Embracing Mystery

Books, films and prompts to inspire your mindful writing journey

Hi, welcome to the revamped version of my book and film recommendations that can help us live a more mindful life. There are going to be two of these posts each month and I’ll also include writing prompts associated to what I share.

One of the books that has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on my life and way of being in the world, is the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. So I thought that one of these posts each month would be a good place to bring back my explorations of this book and how we can use its wisdom in our writing, and lives, today. I had to close down the other Substack dedicated to this last year due to a very challenging time in my personal life. So I am bringing it back here and starting from the beginning again. And rather than just focusing on using it to tell fictional stories, I will also explore how we can use it for our life writing too.

I hope you enjoy it. I’d love to hear from you with your comments and ideas. This month’s translation is from the Stephen Mitchell translation.

Chapter One

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Embracing the mystery and letting go of desire

One of the biggest things that daily reading of the Tao Te Ching has taught me is to embrace mystery. Before I developed this regular reading practice, I desperately wanted to find answers to my many questions, and thought I already knew the definitive truth about many things. But once I took my first steps along the spiritual path, these certainties, and the desire to know things for definite, fell away.

I was bought up in the Church of England and attended Sunday School until I was around eight years old. Then I refused to go anymore. There was no mystery. Everything had been decided and the stories they told us of where we came from were the one truth. But I just couldn’t believe in this concept of a human-like God figure who had created the entire universe single-handedly and was now sitting in heaven watching and judging us all to decide if one day we might be able to join him there, or be cast into hell instead. I then stumbled my way into a tenuous belief in the “Big Bang” through science lessons in school, but deep in my heart I never really believed this either. I had too many questions about where the singularity came from and what came before the bang to create it.*

Many years later, when I was in my early forties, I discovered the Tao Te Ching and something in me shifted. I started to let go of this need to know answers. I started to notice that humans’ propensity to name groups of people, things and events, to label eras and eons, put everything into categories, and believe we had found the true answers, no matter if someone had a different view, was a big part of the problems we have created for ourselves. I finally realised that all these names we had for different things are just ones we had made up. They didn’t have to be considered the definitive truth or reality.

The is the part of the this chapter that really resonates with me every time I read it, and I believe that this naming is at the heart of the myth of separateness that has been created between humans, animals, plants, the planet and the cosmos. The separation that drives wars between nations, ideologies, genders, and sees humans treat each other, the earthlings we share this planet with, and the earth itself, with such disregard. The disconnection that divides poets and prose writers, literary and genre fiction, black and white people, old and young folk. Without all these different names we’ve made up, I believe, we could begin to remember that we are all one.

What does this chapter say to you about our world today? Do let me know in the comments below.

For me, this part of the chapter is the one that has enabled me to embrace the mystery and let go of the desire to know, to name. Through meditation, qigong, and my writing practice, and the many ancient wisdoms I’ve learned from, I have come to believe that the unnameable element is what everything springs from. Everything we see, touch, feel and experience is being created by that, through us and everything around us, ongoing. The characters that come to me asking for their stories to be written, the themes that appear in the stories I write from prompts and find the meaning in later stem from it. The unnameable is the me that exists when all of the labels – woman, writer, friend, teacher, wife — are stripped away. It’s the you who is left when the names you define yourself by are gone. We are still there without those definitions naming us.

But, that said, it’s the tension created by not embracing the mystery that drives the stories we tell. Our characters are defined by the names they have for themselves and others, for the things they do and places they go. They are driven by questions, by beliefs that no longer serve them, by compulsions stemming from desires. By a lack of balance in their lives and minds. When we look around at our societies today we can see the same behaviours playing out everywhere, so our stories and characters are reflections of the world we live in. I truly believe that if we start to change the stories we tell about ourselves, so that we bring more peace, love and unity to our characters, more acceptance from them of the mysteries that surround us, the world we live in will alter to reflect these qualities too. We create our own reality and that of the characters in the stories we write too.

Story Reading

Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang

This short story is the first one in the collection, Stories of Your Life and Others. Ebook available here. It’s a fantastic short story collection and I recommend reading the entire thing. Alternatively, you can access this story online for free here.

Synopsis

Together with a crew of other miners and cart-pullers, Hillalum is recruited to climb the Tower of Babylon and unearth what lies beyond the vault of heaven. During his journey, Hillalum discovers entire civilizations of tower-dwellers on the tower—there are those who live inside the mists of clouds, those who raise their vegetables above the sun, and those who have spent their lives under the oppressive weight of an endless, white stratum at the top of the universe.

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Story Analysis

I chose this story as, for me, the themes, and the physical and psychological journey Hillalum goes on, tie into the part of the chapter about naming.

Heaven has been named and despite the years and years of building and striving to reach it, when they finally break through Hillalum ends up back on earth where he started this journey. Caught in the desire to reach the place that has been named heaven, he only sees the manifestation of earth.

The cosmological ideas of the day for Babylonians held that the cosmos revolved around circularly, with the heavens and the earth being equal and joined as a whole. This idea is definitely present in how Hillalum’s story plays out, and, to me how it ends seems to be saying that heaven is here on earth if we could only find our way to recognising that.

What do you think of this story and how it ties into the chapter and ideas we’ve been looking at? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

As well as how the story ties into the chapter of the Tao Te Ching, its wider themes seems to be questioning the way our capitalist society has developed. When Hillalum arrives at the tower, he learns that the loss of a brick is considered more significant than the loss of a human life as it slows progress and growth of the tower. We only need to listen to the narrative of the day that growth must be maintained at all costs to see the parallels here.

In the collection The Tower of Babylon appears in, Ted Chiang provides author notes for all of the stories and of this one he says:

“The characters may be religious, but they rely on engineering rather than prayer. No deity makes an appearance in the story; everything that happens can be understood in purely mechanistic terms. It’s in that sense that — despite the obvious difference in cosmology — the universe resembles our own.”

Deities are largely absent from our consumer societies today and according to research carried out by Ronald Inglehart, Professor at the University of Michigan, religious belief worldwide is waning.

From about 2007to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied—43 out of 49—became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world. Growing numbers of people no longer find religion a necessary source of support and meaning in their lives.

Just like in the story, our societies are investing more and more belief in mechanistic and technological solutions to find the answers to the questions they seek. When we look around at the discord in our societies today, we can see that material goods and profit margins seem to hold more value for many people, than human life does. The naming of what constitutes “success” seems to me to be, in part, to blame for this. As does the “us” and “them” naming we have all been conditioned to unconsciously do.

What are your thoughts on this? I am very interested to hear them.

Craft Development

There is a chapter in Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg (one of my all-time favourite craft books that I read over and over again), called ‘One Plus One Equals a Mercedes-Benz’ which I believe can help us play with this in our stories to break through the division that naming creates.

In it she says:

“Turn off your logical brain that says 1 + 1 = 2. Open up your mind to the possibility that 1 + 1 can equal 48, a Mercedes-Benz, and apple pie, a blue horse. Don’t tell your autobiography with facts such as, ‘I am in sixth grade. I am a boy. I live in Owatonna. I have a mother and father.’ Tell me who you really are. ‘I am the frost on the window, the cry of a young wolf, the thin blade of grass.

Forget yourself. Disappear into everything you look at—a street, a glass of water, a cornfield. Everything you feel, become totally that feeling, burn all of yourself with it.”

I think this is powerful advice for us to heed when we write stories, novels, poems, essays and whatever else we turn our writerly hands and minds to. Forget the names that have been assigned to everything and immerse ourselves in the mystery, the unnameable, and the darkness, that can lead us towards the gateway of understanding.

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Writing Prompts

Use a character in a story you are already working on and write an autobiography for them using the advice above. Don’t tell us the facts about them, tell us what burns inside of them. Write in their first person voice even if you don’t use that point of view in the story. What does it reveal about them?

Now do the same exercise for your own autobiography. What does it reveal about you?!

New Work Prompt

Start drafting a story where someone lets go of a name - it can be the name they go by, a label that someone else has given them, or that they’ve given to someone or something. However you want to play with it. This can be a fictional character, someone in a memoir, or you.

Things to think about when drafting the story?

• What can the protagonist discover through letting go of this name?

• What closer connection can it bring to their lives?

• What mystery can be let in when the name is let go?

• What can they embrace once it is gone?

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That’s all for this month’s exploration of the Tao Te Ching. I really hope you have enjoyed it and I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas about it all and read the work from the exercises and prompt, if you feel comfortable sharing them.

I’ll be back with Chapter 2 next month.

Write well, embrace the mystery, enjoy this amazing gift of life!

With love,

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*I’ve since watched a fascinating series with Gregg Braden, called Missing Links, which showed me many new theories about how and why we’re here. None of which are definitely proven but they have gone a long way in helping me understand my questioning of the stories told to me by religion and mainstream science.