Albert Schweitzer, Walt Whitman, Swami Premgeet, wonderment, vision, logic, and exaltation

excerpted from THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves, by Jack Haas

“If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you

 suddenly with dizziness.”

Albert Schweitzer

The rapture of wonderment is its own reward, its own validation, its own argument against all else, for the authenticity of absolute ignorance washes the world so unimaginably clean, that no logic, nor polemic, nor art can ever again match, dispel, or compete with the reality of such a moving occurrence.

Swami Premgeet declared: “Life is full of wonder. We taste it in our childhood, lose it as we grow up, and if we are lucky catch the magic again in those precious moments which make life a joy. The echo may return in the eyes of a beloved, in the first burst of morning light, or in a thousand unexpected forms. When it comes we are suddenly in the presence of the miraculous, we are taken by that elusive sense of being part of a great whole. These are the moments when our energy expands to encompass something beyond ourselves.”

Similarly, Walt Whitman poetically wrote:

“I believe a leaf of grass is not less than the journey-

work of the stars,

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain

of sand, and the egg of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,

And the running blackberry would adorn the

parlors of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hands puts to scorn

all machinery,

And the cow crunching with depress’d head

surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions

of infidels.”

This last passage is reminiscent of the enviable vision of a child or a fool, sitting on the ground in rapt attention at the simplest things which we pass by every day obliviously because our minds have gotten in the way and have thus made the miracle of life a commonplace event.

            Dropping everything out of the mind leads us back to infinity, for the vision of wonder is not limited. We must simply have no walls of fear or interpretation, and dismiss our useless cares, so as to stop, to breathe, to smile, to exalt.

excerpted from:

THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves

by Jack Haas

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Mystical books, visionary art, and fine art photography by Jack Haas