Ultimate Reality

Last week I wrote about the Snowmass Conference which was multifaith endeavor to engage in common points of agreement.  This was an example of how evangelism might move ahead in our multicultural and multifaith society:

In 1984 Father Thomas Keating invited a small group of contemplatives from eight different religious traditions—Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Islamic, Native American, Russian Orthodox, Protestant, and Roman Catholic—to gather at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, to engage in what he called “a big experiment.”

The Snowmass Conference Eight Points of Agreement were the points of common understanding among the traditions.  In those eight points I was interested to note that the word they used for God (in the Christian context) was “Ultimate Reality”.  On consideration, I believe that this is a very good term for God.  It engaged me in part because I had just finished reading the marvellous introduction to mysticism by the wonderful mystic and spiritual director Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism.  This is a wonderful primer on mysticism and contemplation that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to explore that part of life. (A minor criticism of the form and not the content, the edition I have does not include page numbers so it is not possible to give page numbers for quotes from the book.)

Underhill poses the ultimate question which we need to consider, “What is reality”.  Underhill goes further and defines mysticism:

Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.  The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or lessor degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.

There are many things which prevent us from that union with Ultimate Reality (in the terms of the Snowmass Conference Eight Points of Agreement).  We have personal blind sports which have been called complexes by psychologists.  We have filters that block out much of what is around us as anyone who has noticed, for the first time, something he or she has passed by many times previously.  We have the facility to project onto others characteristics that we don’t want to recognize in ourselves-the shadow in Jungian terms. 

If we move beyond mere psychology there is the reality of other sciences such as quantum physics and astronomy – not to mention astrology -  which reveal a reality beyond anything our natural senses can perceive.  Underhill expresses this, speaking of the artist and the contemplative as people who are able to see beyond the surface of things:

Both have exchanged the false imagination which draws sensations and intuitions of the self into its narrow circle, and there distorts and transforms them, for the true imagination which pours itself out, eager, adventurous, and self-giving, towards the greater universe.

If we are to see the world that the Ultimate Reality (God) has created we must move beyond seeing the surface of things and have eyes to see and ears to hear the wonder of that creation which is beyond the mere sensation that we have learned to perceive the world in ways which we have been required to learn in order to survive on a daily basis.  We are, in so many ways, like that group of blind men (I think in this case it is okay not to put this in gender neutral terms) who are describing an elephant from their different perspectives which Richard Rohr recently used to address our perception of reality:

How do we know what is real? I’m sure you’ve heard the story of a group of people who are blind describing an elephant, each from a different vantage. One person, feeling the elephant’s tail, described a rope. Another, arms encircling a leg, said it was like a pillar or tree. And so on. Every viewpoint is a view from a point. The more ways of knowing we use, the closer we come to understanding, and yet the full picture will always elude us. In this way, mystery is endlessly knowable. 

In so many ways we are people who are blind or deaf or without the sense of touch trying to grasp a piece of the Ultimate Reality – without the realization it is only a piece.  Many accept their experience of the part of the elephant as the whole truth and nothing but the truth of the world.  May your Ultimate Reality give you ears to hear and eyes to see more of that Reality.

Blessings on your journey.