Mysteries

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about mysteries. But thinking is perhaps not the right word, because the mysteries I’m referring to are so far beyond comprehension that they don’t provide the handholds that thinking requires.

I find it interesting that the deepest of them also happens to be the simplest to pose: Why does anything exist at all?

If you truly contemplate this question it can pay a strange dividend. You realize that magic really exists. Or at least a natural order so strange and beautiful that it might as well be magic.

The fact that anything exists points at an infinity in the heart of nature. 

It makes a mockery of our conventional notion of time. Here I’ll use the word “Everything” to mean “all that is”, rather than the words “universe” or “multiverse” which have their own specific technical meanings. Everything can’t have truly had a beginning. At least not in the conventional sense as a distinct moment in time where things began. To suppose that would require us to explain what caused this beginning. This of course leads to an infinite regress. Our own universe seems to have had a beginning, but our universe must be part of a larger process.

Somehow Everything must be woven as an infinite tapestry with no beginning and no end. Whatever Everything is, it somehow must be. In other words, it necessitates it’s own existence, like a physical instantiation of a mathematical theorem. This means that each of us somehow must be. I find this to be a tremendously comforting idea.