There Are Things That Remain After the Explanation
To those who have ever stood before something they could feel but could not name,
There comes a strange moment in the life of a thinking person when knowledge, instead of closing the doors of uncertainty, opens them wider.
We spend much of our lives learning names. As children, we point toward the world and are rewarded with words. Tree. Moon. Mother. Rain. Death. Later, the names become more sophisticated. Gravity. Trauma. Consciousness. Hormones. Probability. Religion. Evolution. We learn to divide existence into categories until the wilderness around us begins to resemble a map.
There is great power in this. A fever that once terrified a village may now be understood by medicine. Lightning no longer needs to be explained as the anger of heaven. The movement of planets can be calculated centuries in advance.
And yet there remains an uncomfortable fact. The map becomes larger, but the mystery does not necessarily become smaller.
In an interview in 2023, the French thinker Edgar Morin expressed this with remarkable simplicity:
“I believe in mystery without being able to name it,
without being able to say what it is,
but I feel that it is present everywhere.”
There is something beautiful in the restraint of those words. Morin does not rush toward a theological conclusion. He does not give the mystery a face, a church, a doctrine, or a scientific formula. He does something far more difficult.
He allows it to remain mysterious. For a civilization that has become extraordinarily talented at naming things, this can feel almost unbearable.
We have been taught that an unanswered question is unfinished business. When something happens, we immediately ask why. When someone leaves us, we search for the reason. When a door unexpectedly opens, we want to know whether it was chance, destiny, psychology, divine intervention, or merely good timing. When we experience something uncanny, we hurry to give it a name before the experience itself has even finished speaking.
Perhaps this is one reason spiritual traditions have survived every age of explanation. They do not necessarily survive because they provide answers. Sometimes they survive because they preserve questions that human beings should never stop asking.
When a Name Becomes a Cage
Names are useful, but names can also deceive us. Once something has been named, we easily begin to believe that it has been understood.
We say “love,” although no two loves have ever been exactly alike. We say “death,” although none of us can describe from experience what lies beyond the last breath. We say “consciousness,” while the fact that matter has become capable of looking at the stars and wondering why it exists remains one of the strangest realities imaginable.
We say “God.”
We say “Olódùmarè.”
We say “spirit.”
We say “energy.”
We say “nature.”
Sometimes these words illuminate. Sometimes they merely place a beautiful label over an abyss.
There is a humility hidden inside Morin’s sentence that deserves attention. He does not say that because the mystery cannot be named, therefore it does not exist. Neither does he claim that because he feels it, he possesses knowledge of what it is.
He remains between those two shores. Perhaps genuine spiritual perception often begins there. Not in certainty. Not in disbelief. But in attention.
There are mornings when sunlight enters a room in such a particular way that, for reasons impossible to defend before a tribunal of logic, life suddenly feels larger than the room containing it. There are moments beside the ocean when the body understands something that the intellect cannot translate. There are dreams whose images disappear after waking while their emotional truth remains for years. There are encounters that alter the direction of a life although, viewed from the outside, almost nothing happened.
We can explain many elements of these experiences. Yet explanation and meaning are not always the same thing.
Knowing how rain forms does not make rain less miraculous to the farmer who has waited months for it.
Knowing how the nervous system responds to touch does not exhaust what happens when the hand touching yours belongs to the person you love.
Knowing the chemistry of a leaf does not tell us why humanity has spent thousands of years listening to forests.
There are forms of knowledge that illuminate the world. There are forms of mystery that prevent us from becoming arrogant about that illumination. We need both.
Àṣẹ and a World That Is Not Empty
Yoruba spiritual thought offers a particularly fertile way of approaching this question because it does not begin with the assumption that the visible world is spiritually empty.
The world is alive with relationship. Human beings live among ancestors, Òrìṣà, destiny, nature, community, visible events and invisible consequences. Àṣẹ moves through speech, plants, water, bodies, prayer, ritual, character and action. It is not necessary to reduce all these dimensions into one abstract concept before entering into relationship with them.
A river can be water and more than water. A leaf can be medicine and more than medicine. Iron can be metal and more than metal. A human head can be anatomy and also the seat through which Orí, destiny and consciousness are approached.
The spiritual imagination does not need to destroy the material world in order to discover sacredness within it. This matters because one of the great mistakes of modern spirituality is to place mystery somewhere far away.
We search beyond the stars while ignoring the impossible complexity of our own bodies. We wait for supernatural events while passing trees that transform sunlight into life. We ask heaven to send signs while speaking every day with people whose paths have crossed ours through chains of circumstance so intricate that no human mind could reconstruct them completely.
Perhaps Morin’s mystery feels present everywhere because mystery is not a separate layer added to existence. Perhaps existence itself is mysterious.
The question then changes. Instead of asking whether mystery exists, we might ask whether we have retained the capacity to perceive it without immediately trying to own it.
And that capacity requires something our age does not reward very generously. Silence. Patience. Humility before what has not yet revealed its name.
May we never become so certain that the world can no longer surprise us. May our knowledge sharpen our vision without hardening our hearts, and may our Orí know the difference between seeking understanding and demanding control.
May what needs to reveal itself find us attentive. May what must remain hidden for a while find us patient. May we walk through this extraordinary and unfinished world without reducing every sacred depth to a word.
Stay blessed, and may your Orí remain open to the wisdom that approaches quietly.
Àṣẹ pẹ̀lú ìmọ̀, àṣẹ pẹ̀lú ìrẹ̀lẹ̀.
May there be àṣẹ with knowledge, and àṣẹ with humility.
With blessings from the road between what we know and what we have yet to understand,
Babá Tilo de Àjàgùnnà
DAILY IFÁ
For Supporting Readers: We Go Beneath the Surface
In the second part, we descend from the universal idea of mystery into one of its most powerful Òrìṣà images: Olókun, keeper of the unfathomable depths. We will explore why not knowing is different from ignorance, why spiritual maturity sometimes means accepting not yet as an answer, how to distinguish genuine sensitivity from the dangerous habit of interpreting everything as a supernatural sign, how Iré and Òsógbó can appear in our relationship with uncertainty, and why divination should help us walk through mystery rather than abolish it. At the end, I will share a quiet contemplative practice and prayer for approaching the unknown without trying to force it to speak.
PART TWO — THE DEPTH THAT DOES NOT EXPLAIN ITSELF
Olókun and the Sacred Right of Things to Remain Hidden
There is perhaps no image more appropriate for this mystery than the ocean. We can stand before it. We can touch it. We can drink the salt from our lips after swimming in it. We can measure its temperature, map its currents, calculate the movement of its tides and watch storms forming over its surface from satellites thousands of miles above the Earth.
Yet almost everything we experience when standing at the shore happens at the thinnest boundary of an immeasurable world.