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Ken Kesey

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I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. ... The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
--
"The Art of Fiction" - interview by Robert Faggen, The Paris Review No. 130 (Spring 1994)

 
Ken Kesey

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Look for the mysterious in life. Wherever you look — in the white clouds, in the stars in the night, in the flowers, in a flowing river — wherever you look, look for the mystery. And whenever you find that a mystery is there, meditate on it. Meditation means: dissolve yourself before that mystery, annihilate yourself before that mystery, disperse yourself before that mystery. Be no more, and let the mystery be so total that you are absorbed in it. And suddenly a new door opens, a new perception is achieved.

 
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Each of us is a specific individual, that one and no other, out of billions. I think each of us knows his own mystery with a knowing that precedes the origins of all knowledge. None of us ever gives it away. No one can. We envelop it with talk and hide it with deeds.
Yet we always hope that somehow the others will know it is there, that a mystery in the other we cannot know will respond to a mystery in the self we cannot understand. The only full satisfaction life offers us is this sense of communion. We seek it constantly. Sometimes we find it. As we grow older we learn that it is never complete and sometimes it is entirely illusory.

 
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There is mystery here, but a soft, sure mystery that is understood and only remains a mystery because I want it so. The mystery of the nighthawk against a darkening sky, the puzzle of the firefly along the lilac hedge.

 
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Well, God answers of course come in every flavor imaginable these days so God can be process-God can be mind-God … so there are all of these ways that God is now configured as well as the ones that come to us from traditional religions where God has much more power — then there's the whole personal God part which I do talk about in there at some point. So I don't think that even that there is a God framework out there at this point that I am either accepting or rejecting. My response is that I call myself a non-theist as opposed to an atheist because as I see an atheist as having a belief about God, i.e. that there isn't one. And my I've never been actually very interested in the question I guess is one way to put it. I see it as a question That can be summarized in the aphorism "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing." And science doesn't have any answer to That so what I articulated in the book and continued to do is what I call a covenant with mystery where mystery is itself a … noun but I am using it as literally in absence of category. It's not like I have a mystery then I put attributions onto it it just ... I don't know the answers.

 
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To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain the sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?

 
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