And that’s what it means to be human. There are Christian-sounding things I could say about mystery and transcendence versus imminence, etc. But you don’t have to believe in God to track with this mystery business. Listen, friends, we do not see things as they are on the most basic of levels: visual perception. We see our three-dimensional world in two dimensions. When something is moving closer to or farther from us, what we see is that object getting bigger or smaller respectively. We learn to interpret size change as movement, but we still see an object moving away as getting smaller even though there is no actual shrinking of the physical object.

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