Looking Around For Miracles; Being Enchanted?

To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

Abraham Maslow Cited in Mystical Hours

Wayne Teasdale gives us some background and connections to this observation in these words:

“Abraham Maslow, was a great psychologist of human potential, here he echoes Albert Einstein who said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

The recognition that “everything is miraculous” is the knowledge of the mystic. It takes considerable awareness to bring home the point to ourselves, and yet everything declares it to us if we could only realize it. Maslow’s wisdom tells us that if people are searching for the miraculous outside of themselves,they are in a state of ignorance. To be more conscious of the miraculous, we need to cultivate our awareness in each moment.”

Without wading too deeply into the whole phenomena of religious miracles which, for me, appears to be a paralogical expression of the collective unconscious; (or something that appears to manifest from beyond the Mythos, or from outside the usual and accustomed human planes of thought and action) I would concisely agree with both Maslow and Einstein. (Two cultural giants of thought… and me agreeing from my own meager philosophical and spiritual wanderings)

The central point, as I comprehend it, is that we live in and through enchantment: the magical, mystical, and the Mythological all occur within our hearts and minds and they comprise the elusive quality of awareness that recognizes and affirms this transcendent and interpenetrating reality.

We live or exist in a world or a land that is unlimited, gracious, and never ending or constantly brimming with possibilities and dimensions of existence we can only get fleeting glimpses of in our mind’s eye.

Because we hold these miracles and truths within our consciousness, and can sincerely seek and find them there, there is little need for the externals of religion, or any speculative exercises.

While it is assuredly the province and potentials of the mystic to more readily claim and describe that the miraculous remains within the mysterious, Maslow’s warning to us is not to see ourselves as limited; detached, or somehow separate and alien from nature and one another is to dwell in a hellish sense of separation.

To see the allness of life as being miraculous is, for me, a fervent hope and a sustaining blessing! It can be far too facile and convenient to miss that supernal fact, in favor of some more egotistical expression that elevated the personal above the spiritual and the miraculous. I prefer to see and to experience the sensation that I have awakened each morning to the miraculous that is in charge of my life, and as fully operational in all human life.