The Wetness Question
I asked myself once: is the fish wet? This question, like a zen koan, is as slippery as a wet fish. It feels clever until it collapses, because wet is not a “thing” but more like a “relationship”, something born of the boundaries between two situations.
A fish in the water has never been dry. It has no word for wet because it has nothing to compare wet to. Pull it out of the water. Now it is wet. Put it back. The wetness disappears, not because it went anywhere, but because the water it swims in offers no contrast to measure wetness against.
An old fish asks a young fish “How’s the water today?” the question remains unanswered but the young fish, puzzled, wonders internally “The old guy lost it, what is water anyway?”
A scientist will treat matter as fact, a ground we all can share or argue against. Mystics will treat consciousness the same way, yet it cannot be a shared experience the way matter and facts are, because consciousness is mostly a subjective experience.
From a scientific “external” stand point, mysticism does not make any sense. The fish has no interest in the question at all, water is not a “thing” it is the space within which all experiences happen.
From a mystical “internal” stand point, science falls short and misses the point entirely. It can name the water, measure it, prove the fish wet the instant it's pulled out. But it cannot swim.
This simple yet complex shift has been the source of much complexity in my work. And because it is such a common blindspot with so many implications, I tried to shed some light on it.
The easier assumption is the one we least examine.
Someone with a scientific mindset cannot allow mysticism to exist because it destroys the foundation of scientific belief. Someone with a mystical mindset cannot allow science to exist because it destabilizes the foundation of mystical belief. Stepping outside the mindset is what is required but that is what the mindset prevents.
Materialism is like water. Most people who swim in it do not know they are wet.
Shore and Water
There is an old saying. Science can walk you to the shore. But it cannot tell you what it feels like to be in the water. For that you have to get in, and in that moment you move from external objective to internal subjective.
Science can study consciousness. Mysticism only can experience it.
I am both a scientist and a mystic. Decades spent in each mindset. Two different instruments. Two different kinds of knowing. I was trained for years in the first one before I ever touched the second. Decades in the noise of the world filing reports to establish facts. Then decades in silence with no reports left to file.
Writing about the water from the shore is the oldest problem I know. After ceremonies, whether my own or other’s, I sit down and try to put words around something that happened beyond language, beyond concepts even. Describe a shore that language was never meant to reach, describe a boat by the wake it left behind.
This is not a flaw in the writing. A word is a shore instrument. It points, yet it never gets wet. Hence mystic trying to file reports use poetry, myth, evocations. The base is ineffable. Beyond mind.
The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao.
I will not stop writing but I will not pretend the writing is the water. The map gets me to the shoreline. It stays dry. It cannot make my clothes wet. Only wading in does.
The mystical man in the water shouts to the one on the shore “Come, the water is amazing”. The scientific man on the shore responds “Can you prove it?”
The Permeability Test
I have seen this in myself. As a scientist, what was beyond the mind could not reach me. I was impermeable. Then I had a big experience the mind could not contain or explain. I turned mystic. And for sometime science could not reach me anymore.
It took a while for the scientist and the mystic to cohabitate.
I saw all over where scientists who cannot conceive the earth is alive; locked in their mindset. I tried to bring some mysticism in. Until I saw a lot of mystics would could not handle the reality check of science either.
And so I started working at the permeability between these two neighbors. And I am asking: whether I am on the shore or in the water, am I still reachable?
A scientist certain that consciousness is nothing but neurons firing, closed to any data that says otherwise, has stopped doing science. A mystic certain that his vision has shown him the final truth, immune to any question, uninterested in whether his insight can be checked against anything outside himself, has stopped doing practice. Different words. Same blindspot.
Neither the content nor the intensity of the belief tells us anything except about the believer. People with real mystical depth tend to hold it lightly, curious about being wrong, willing to be corrected, knowing they mostly don’t know. People running from something tend to wield their certainty like a wall.
A believer certain the universe is only ever benevolent, arranging itself around his wishes. A nationalist certain his God has chosen his people over others. A parent refusing vaccines against decades of data. A man denying a warming planet because the conclusion is inconvenient to his life. A flat-earth believer certain the horizon is a conspiracy, no photograph or physics able to reach him. A creationist certain the world is six thousand years old, all of geology and genetics dismissed.
All these beliefs use the same shelter. Each one uses conviction as a wall built to keep a threatening fact out. There are no more doors left to let anything truer in.
I have watched this test applied to four kinds of people over the years. Many times I was that person. The mystic who welcomes the question vs. the one who treats the question as an attack. The scientist who says I don’t know vs. the one who cannot say it without losing authority. The guru who can be challenged by his own students vs. the one who cannot. The activist certain enough of the cause to stop listening vs. the one still asking questions about it.
I once thought the dividing line was between science and spirituality. The real fault line runs through both. It runs through me too and I check myself against it more than I would like to admit.
Can you still be reached.
That is the whole test.
Everything else is protection.
Guilty
Politeness has now reached the shore and honesty means getting wet.
Any belief system, whether new-age or authentic spiritual lineage, that keeps us untouchable under the pretense of knowing is dangerous. It borrows the attribute of superiority, including the attribute of higher consciousness at times, and uses it as an armor to keep the speaker beyond question. It pretends to be depth when it is in fact surface shield.
No one can argue with someone who has transcended argument.
I can plead guilty of having done that more than I dare to share.
Rigid materialism does the identical thing with different tricks. Data instead of vibration, peer review instead of transmission, but the function is the same: place the speaker beyond question. You cannot argue with someone who has already settled what is real. That also looks like depth. It also functions as armor.
I can plead guilty of having done that more than I dare to share.
Since it is my default to look to the story behind the story, I did some digging, and what I found is that stories, armor, shield are always for protection. To protect someone who does not feel safe enough to venture in the world of argument because somewhere down the line it was not safe to do that.
An identity of knowing forged by the necessity of survival.
I can plead guilty of having done that more than I dare to share.
Yet after years of such strategies, I have also learned where the strategies lead. They lead to isolation, they lead to loneliness. And with loneliness comes insecurity. The very thing the strategy was meant to prevent.
The easiest way through is not more argument, but helping the other feel safe.
So whatever the vocabulary, the mechanism is the same. Every version uses a language ‘beyond’ the ordinary mind to protect the ordinary mind’s conclusions from ever being touched.
Any practice, of either kind, science or contemplation, should leave a person more reachable, not less. More willing to say “I do not know”. More curious about the challenge instead of being threatened by it. When a discipline starts producing the opposite, certainty that cannot be checked, insight that cannot be questioned, it has stopped being the discipline it claims to be. It has become the excuse the mind produces to protect itself from exactly the kind of transparency it once promised.
The fish does not know it is wet. But someone using the water to keep out scientific rigor, or using rigor to keep out the water, is not a fish.
Sheltered
Let’s get practical.
What I see a lot today in the world is Scientific materialism. A point of view that assumes matter is fundamental, dead, inert; and consciousness is a late byproduct.
Yet my mystical stand point, which would be Panpsychist/animist mysticism, tells me matter is never fully dead; awareness, in some degree, runs through it.
And there is a conflict between the two.
From my mystical point of view, it is obvious that all the problems we are experiencing are grounded in the short coming of the scientific materialism mindset. Without any life-consciousness within, everything can be exploited, extracted for human benefits without morality getting in the way.
This is the same kind of debate that was wondering if black Africans had a soul. Without a soul they could be enslaved. No second thought needed. Consciousness denied is permission granted.
So I initially thought, well, we can make the mystical experience more available and people will see for themselves. But that was without counting on the excess of that very viewpoint. Giving someone a mystical experience does not automatically give them the discipline to stay permeable. It only hands them a new certainty to hide behind, not a cure for hiding. Nationalism, bigotry, conspiracy theories, influencers without credentials, state propaganda, commercials are all using the same blind spot of belief.
Certainty is a shelter people reach out for when the world does not feel safe enough for question, or maybe even when the world does not feel safe at all.
Whether the shelter is built from scriptures, science, nationalism or mystical experiences does not matter. No one talks their way out of a shelter. We only leave the shelter when it is safe enough to do so.
For years I was hiding safely behind science. For years I also hid behind mysticism. I recently started feeling safe enough to stop hiding. Some days you’ll find me in the water. Some other days standing on the shore watching the horizon.
I still don’t know if the fish is wet.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
Well said, friend. The actual roadblock is certainty. And I am reminded that the Greek word for faith, pistis, actually means trust. And when one is certain, there's no need for faith or trust. Trusting that there's something more than what we already know is the heart of true story. Well, just my 2 cents.