Contemporary mysticism, like all contemporary popular thought, reserves all conceptual clarity and precision for material reality alone. Mysticism is a misty, nebulous remainder, hovering above and glowing behind material reality — an opalescent swirl of vague hopes, of insinuated meaning, of faint underwritings of morality.

I have chosen to distribute my own clarity and precision more broadly — across infraformal material, formal psychic, and supraformal spiritual realities. This choice is informed both by my everyday experiences working among humans and nonhumans as a designer, and by my mornings spent reflecting on these experiences and on my past reflections — integrating, clarifying, iterating.

We all need this expanded clarity, but we cannot even articulate the need, precisely because of our truncated clarity. We have optimized our understandings to account for physical phenomena, but we wave away the immediate matters at the heart of our lives — love, beauty, meaning, relatedness, belonging — as someday-to-be-explained epiphenomena.

We placed the particle at the center of our persons, and set these human matters in orbit around it. And now we must do the most complex calculations of epicycles within epicycles before we can calculate why our families matter to us more than life itself.

Last night Jack asked for the musical instrument “you blow into”. I didn’t know what he meant. Each wrong guess made him more visibly desperate. So we went to the instrument box and started rummaging. We found a pitch pipe tuner, and he was able to say that “it is like that.”. When we found the harmonica, his relief was instant and total. It was obvious, though, that most of his pain and subsequent relief had more to do with his need to communicate than with his need for the harmonica. The two needs were bound up together and compounded exponentially.

When a toddler begins to melt down we sometimes say “use your words.” This does two things. First, it teaches them to begin with communicating their needs before expressing their frustration. But second, the very act of communicating calms and stabilizes them.

Imagine a world where adults feel inexpressible frustration at having their most fundamental human needs unmet, but are, at the same time, unable to articulate their needs and account for why those needs matter.

A toddler with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs throws himself to the floor and screams and kicks and demands Froot Loops. An adult with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs riots in the streets and makes political demands.

We must rethink our metaphysics. At the very least, our civilizational survival depends upon it.