dharmaseed.org/teacher/484/talk/31722/