Mystical

The following are quotes from Alan Watts book, "This is IT".

Writing about "...the spiritual or mystical experience and its relation to ordinary material life", Watts pointed out that "Having said this, I am instantly aware that I have used the wrong words; and yet there are no satisfactory alternatives. Spiritual and mystical suggest something rarified, otherworldly, and loftily religious, opposed to an ordinary material life which is simply practical and commonplace. The whole point of these essays is to show the fallacy of this opposition, to show that the spiritual is not to be separated from the material, nor the wonderful from the ordinary......

".....I am neither a preacher nor a reformer, for I like to write and talk about this way of seeing things as one sings in the bathtub or splashes in the sea. There is no mission, nor intent to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter. We should see at once that the high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substitutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us - not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelmingly uncanny fact of mere existence."
Alan Watts , "This is IT" 1958.

When I was at school, I expected science to explain the fundamental questions of life and matter. I wanted to know "What IS this stuff?".

Science taught me that a speck of dust is made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons, which are made up of more fundamental particles still, and so on. All fascinating, almost unbelievable stuff, and a credit to science, but none of which really answered the questions.

I then expected the more advanced science taught at university to explain them. Again science failed to even address the questions, and it's now apparent that it cannot answer them, and does not claim that it can.

Since science has done much to debunk religion, and since many people regard science as a kind of replacement for it, it might behove science to advertise more widely the fact that it cannot answer the fundamental questions, to put a kind of health warning on the packet.

Since religion cannot answer these questions either, it appears that all we are left with is a mystery.......But what a mystery!

People go running around looking for the supernatural, trying to develop magical powers, trying to see the spirit world or trying to stay onside with God. Or they try to control their world through science or technology, or frantic achievement. And all around them, all the time, right in front of our noses, the most normal, boring, everyday things, even specks of dust, are natural and supernatural, real and magical, matter and spirit.

Or, more accurately, they're none of these descriptions. They're something mostly unknowable by the rational side of the mind, but more intelligible to the heart or soul or emotions or the feeling side of the mind, or whatever you want to label it. The main thing is to begin to realise more strongly something that we've always dimly felt - that we live in, are completely immersed in, and are ourselves, a sea of eternal miraculous wonder, and to move that realisation closer to the center of our lives.

See also Meditation