The Psychology of Mystery

Jay: Is mystery important to our spirituality? Here are some passages that suggest it is, at least, important to the psyche:

1. An artist called John Newling went to insurers Lloyd’s of London in 2006 and asked them to underwrite him against ‘loss of mystery’ — in other words, to offer to pay out if all mystery was lost from his life. He felt life had become too controlled, constantly surveyed and audited, with every meeting minuted and every risk assessed. ‘Mystery,’ he says, ‘is a predisposition to search, enjoy, play and wonder. That becomes lost when we’re controlling it all.’

He was unconvinced that mystery could survive in our unremitting climate of CCTV and health and safety regulations. And so began his year of mystery prospecting, including a stall — The Preston Market Mystery Project — set up to collect people’s personal mysteries. ‘Losing your sense of mystery?’ he asked the public. ‘Finding everything a bit predictable?’ He asked people to entrust him with their mysteries. And they did.

‘Mystery is familiar to us all,’ says Newling. ‘Many of us have been in or observed situations when something inexplicable has occurred. The 281 mysteries I collected read like a treatise in being human and our need to have things that we cannot explain.’ They ranged from out-of-body experiences to uncanny coincidences, from lost red staplers to mothers who wake from comas to whisper ‘It’s Aspen’ — which turns out to be the crossword solution the whole family is puzzling over a week after her death.

Despite the blossoming of interest in Newling’s project, we live in an information age. We put our faith in experts and our questions into Google. We have charted the far reaches of our planet, mapped its contours and sat-nav’d its trickier intersections. Even our deepest emotions are being reduced to empirical brain chemistry — skips and blips mapped by the art of neuroscience. We still have mysteries, sure, but now they are forensic rather than fantastic, solved by the closing credits of CSI.

Physicists are working on the ‘theory of everything’, taking Einstein’s theory of relativity and combining it with the findings of quantum physics to account for, in theory, everything. Imagine– no more unmapped consciousness. No more lost socks. But what becomes of mystery when we have all the answers? What of ghost stories, coincidences and chance meetings? When everything is explained doesn’t life become somehow mundane, predictable and earth-bound?

Surely we actively need a continuing sense of mystery and wonder? Isn’t it the unknowable that keeps us interested in life, in learning, in developing ourselves? Think of magical children’s stories such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, or the magical realism of Louis de Bernières and Gabriel García Márquez. They remind us that even with all the answers we would do well to foster what philosopher Martin Heidegger called a willingness to walk in the dark – to cast ourselves into mysterious waters, the unknown where our senses become more alive and instincts alert. Not knowing requires subtler, more numinous skills – you need to use your heart and your intuition. Surely the philosopher Kierkegaard was right to maintain that life is not a problem to be ‘solved’, rather a ‘mystery to be lived’.

‘A sense of mystery is intrinsic to the human mind,’ says Les Lancaster, professor of transpersonal psychology at Liverpool John Moores University. ‘It’s intrinsic for us to seek answers. It’s our evolutionary heritage, moving us forward by motivating us to find out more and use our imagination.’ Mystery is the ultimate trail of breadcrumbs. It piques our interest, invites us to solve or make sense of something and use our imagination to fill in the gaps.

All the sociology points to the fact that we are happiest when we feel we belong to something bigger than ourselves. ‘There are two kinds of belonging,’ says Lancaster. ‘One is social inclusion — football clubs or social groups — but the other is belonging in that sense of being part of something larger than yourself.’ Mystery is this shared but unknowable terrain, reminding us that we are not the masters of our destiny, but pawns together. It dispels the arrogance that we know where we’re headed. It keeps our minds open, and our lives interesting.

‘The need for mystery,’ wrote American author Ken Kesey, ‘is greater than the need for an answer.’ We may live in a time where there is great emphasis on proof, answers and outcomes, but mystery persists as a reminder to enjoy the process — that undirected, unsettling, unknowable journey. Certainly in our controlled cultures we will be dissuaded from walking in the dark lest we bump, break or sue somebody. Do it anyway. When the lights get too bright we are programmed to seek the shadows, to nurture the unknowable and, as Kesey says, to plant gardens ‘in which strange plants grow and in which mysteries bloom’. (https://www.psychologies.co.uk/self/why-mystery-matters.html)

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2. Perhaps more than anyone, Albert Einstein reflected on mystery in the universe. For instance, Einstein noted:

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable.”

Others have written about mysteries of being human. As an example, C. S. Lewis wrote considerably about the connection between an interior kind of mystery and a sense of longing for Something More that individuals often experience. Lewis once remarked:

“Most people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we have grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.”

Psychologists of religion and spirituality also have occasionally studied personal “mystical experiences.” In his book, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” the venerable psychologist, William James, identified four major characteristics of such experiences, including: (1) ineffability (i.e., the sense that one has had an experience that cannot be adequately captured with words), (2) a noetic quality (i.e., belief that one has had an experience that is real and profound), (3) transiency (i.e., an experience lasting a relatively short amount of time), and (4) passivity (i.e., the sense that one’s personal control has been temporarily suspended while something external takes over). Many of these characteristics are exemplified in the following quotation, from James himself:

“I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite. . . I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. . . I could not have any more doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.”

In some ways, psychological science suggests that mystery is an inseparable aspect of human experience. That is, no matter how we try, and no matter our confidence, there seem to be psychological barriers to comprehending reality. For example, perceptual mistakes, cognitive biases, and memory distortions pervade our attempts to understand.

It is clear that people respond to mystery in different ways. Some of these differences may reflect a developmental process. Laird Edman, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern College in Iowa, has discussed a stage-based model of “epistemological development” consistent with this. At the lowest level in this model, individuals view knowledge as certain and absolute. Part of the motivation for this likely is that it is difficult to acknowledge uncertainty. At a middle level, people recognize that uncertainty is part of the knowing process. However, conclusions often are not reached because it seems that “all truth is relative.” At this level, part of the problem may be difficulty in committing to something when uncertainty is evident.

A different kind of response to mystery is curiosity, the desire to learn for its own sake. Indeed, in his excellent book devoted to education, “The Courage to Teach,” Parker Palmer notes how, for millennia, individuals have been drawn to contemplate and discuss the mysterious, “great things” of life (often around fires). This instinct toward curiosity is the basis for all true education and, as Einstein famously implied, may be the “cradle for all true art and true science” and “true religiousness.”

Returning to Edman’s theory, at the highest level of epistemological development, individuals recognize that uncertainty is a necessary component of knowledge. Still, based on the best evidence and reasoning possible, people at this level reach tentative conclusions. As a result, they are capable of understanding and respecting others’ views, while at the same time holding on to what they believe, even if somewhat lightly. The psychologists David Myers and Malcolm Jeeves provide an outstanding example of this kind of thinking. It provides a fitting closing for how individuals might respond effectively to many of the mysteries of everyday life:

“. . . the intellectually honest words belief, faith, and hope acknowledge uncertainty. . . One need not await 100 percent certainty before risking a thoughtful leap across the chasm of uncertainty. One can choose to marry in the hope of a happy life. One can elect a career, believing it will prove satisfying. One can fly across the ocean, having faith in the pilot and the plane. To know that we are prone to error does not negate our capacity to glimpse truth, nor does it rationalize living as a fence straddler. Sometimes, said the novelist Albert Camus, life calls us to make a 100 percent commitment to something about which we are 51 percent sure.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-pursuit-peace/201302/everyday-mystery)

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3. Our typical response to chaos is an instinctual drive to impose order and regain control. Our fear of uncertainty often impels us toward irrational and sometimes bizarre behavior. [S]uch neurotic activity does little to assuage our anxiety and may even serve to increase it. And neither should we imagine that only individuals can be affected in this way. Stalinism, Nazism, McCarthyism, and fundamentalism of all stripes are examples of the kind of irrationality of which institutions and governments are capable in the name of order.

The human need for order, given the apparent unpredictability of the natural world, is probably as old as history. This explains why universal laws have been the holy grail sought by science. The evolution of the classical scientific paradigm, beginning with Newton, reflects a 350-year progression toward this goal. Establishing the existence of universal laws has allowed us to encounter the world with enormous confidence and creativity. And although there is no doubt that this is one of the great accomplishments of Western culture, something has gone terribly awry.When we fail to distinguish between discovering order in nature and imposing order on nature, we have lost relationship with the very thing we yearn to know. Whereas once we were students of nature, looking to her for meaning, we now denigrate her in the belief that it is our inalienable right to have dominion.

But the mechanistic, linear approach that has pervaded the course of science over the past 350 years has led to the glorification of order and the subsequent objectification of reality. At the same time, the idea of mystery—a sense of the unknowable—has typically been dismissed by science as mere metaphysics or, worse, superstitious ignorance—the last refuge of a primitive mind.

Because mystery is by definition unknowable, its nature is also unpredictable and therefore beyond the aegis of technology’s control. Because its understanding serves no practical purpose in the context of the classical paradigm, there would appear to be no reason to give it attention. Be that as it may, in the final analysis, the classical scientific paradigm, in rejecting uncertainty as an essential aspect of reality, has been the unwitting agent of great injury both to our planet and our psyche. I believe that this situation is in urgent need of redress and necessarily involves “revisioning” both our scientific and psychological relationship to uncertainty.

Despite its limitations, the classical paradigm has been maintained because it supports a view of the world and ourselves in which, over time, we have become highly invested. Therefore, even though it has become increasingly cumbersome and unresponsive, our culture has been extremely reluctant to give it up. It is a familiar model. For the most part, it works, at least to the extent that it explains the world in a predictable, orderly fashion. It is also, in its basis in determinism, an essentially idealistic model that assumes that if we keep to the scientific project—ask the right questions, gather enough information, solve the problems—then finally we will run out of problems to solve.

My point is only that phenomena relating to unpredictability and uncertainty have not been ignored over the past 350 years simply because scientists are narrow-minded or lack the intellectual capacity to perceive of their existence, but because uncertainty is an anomaly inherently beyond the scope and interest of the prevailing paradigm. Furthermore, to consider uncertainty as an actual systemic state opens a Pandora’s box that seriously calls into question a model of reality that has taken hundreds of years to establish. Scientists, like manufacturers, are not eager to retool the plant just when it is starting to turn a profit. Not, that is, unless they want to generate a level of crisis and anxiety that may well threaten the entire system on which their enterprise is based.

THE QUESTION OF DETERMINISM

In the newly emerging scientific paradigm, the issues of determinism and uncertainty are considered in a radically new light. Although separated by 300 years, the theories of both Newton and Einstein are models of scientific determinism, a view of the universe that holds that “the structure of the world is such that any event can be rationally predicted . . . if we are given a sufficiently precise description of past events, together with all the laws of nature” (Popper, 1982, p. 2).

However, the new scientific paradigm, in embracing nonlinearity and indeterminism, takes a radically different view, assuming unpredictability to be an inherent cosmic expression deeply embedded within the core of reality. As Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine (1997) so succinctly put it, “Chance, or probability, is no longer a convenientway of accepting ignorance but rather part of a new, extended rationality” (p. 55). According to this view, the universe is an emergent, self-organizing system of exquisite complexity, continuously evolving within an interpenetrating web of cocreative relationships (Goerner, 1999; Laszlo, 1995).

The notion of inherent unpredictability challenges the very foundation of classical science, the linear, cause-and-effect approach to the world that most of us learned in high school. For, indeed, how can a science which asserts that “the future can be rationally deduced (based on) scientific procedures of prediction” (Popper, 1982), be rationalized with a model of the universe in which uncertainty and unpredictability are regarded not as troublesome anomalies but as the essential nature of reality? Prigogine (1997) stated that “the universe itself is highly heterogeneous and far from equilibrium. This prevents systems from reaching a state of equilibrium” (p. 158).  Prigogine suggested that as systems tend to move further from equilibrium, so they tend toward greater degrees of freedom, thus “distance from equilibrium becomes anessential parameter in describing nature” (Prigogine, 1996,p. 68).

We begin to see that unpredictability and uncertainty do indeed follow universal laws once we accept that probability is not an expression of ignorance but rather accurately reflects the weblike patterns of interconnection that we see all around us in the natural world. For uncertainty to make sense, we must relinquish the simplistic—a predictable, closed systems view of the universe—and take up the complex—a world comprised of interdependent, interpenetrating networks of relationship. This is the very essence of new paradigm thinking.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF UNCERTAINTY

Once entertained, the concept of scientific indeterminism leads down a slippery slope away from the known and knowable toward the psychological depths of mystery. Here, at the edge of chaos, the linear map ends and we enter on a new paradigm, one that embraces uncertainty, unpredictability, and the unknowable. [At]  “the edge of chaos,” you find complexity; a class of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either.

In this realm of infinite potential, nothing can be grasped or quantified once and for all. Whether despite our science or because of it, we face this “awe-full” place in trembling and anxiety, for it is one thing to conceptualize an indeterministic world but quite another to actually live in it.

Heidegger (1962), however, refuted the notion that anxiety is a pathology or even, for that matter, an emotion but rather considers it as an irreducible, existential state of being. For Heidegger, anxiety is not in response to something, such as an external threat, but exists for its own sake. It arises from the self-reflexive awareness of our own “potentiality-for-Being.” Speaking from a more strictly psychological perspective, May (1977) made much the same point in saying, “Whenever possibility is visualized by an individual, anxiety is potentially present in the same experience”

Creativity, authenticity, uncertainty, anxiety—these cannot be separated. To live a creative existence means to live with uncertainty. To live an authentic existence means to live with anxiety. But Heidegger (1962) also said that when we turn away from our authentic self and, grasping for safety and certainty, abdicate our choices to the ubiquitous “they” (Das Man), it is anxiety that draws us back from our absorption in the world (p. 189).

Our problem with anxiety is identical to our problem with uncertainty and stems from an unwavering desire to put clear, definitive boundaries on that which is, in essence, boundless.

AWE

Being in awe is not only meaningful for the individual in society but for society as a whole. As a culture, we have adopted an arrogant relationship to the world, assuming that what is beyond our dominion is of little consequence and that what cannot be known with certainty is not worth knowing. We have placed our faith in the classical scientific model and counted on it to resolve the uncertainty of our existence. But the attitude of certainty assumed by normal science, the attitude in which our culture has been so thoroughly schooled, is by no means the be-all and end-all of science. It is indeed paradoxical that the scientists of greatest genius, the Newtons and Einsteins who championed the deterministic model, were those who approached science from a position of awe.

This, however, is not the typical attitude of normal science, which, as an institution, has rejected the unknowable as irrelevant to its projects and has applied itself instead to gaining dominion over the natural world. In an effort to grasp the universal laws and know them once and for all, science has denied a level of complexity that is beyond our capacity to measure or quantify. In advocating this position, science has taught, or at least encouraged, our culture to resist the anxiety of uncertainty. In denigrating all that cannot be explained in objective, “scientific” terms, we have lost reverence, not only for our planet, but for the complex, interpenetrating web of relationships that comprise the world. By thus demeaning nature, we demean ourselves.We have paid dearly for our single-minded absorption in our own accomplishments.

Through science we have acquired far more knowledge than wisdom. (https://judithcurry.com/2012/06/10/psychology-of-uncertainty/)

Do we pay a spiritual price in trying to eliminate uncertainty?

David: It seems to me that society, religion, and even schools tend to emphasize the Newtonian deterministic universe over the mystical universe of quantum uncertainty, chaos, and complexity. Science has embraced this uncertain, probabilistic universe, but on the whole, society has not. Society in general and religion in particular still live in a clockwork universe of cause and effect, even though Heisenberg showed us almost 90 years ago that the universe runs on uncertainty. To our greatest deterministic mathematicians, such as Newton and Einstein, I suspect that their imaginations stretched far beyond the deterministic even though they lacked the physics and the math to go there themselves. We don’t have their excuse!

Jay: Is our innate preference for predictability over uncertainty on the whole good for us? Or does it damage us in some way? Or is there a balance that needs to be struck?

Donald: For many of us, mystery—the unknown—is almost intolerable. Few of us can live comfortably in an uncertain world. I read in Bill Johnson’s blog dated January 14, 2013 the nice definition of the mark of faith as being to live according to the revelation we have received in the midst of mysteries we can’t explain. Are we capable of understanding the views of others, while retaining our own? Do we try to hide mystery away in a box, and is doing so a danger to faith?

Michael: Mystery is essential to spiritual life; cause-and-effect is vital to secular life. With respect to science, I don’t think of scientists as mystics, and don’t see them accepting spiritual life as a mystery. I think they would see no mystery in the tendency of strongly held atheism to turn into a creed, a religion of its own!

David: The unwillingness of scientists to even contemplate mystery is unfortunate, I believe. I think we would progress faster if we had more people willing at least to wonder, as Einstein did, about God and the game of dice. Like most religionists, most scientists look to their sources for answers, not for questions. It is not intuitive for religionists to think of the Bible as a book of questions, and it is not intuitive for scientists—even Einstein!—to think of the universe as a place of quantum uncertainty; of probability, not certainty. Even so, there is no question that we have to assume physical certainties—we have to accept cause and effect as a pragmatic matter—in order to live physical life. If you punch a policeman in the cheek, you can be sure he is not going to turn the other one. But such certainty is neither present nor relevant in the spiritual realm.

Jay: I suspect most of us find comfort and satisfaction in a predictable world. But I doubt we would be happy in a world where there was no mystery, no serendipity, because everything was predictable? I think we want something in between the extremes. I think there may be a qualitative difference between the things we find unpredictable but acceptable, and the things we find unpredictable and therefore unacceptable. For example, we want to believe in miracles; they are unpredictable but acceptable. Think of someone who has cancer.

Donald: It seems we don’t like the idea of an unpredictable God. We want to button him down. It causes a great deal of harm, especially when we try to impose our certain views of him on others. We think of heaven as a place of ultimate certainty, but that probably just reflects our inability and unwillingness to fathom deeper than cause and effect.

David: The scientific fact (as far as we can tell right now!) is that the universe and everything in it exists not as a certainty but as a probability. You may think you definitely exist, but in fact you only probably exist. The probability that you don’t exist is vanishingly small, but the key point is that it is not zero. Personally, I find such uncertainty absolutely wondrous. I wonder (thanks to Don, who persists in raising this question) whether our religions are capable of embracing and sharing that wondrousness. This might be possible if churches were to present the Bible as a source of questions (a source of uncertainty) rather than a source of answers (a source of certainty), as Don has frequently described it.

But as Donald just said, most people don’t seem to want that. And it is arrogant to think that people would be better off spiritually if churches adopted that view. Who are we—what right has anyone—to become a stumbling block to people secure in their stage 2 faith? The best approach might be that which we ourselves have stumbled upon: To let like-minded people find one another to discuss matters of the spirit. Don’t recruit, don’t proselytize. Just be. I might wish that there were a million groups like ours meeting all over the world, and I might think it would be a better world because of it. But I don’t know.

Jay: As long as God is certain, we have a predictable path to salvation. But what if he is only probable?

Donald: Is the uncertainty a function of God himself, or of our limited understanding of him? What is the difference between mystery and imagination? We try to solve mysteries, but we accept imagined things without question.

David: I think of imagination provides a temporary stop-gap in the mysteries—the gaps—of knowledge and understanding.

Jay: Imagination is a function of mystery. If everything were known and predictable, there would be no use for imagination. Imagination helps make mystery cognitively tolerable.

David: According to the God of the Gaps theory, the gaps—the mysteries, God—diminish as scientific understanding grows. In that sense, God is a figment of our imagination. But as a subscriber to process theology and Omega Point theory, I believe that God is both a Being and a Becoming. He is a Being—he exists—in the nature all around us; he is a Becoming—a growing potential—in the gaps. It leads to the beautiful paradox that when there are no more gaps, God’s potential is fulfilled. That is Omega. He again is both a complete, unified Being, and a blank-slate Becoming. That is Alpha.

This has enormous explanatory power for me personally, spiritually.

Michael: The greatest mysteries are existential and fundamentally unsolvable. We try our best to answer them, but we can’t. Perhaps we should just accept that it is the way it is; but I don’t know how we would do that—I don’t know what would make us stop trying!

Donald: We find comfort in trying to explain death and its aftermath. But we really don’t know.

David: We all fall into the trap of thinking that we do. Even Einstein must have thought he knew, when he said that God does not play dice. My question for Einstein, and for myself in my humbler moments, is: How do you know?

Jay: Most people seem to be comfortable in not fully understanding, but in accepting nevertheless, the mystery of love. Perhaps we’ll discuss that next week.

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