Wendell Berry
The Fundamental Ultimate Mystery
“Really, the fundamental ultimate mystery - the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets, is this: that for outside there is an inside, and for inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together. There is in other words a secret conspiracy, between ALL insides and ALL outsides, and the conspiracy is this: to look as different as possible, and yet underneath, to be identical. Because you don’t find one without the other. Like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee agreed to have a battle. So there is a secret. What is esoteric, what is profound and what is deep, is what we will call the ‘implicit.’ What is obvious and on the open is what we will call the ‘explicit.’ And I, and my environment, you, and your environment, are explicitly as different, as different could be. But implicitly, you go together. And this is discovered by the scientist when he tries, as the whole art of science is to describe what happens exactly, and when he describes exactly what you do, he finds out that you, your behavior, is not something that can be separated from the behavior of the world around you. He realizes then, that you are something that the whole world is doing. Just as when the sea has waves on it - well alright, the sea, the ocean, is waving. So each one of us is a ‘waving’ of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is! And with each one of us it is waving and saying,’YOOHOO! Here I am!’ Only it does it differently each time, because variety is the spice of life.” ~Alan Watts
