Unlocking the Doors of Mystery
„Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived,” said Osho. His words resonated with my heart and feelings but I had no idea intellectually how true they were until I moved to the forest. A friend of mine, who spends long months in the wilderness of Colorado, once told me to observe nature. Everything that we will ever figure out, he said, is already there in nature. There is great truth in that: nature is a blueprint for life, a great teacher for those who dare to look and connect the dots.
There are the mushrooms, for example. First, I just looked at them as some kind of plant you can - with a bit of mad courage - forage in the wild. Most people think that way. Fewer would be aware that the thing we see and pick is only the fruit-body: the actual being is an underground, complex web of threads which connects with the environment covering an incredibly large area. We might think of a blue whale as the biggest living thing, but the biggest organism we currently know of is an Armillaria ostoyae mushroom in the forests of Oregon, which has the size of 20.000 (!) basketball courts. But it gets „curioser and curioser.” Mushroom threads form mycorrhizae: symbiotic relationships with plants, often trees, where they exchange water and minerals for sugar. These subterranean webs also enable the exchange of information: if one tree in the forest is attacked by a certain pathogen or parasite, it sends the message to other trees who then put up their defenses accordingly. Trees can even let each other know if they lack some nutrients, and other trees, who have a surplus can help them out through the mycorrhizae.
Photo courtesy of Imi King © 2017.
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These days, when I look out from the garden and see the hill on the other side in the distance, I notice that an entire patch of forest has been cut out for timber. Foresters around here claim to work in a sustainable way and promise to regrow but isn’t this still an act of painful ignorance? The cut-out patch looks like a wound, and indeed it is. There, the entire amazing natural web of exchange and information is severed. Walking around there feels sad: it all reminds me of the „Nothing” which spreads like a terminal disease of imagination in Michael Ende’s Neverending Story.
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So, I cannot help but think that the web of exchange is not only severed in nature, but also in our very own lives. Some while ago I was doing research about the San (Bushmen) of South Africa. It turned out that among this native people, when members of the tribe went away for a hunt, the rest of the group knew when they were returning. They described this as an "invisible wire," like a body-telegraph: when the beloved once were coming closer, certain points - which we may also know as chakras - "fired" in the body.
Where is our connection today? I believe today we are still connected to each other in invisible ways, and most importantly, we are connected to the higher realms. It is the noise and clutter of modern living which severs the connection, like a barren strip in the forest. But we have something deep inside is, which is waiting for a come-back: the soft, almost inaudible voice of divine Intuition. It can grow louder and stronger as soon as we provide a safe place for it. Listening to the inner voice is an ongoing practice which can be enhanced by going into nature and just be. There is a tremendously beneficial effect of switching our phones, internet and televisions off regularly (as well as our inner chatter).
Something is calling us in the Silence. Something greater and wiser than anything in the human realm. There is a whole other world out there, waiting for us to discover it. Every time we dare to listen to our own intuition and do what we genuinely want to do, that world awakens and starts to grow like the underground threads of mushrooms. Life will be never the same again.
Life is not a problem to be solved, life is a mystery to be lived and a miraculous opportunity to create. It is up to us to grow it.
Something is calling us in the Silence. Something greater and wiser than anything in the human realm. There is a whole other world out there, waiting for us to discover it. Every time we dare to listen to our own intuition and do what we genuinely want to do, that world awakens and starts to grow like the underground threads of mushrooms. Life will be never the same again.
Life is not a problem to be solved, life is a mystery to be lived and a miraculous opportunity to create. It is up to us to grow it.
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“Practice listening to your intuition, your inner voice; ask questions; be curious; see what you see; hear what you hear; and then act upon what you know to be true. These intuitive powers were given to your soul at birth.” |