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  • Cory Edmund Endrulat

What Do You See?



Look into the stars, what do you see? You should see stars, but you also may see mystery. Well how is that? It sounds like more of an abstraction than that of looking at the clouds and assuming of them a message. Do you not see what surrounds the stars? What allows you to see the stars? And what makes it so that we call them stars? Perhaps now you see the mystery. However, the mere fact that you don't know what you truly see despite how you think you know what you see, certainly involves a lot of mystery in an individual. At least, the curious and open minds. And why not give as much credit to the stars as we do the surrounding darkness that allows us to see them? Without one, we don't have the other. Indeed, mystery is something we must have to see the bigger picture. For if it weren't for mystery, we would have no need in discovery or innovation. It would also be quite hard to be poetic or to read poetry, to say the least.


Mystery comes with our freedom and it comes with our child like nature. Furthermore, it actually helps us connect more with the world we do know. It is accepting an unknown, in order to know. Think of yourself, you don't know everything about yourself. But as you explore the unknown or the shadow that you have, you actually gain more of an understanding of yourself. You acknowledge what you don't know, even to some extent of keeping it at the position of unknowable, and therefore come to accept a mystery in life. A willing ignorance of reality, that to a great extent, is bliss. For instance, if we knew everything about everybody, there'd be less to connect with others or learn. There'd be no meaningful adventure in going somewhere new, of discovering a new product, person or place, and so on. Mystery is the quality of yin, but it is this entire universe, the basis from which all science and religion must work upon. Yet, we may even want to be ignorant of this ignorance, and how far into our darkness do we go without shedding any light? It is in recognizing the unknown that makes it known, or recognizing our ignorance that helps us seek knowledge, and these concepts would not exist without one another.


So what is behind it all? If you can look at a sky and many stars, and see how everything relies on one another in a polarity, with polarities within, like the Mandelbrot set, what is beyond polarity? These questions are not meant to have answers, perhaps because it is mystery which ever keeps us finding more. And without which, we'd have no purpose. Those who think they've figured it all out not only limit themselves, they rid of the child within them, and assume yang over yin. It must be known that there is always more to life, more than these words, than the governments, ideologies and religions, yet people wish to stick themselves there, when all these have developed out of something much much more, and also from time, for which new experiences are always being made. If Jesus or Buddha or any other spiritual figure, or their representative spirit, was so on this earth, it was a period of time, which proves the fact it won't be the last. Our knowledge, our innovations, continue with our mystery. And this should be upheld if we wish to keep going. But squandering this mystery by sticking ourselves in a box, will get us stuck until we have no choice but to catch up to speed, and as Ancient Chinese freedom-philosopher Laozi has told us, the flexible and soft and yielding are the disciples of life. Thus, in a world of mass media and consumerism, with less mystery, we may ask ourselves if we still have our uncarved block, if we still know what is reality. And this question will become ever more relevant the further we lose touch with our own mystery and senses which perceives it. Stay curious, otherwise you'll never listen, and thus, you'll never know.


Note from writer:

One night, I once did a deeply emotionally-invested role-play in World of Warcraft with a friend of mine. This friend has one character, I had two. Of these three characters, they were laying on the ground and observing the clouds in the sky. These figurative clouds were role-played into existence, though we may observe some clouds in-game. One of the characters observed a cross as she was a spiritual individual, another observed ocean waves as she was a water-based Mage, another observed a rabbit. The following day in-real-life, I walk outside and look at the sky, I notice these exact depictions all coinciding within one another. Synchronicity? Attraction? You can see it depicted for this article, I would also use it as the album for some of my electronic music.

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