We are none of us spontaneously reality-based nowadays; partly due to inhabiting the virtuality, partly due to everybody* being psychologically (if not physically) ill and/or impaired.
Since health and normality are unattainable, and because all external sources of guidance are tainted and corrupted by the inescapable totalitarianism of all institutions (including religions and churches); reality is now something we can achieve only intermittently and briefly.
Reality - truth - is therefore something we can sometimes know, but cannot consistently achieve.
An extra problem is that our idea is reality is misconceived as some kind of blueprint - whether ideological or religious: something like a set of principles or laws, an instruction manual, or utopian map.
After the comprehensive and extreme failure of this model, it turns-out that reality is not like that!
But neither is reality nothing at all, nor whatever we want, nor whatever those with power say it is - these notions too have been tried and catastrophically failed to inspire or motivate.
It turns-out that reality is a kind of connection instead of some sort of blueprint.
In other words, reality impinges when the mass of surface-stuff in our emotions, thoughts, behaviours; discovers and attends to a connection with our true-self, and via this with that-which-is-divine.
When we become aware, by this connection; with the reality of truth, beauty and virtue as it exists dynamically, livingly, actively - in actual divine beings...
Such as the divine in ourselves, God the Creator, Jesus Christ and other beings; these connections are what provide knowledge of reality.
All of which may strike us as very difficult to attain; and we may then ask: Is this really the best that God could contrive for our guidance?
Why is mortal life set-up in such a fashion?
My understanding is that this reality-by-connection has the great advantage of being potentially available to everybody under all circumstances - whatever our personality, whatever our social situation.
But ultimately the answer to "is this really the best that can be managed" for mortal life is: Yes.
It is the best that God can contrive for an entropic universe, that also contains a good deal of evil.
Which is why Jesus's offer of Heaven refers - not to mortal life nor this earth and universe - but to our post-mortal life in Heaven.
*I say "everybody" because that is what I observe - obviously including myself! I recognize that there are plenty of people who present-themselves as bastions of normality, common sense, health and strength. But all of these I have encountered, strike me as very obviously and strongly pathological characters - who are deceptively attempting to displace attention (their own attention, as well as that of other people) to the deficits of others.
2 comments:
Bruce, excellent article! Our experience of reality is intermittent and occasional and mostly unpredictable, but it is clear when it happens. I think some people are born to it more than others but I would not say why. There may also be an element of Grace and assistance to those who can recognize it. We all have beings in the spirit world who are helping us whether we know it or not, even if we are doing things that are harmful to us and others. After all it is very hard not to do evil in this world
@ag - Thanks! Glad to hear you agree.
"it is very hard not to do evil in this world" - I would modify "very hard" to completely impossible (and famous saints also state the same).
I think this is the basis upon which Jesus taught (at least, in the valid and coherent parts of the IV Gospel - which I take to be primary in authority)
This is why I think we need/ought-to start with the solid assumption that we are all sinners and will remain so...
And from that baseline conviction, we should then try to understand what is required of the followers of Jesus.
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