Mar 31, 2023
The Mystery of Everyday Existence
Biodynamics remembers that existence is a mystery and a gift. While we can always seek to understand such mysteries, there will always be further veils to peel back. Veils upon veils, or, externally, appearances upon appearances. We can never find the "essence" of something merely from the outside. Even as we remove one veil, there is always another behind the veil removed, as long as we live in this world. As the surrealist painter Rene Magritte wrote, “Mystery is not one of the possibilities of reality. Mystery is what is absolutely necessary in order for reality to exist.”
There is no limit to what is knowable, in theory, but there is always more to know that remains unknown. If this were not so, no new experience would be surprising or even interesting. Imbued with meaning and an order so complex that often it looks like chaos, the world takes on a luminous quality as a messenger of the heavens.
The philosopher Wittgenstein suggests a similar notion, namely, "Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is the mystical. It is not how things are in the world that is the mystical, but that it exists."
In a disenchanted world, the imagination is viewed with radical skepticism. But skepticism is unoriginal in our day and age and is a false substitute for knowledge. The fairy realm has not really gone away. Just consider our fiction today or our TV shows! As Owen Barfield notes, no sooner do we cease believing in fairies does the god Pan "move indoors" in the form of psychoanalysis. The poor imagination has been reduced to a function of mere fanciful delusion, but in its healthy form, consider how if you wish to build a barn you must first imagine it (or at least find plans from someone who imagined it for you).
Biodynamics may not be remedies that you or I might have imagined ourselves, but like blueprints, they work regardless of who decides to use them. The proof is in the pudding. Give it a try and you'll see, and not just that, your way of seeing itself may become regenerated.
There is no limit to what is knowable, in theory, but there is always more to know that remains unknown. If this were not so, no new experience would be surprising or even interesting. Imbued with meaning and an order so complex that often it looks like chaos, the world takes on a luminous quality as a messenger of the heavens.
The philosopher Wittgenstein suggests a similar notion, namely, "Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is the mystical. It is not how things are in the world that is the mystical, but that it exists."
In a disenchanted world, the imagination is viewed with radical skepticism. But skepticism is unoriginal in our day and age and is a false substitute for knowledge. The fairy realm has not really gone away. Just consider our fiction today or our TV shows! As Owen Barfield notes, no sooner do we cease believing in fairies does the god Pan "move indoors" in the form of psychoanalysis. The poor imagination has been reduced to a function of mere fanciful delusion, but in its healthy form, consider how if you wish to build a barn you must first imagine it (or at least find plans from someone who imagined it for you).
Biodynamics may not be remedies that you or I might have imagined ourselves, but like blueprints, they work regardless of who decides to use them. The proof is in the pudding. Give it a try and you'll see, and not just that, your way of seeing itself may become regenerated.
