The Mystery Mover

I do not completely agree with the atheist position: that there is nothing out there, nothing in there, nothing in us. Matter of fact, I know this isn't the case. There is something. The mystery mover. The movement of existence and of the worlds beyond. Something is going on and we are living proof to this.

This mystery mover cannot be fully understood by anyone. Anyone who wants to say definitively that they know what it is or is not must be held to heavy scrutiny and skepticism. Even me, if I ever say such a thing.

You can't see it all. There is no way to understand the whole story.

The only way we understand anything is to make it smaller. How can you make the immensity of existence small enough to scrutinize what is in it and beyond? There is no way. What we have done is compartmentalize it. We package it so that we can look at it. We put it under a microscope. We put it in a particle accelerator. We take pieces of existence and break them down into compounds and components we can manipulate, play with, and test.

But this is not about quantum physics, necessarily. It is, and it isn't. For now.

This is about one thing: no one can see the whole story.

I vehemently disagree with the idea that some personal deity has an interest in your individual existence. But that is just my opinion.

For me, the only deity that cares about my existence is me. And I submit that the only deity that cares about your existence is you.

But this is, again, my knowledge base. Please believe what it is that you want to believe, whatever helps you to feel whole.

So why do I say deity at all? Why say God? Because we have identified this mystery movement as a mover, and we have given this mover many names. Jehovah. Brahma. Olodumare. Amun. Ahura Mazda. Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery. Unkulunkulu. Tian.

So what is the connection with us? The mover in here. What is in here? In your person, in your body, in your mind.

Do you know what moves you? Do you know what gives you the energy to stand up and sit down? Do you know what causes your blood to flow? The beating of your heart. And why is your heart beating? Electrical signals. Where do those signals come from? They run down your spinal cord. But what is that energy? What is that signal? Where is it coming from?

Does anybody know what moves them? Electrical signals, again. Neurotransmitters. But what moves that? What powers that whole system?

That same mystery mover, that same question about the cause, is not only in the existence around you: the universe, the galaxies, the planets, and beyond the universe. It is in you. It's the same mystery.

To claim identity with that mover may seem a stretch. I don't think it is. Because it is in you. Literally, not metaphysically.

You can recognize that there is something unknown in you, and that you are connected to this unknown. That recognition is a level of consciousness we have been gifted.

I use the word gifted as if someone has given us this gift, because that is what makes sense. There is a gift here. Whether there is a personal deity or not, we still possess this consciousness.

We have our ideas about consciousness though. Maybe it is a reality that we have a soul. Maybe it is a product of the algorithms of the brain-computer, an illusion created by the machine: a ghost in the shell, if you will. Either way, the question remains.

The mystery is still present, in us and in this universe.

From the days of the past until the present day, the things that move in our environment have been given names. They have been deified.

The wind. The stars. The sun. The rain. The storms. The ocean, and what lives in the ocean. Disease. The crops. What moves the crops up from the ground toward the sun? The trees. The plants.

And the one I identify with most: Èṣù, closely associated with Elegguá in the Cuban Lucumí tradition.

I do not mean that Èṣù is a personal deity watching over my individual life. I identify with what Èṣù means. One of his names, Elegbara, means the owner of power. And his power is bound to accountability. That meaning sits at the center of this process: the choice, the turn, the consequence, and the power that comes from owning all three.

Èṣù stands in a class of his own. Many count him among the Orishas. Others hold him apart: the one through whom communication with the Orishas must pass.

Èṣù is the crossroads. He is the trickster, yes. But he is also the one who is about accountability. He sees whether the offering is made, and he enforces the consequences of our choices. He directs the communication from the human to the divine. He carries the message. He is the guide from here to there.

I wear his colors today: the black and the red.

The point is this: we have named these unknown movers, these connections and connectors. Even in our communication and conversation, we have deified them. Every one of these transitions, propositions, and circumstances has been given an identity. We gave them human qualities: personality, desires, what they want and what they don't want. We gave them dialogue and conversation.

Deifying the mystery is what we do. Deifying the unknown, giving it a name and personifying it, is what we do.

But naming the mystery out there does not change the fact that this mystery also exists in us. So what have we named the mystery in here?

From Sum Wah's perspective, it is the Light. And we will say more about that later.

Now we bring the mystery mover from the universe back to the person.

Sit in meditation, in the quiet space. You can witness thoughts, ideas, memories, and fantasies move across the mental screen. You can see these things happening.

But who is watching?

What entity observes the thoughts in what we call our mind? It is not part of the thought. It is a witness. An observer.

In the hodgepodge of Eastern and Western spirituality, the term Watchers comes into play. So where does it come from? What does the Watcher signify?

In the Hebrew scriptures, in the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a watcher, a holy one, coming down from heaven. The Aramaic word is ir: the wakeful one. The one who does not sleep.

In the Book of Enoch, the Watchers are heavenly beings. Some of them came down. They took human wives. They taught us metalwork, the movement of the stars, and sorcery. In that story, the Watchers who crossed the boundary between heaven and earth became the fallen ones.

In certain Western mystery traditions and Wiccan practices, the Watchers stand at the four quarters: east, south, west, and north. They are called the Guardians of the Watchtowers, and they are called upon to guard and witness the sacred circle.

In the East, the language is different, but the experience of witnessing offers a connection. The Upanishads speak of two birds sitting on the same tree. One eats the fruit. The other simply watches. In Advaita Vedanta, this is reflected in the sakshi: the witness, the awareness that observes everything and is touched by none of it. Buddhist meditation cultivates the capacity to observe what arises without becoming entangled in it, while understanding that even our sense of self is subject to change.

So a watcher is one who is separate from the world but observes the interactions and engagements of people within it. In these Western accounts, we encounter the Watcher out there, in the heavens. In these Eastern contemplative traditions, we encounter the experience of witnessing in here. In our awareness.

The Watcher is a deified entity. An otherworldly mystery mover of this existence. And it is the one sitting in your meditation, watching your thoughts go by.

This is an elemental conversation. The air. The wind. The fire. Elementals moving on their own. We gave them names. We gave them personalities.

But what moves the elements? What moves the air, the fire, the stars, the sun? What moves the galaxies? What pulls, pushes, or turns this star we ride through the ethers, this intergalactic space-traveling machine we are part of?

Thirty years ago, I submitted that the circle is the mystery mover.

There is an orbit. Our sun circles the center of the Milky Way. In every galaxy, stars move around a center. And our galaxy flows with a hundred thousand others through Laniakea, the immense heaven, like water toward a valley astronomers call the Great Attractor.

And the universe itself? It has no center we can find. Space is expanding everywhere at once, driven by a force we have named dark energy and do not understand.

Is that the mystery mover? Then what is moving that? We keep extending outward, mystery beyond mystery.

Then let us come home.

We go all the way out there, into the ethers, into the universe. But then we must come back home. Home to the wind, the rain, the sea. Home to the crops.

And then to something even closer to home: fertility. The bringing of new life into the world.

The one thing we may be able to influence in this great cosmic play is the creation of life, at least our version of it: the children. We are the vessels, the carriers, the portal, if you will, from the mystery into this reality.

And the woman is directly that portal. That gateway.

We know how the mechanism works. But we still do not understand the how. How does it even happen? Where does the life in that body come from?

The male and the female, whether human beings or fish, cows or eagles, these two components come together. And in that moment, that spark, that call to wherever in the mystery for a life, where all things come from and flow from, a new life is pulled into this existence through this portal.

And there it is. Life, again.

The man and the woman are the keepers, if you will, of human life.

I have been given the title Keeper of the Light of Sum Wah. But what does that mean? What does a keeper of the light do? And who is the keeper of life?

I submit that we are the keepers of life in this realm. But a keeper does not control existence. A keeper cannot turn it on or off.

A lightkeeper exists to serve. To illuminate the wayfarer's path home, for those who are away from port, and to guide safely home is their only purpose in life.

Each human being carries the Light of Sum Wah. We are all keepers of that light. This message is for you. As much as I keep the light for all, you keep that light for yourself.

It just so happens that we are conscious of the mystery moving through us, or we can be. The deer, the chipmunk, the bird, even the dolphin, as far as we know, are not conscious of their relationship to the mystery. But we can be.

This component within the human being is the deity, what we call the Light. This is why I say the only deity that cares about your existence is you.

Alan Watts said something like this decades ago. I'm paraphrasing: What if you were God? Eons of existing, playing in this world, making creation. No beginning, no end. You've done everything. So what if you decided to dream, to play a game where you forgot you were God? To be born into your creation and experience it, because that is the one experience you have never had?

I submit that this is what we are experiencing here.

That is the deity. That is the deified nature of the creature, at least in this realm.

That is the Light.