Is it? I feel there's something fundamentally inexplicable about it. There's no amount of knowledge that seems adequate to dispel the mystery of it. Some mystery never recedes, this is well present fact of even the most well understood phenomena. The philosopher Bertrand Russel described our most rudimentary knowledge of the world as knowledge by acquaintance. For instance, the color of a table standing before you, and here's a quote:

"The particular shade of color that I am seeing may have many things said about it—I may say that it is brown, that it is rather dark, and so on. But such statements, though they make me know truths about the color, do not make me know the color itself any better than I did before so far as concerns knowledge of the color itself, as opposed to knowledge of truths about it, I know the color perfectly and completely when I see it, and no further knowledge of it itself is even theoretically possible. Thus the sense-data which make up the appearance of my table are things with which I have acquaintance, things immediately known to me just as they are."

Now, what Russel seems to overlook here, is that this basic knowledge to which no knowledge can even be theoretically added, is a place where we uncover an intrinsic limit to understanding. When we consider any facet of experience, in this case a vision of color—If we can then stem the tide of our thoughts long enough, to merely observe it as it is, the fact that we're in total ignorance of what it is can be come obvious.

What is the color blue? Not as a function of wavelengths of light, or neurophysiology, but as it is directly perceived. We're really left with nothing to say but that it's blue, which of course does nothing to clarify things. In fact, it's not even blue, which is just a word. It's a noise we're making, but what we see before us is whatever it ineffably is. Focusing on this distance between concepts and experience is a means of sneaking up on a truth that is generally described in Buddhism as the truth of emptiness, the idea that no thing has intrinsic independent existence in the way that it seems.

The moment we suspend the conceptual associations with a given object or perception, our knowledge about it, our direct experience of it, can grade into this experience of pure mystery. We're left with this wordless intuition of consciousness and it's contents about which nothing more really can be said.

While you know many things about the present moment, you do not know what anything in itself is. Look at your hand. What is it? You can define this part of your body in language. You can call it "hand". You can consider the fact that it is made of bone and muscle and threaded with blood vessels and nerves. But this is all a description about the object that you're looking at. If you simply look at your hand and ask yourself, "Is it?" and you might notice that "it" is an absolute mystery. It is, in fact, as mysterious in appearance as any you could ever hope to find.

Now, there are scientific arguments that can be arrayed against the mysteriousness of any object. We can point to the fact that the atoms in your hand were born billions of years ago in the belly of a star, and in fact some of these atoms may have inhabited several stars in succession. It's even possible that some atoms that were once in the bodies of historical figures, like Churchill or Cleopatra, are now in you. In fact, it might be descriptively true to implicate the entire universe in your hand, or in any objects, being what it is. But no such litany of concepts or connections can account for the mystery that looms whenever you just look at something closely, anything, however commonplace, and realize that while you might have volumes of knowledge about it, you don't have the slightest understanding of what it is in itself.

Others have noticed this fact. Walter Benjamin, the German literary critic, stumbled upon this mystery in Marseille after smoking hashish for the first time. He distilled it in the phrase "How things withstand the gaze", and all things really do is withstand the gaze. We confront the mystery of being in every moment, but we don't notice it because this mystery is tiled over with concepts. There's another famous parable from the Buddha meant to get at this difference:

A man is struck in the chest with a poison arrow, and a surgeon rushed to his side to begin the work of saving his life, but the man resists. He first wants to know the name of the fletcher who fashioned the arrow's shaft, and the type of wood from which it was cut, and the motive of the man who shot it, and the name of the horse upon which he rode, and a thousand other things that have no bearing at all of his present suffering or ultimate survival.

So, this man needs to get his priorities straight. His commitment to thinking about the world, results in a basic misunderstanding of his predicament, and although we may be dimly aware of it, we too have problems that will not be solved by more thinking.