The Great Mystery: 
Finding Our Place Within It

The words “the Great Mystery” offer an inclusive way to approach the human journey, with room for different beliefs, experiences, and ways of encountering the sacred. They provide Laura and I a way to speak about something that has accompanied our years of exploring consciousness together: the sense that life holds depths we can experience while still struggling to describe them. The path of the Great Mystery invites us to listen more deeply, recognize more of what surrounds us, and bring that awareness into the way we live.

This is why Laura and I have found the exploration of this mystery as one of the most meaningful purposes of our lives. The questions that first attracted us to spiritual exploration continue to guide our shared journey. What are we part of? Where does our sense of connection come from? What becomes available when we give our full attention to being alive? These questions continue to have meaning for us because our experiences keep giving us new ways to consider them.

When we use the phrase “the Great Mystery,” we are acknowledging the depth of life and the limits of what we can explain. We are also acknowledging a sense of sacredness that we encounter in our relationship with the world. There are moments when the familiar becomes extraordinary, when we feel more aware of the life around us and of our own participation in it. The mystery is present in the experience of belonging.

This draws our attention to the ways people have sought a relationship with the sacred through ceremony, movement, song, and attentive engagement with the natural world. We are interested in what these practices invite a person to do. They ask us to participate with our whole being. A gesture, a breath, or a period of silence can become an expression of our willingness to listen. Reverence takes a physical form.

That is a connection we return to through our work at the Institute. Laura and I approach the exploration of consciousness through direct experience. With Ritual Postures, we bring the body into the inquiry through ritual, a particular position along with rhythmic sound. We create a setting in which something unfamiliar can be experienced and then reflected upon. Each person brings their own history and understanding to what unfolds.

The body matters here. The rhythm of our breathing, the contact of our feet with the ground, and the sensations that arise when we become still can draw our attention into the present. Our physical presence becomes part of our capacity to receive and respond.

This is one way we understand embodied wisdom: allowing what we experience to inform how we live. An insight can be compelling in the moment. Giving it a place in our daily life takes attention. We return to it, consider it, and discover whether it helps us become more aware of ourselves and more responsive to others. Over time, experience can become a source of practical understanding.

This kind of participation offer us a way of walking the path of the Great Mystery.  We bring our curiosity and our questions. We also bring our emotions, our physical awareness, and our willingness to be affected by what we encounter. There is an openness involved in allowing an experience to unfold before deciding what it means. We find that openness essential to continuing to learn.

For us, exploration and discernment belong together. A powerful experience deserves thoughtful consideration. We want to understand what it reveals about our lives, what we each bring to its interpretation, and what remains unanswered. Research has a place in this inquiry, alongside reflection and conversation. Our willingness to ask questions gives our exploration depth and keeps it alive.

The question that interests us most is how an experience of belonging changes our behavior. If we feel more deeply connected to life, what does that ask of us? It asks us to pay attention to how we treat another person, how we care for the place where we live, and how our choices affect the lives around us. A sense of sacredness carries a responsibility to care.

This is also where a personal experience can become part of a shared life. People can understand the sacred differently and still meet in a common concern for one another. Listening carefully, respecting another person’s experience, and caring for the world we share give that concern a practical expression. Our differences remain, and we can continue learning how to live together with greater awareness.

We return to the Great Mystery with a sense of invitation. There is room here for the questions we carry and for the experiences we have yet to understand. Through our work at the Institute, Laura and I continue to make room for that exploration. We want to remain available to wonder, to allow experience to deepen our understanding, and to give that understanding a place in our actions. Finding our place within the mystery is an ongoing relationship, lived one encounter and one choice at a time.