On the mystical imagination.

“Yes, there is always the danger of ‘mystical nonsense’, but there is, I believe, an even greater danger in being ‘mystically tone-deaf.’ The older I get, the more I become sure of only one thing: we understand a lot less than we think, and the mystics like John of the Cross got it right when they said ‘Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding’!”’

I often think about what we don’t know that we don’t know in terms of a colony of ants. I’ve watched fascinated as these insects go about their work and lives, often building complex structures that rival the Egyptian pyramids in architecture and orientation. That colony is their universe. And yet we humans know that there is another universe beyond theirs, the universe that we comprehend. It seems to me disingenuous to flatly deny that there could be a universe beyond the one we know, another universe that comprehends us as we do the little universe of ants, a universe that we, in our turn, can’t hope to comprehend. Being human however, unlike the ants, perhaps we might at least admit the possibility of worlds beyond our knowledge.

From ‘The Ethical Imagination’ by Margaret Somerville.

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