After reading through all of these responses (you fuckers are really smart), I can't help but feel the urge to scream a little. Not because the discussion is wrong, honestly, it's fascinating, but because I think sometimes we try so hard to explain a mystery that we forget to actually experience it. Good luck putting lightning in a bottle.
I am reminded of a quote from Tommy Kelly: "Some mysteries are to be experienced rather than solved."
Some minds cannot help but build castles and cathedrals around a mystery. We construct systems, models, philosophies, and explanations. There is nothing wrong with that. Those things can be beautiful and useful. But we should be careful not to mistake the explanation for the thing itself.
Sometimes the magick is in the mystery. Read that again if you need to.
The presence of a spirit does not become more real because we finally found the perfect words to describe it. The experience does not become more profound because we built a perfect container for it. Some things refuse to be contained.
Stand in awe of it. Let the encounter change you. Let it challenge you. Let it burn away what needs to be burned and teach what needs to be learned.
Maybe the mystery is not a problem to be solved. Maybe it is a relationship to be entered.
Experience is always greater than description. The terrain is not the map, and it never will be. You can spend a lifetime studying the ink, the paper, the lines, the cartographer, and the mathematics of the map, but eventually you have to step onto the land.
Don't let your desire for a box to contain the mystery become an excuse to never enter it. And don't let your attachment to one answer become the very thing that blinds you to what is actually happening.
What the hell do I know. I'm just another voice in the void. But I think sometimes the greatest wisdom is not having the final answer. Sometimes it is standing before the unknown and just saying: "Teach me."
As Robyn Hitchcock put it: "Wisdom cannot be transmitted".