On the spiritual path if we try to arrive at some particular place then our mind will start creating a “place.” It is not about giving up one level of hallucination and moving into another level, but to learn to live with reality by giving up hallucination altogether. We need to make an effort to get the Truth and that Truth is existential and not what we make up in our mind. We may see things in terms of culture and what we may be exposed to. It may be that we are optimists or pessimists and may see god or devil in a person, but all these have nothing to do with the reality. To be concerned with reality would mean knowing why we are here, where we have come from and where we will go.
Some religions try to instill the concept of hope; people take it and try to visualize a better future. One begins to be hopeful about joys of heaven. We should try to be joyfully hopeless. We could come to a stage where we are all right in whatever condition we are because we have found something within ourselves.
Learning to live with reality is the most important thing, and that means not distorting things in our minds but seeing things as they are. We should stop creating god or devil, heaven or hell, good or bad. There should be no likes or dislikes. It may be necessary to do so at certain times, but apart from that we should be able to see things as they are. We will gradually appreciate that life is not just in forms, and also stop identifying things as animate and inanimate, but realize that the whole cosmos is a living cosmos. “Even modern physicists say this is an ever-expanding universe. Essentially they are saying there is nothing conclusive about anything….So there is no ‘this is it.’…If you arrive at a station called reality, there is no such thing as ‘this is it.’ Conclusions happen only in your mind, never in the existence. Conclusion is the nature of the mind. It wants to close one chapter and say, ‘I got it.’ But life is a limitless possibility,” writes Sadhguru, a yogi, mystic and visionary. (Free Press Journal, September 29, 2024)
We do not see things and people as they are but we see them from our own perception. There is a world and there is a projection. Projection is the result of our psychological background, which stifles our perception and estimation of the world. When we see an object, say a chair, our senses bring to us its details as a raw data. The lower Manas synthesizes or transforms it into an idea of a chair, which may be quite different from the real chair. Our perception is affected by our conceptions and imperfections of the instruments that bring the data, and hence, we do not see things correctly.
Robert Crosbie says that true perception is from within, without, because Atma-Buddhi-Manas or the Higher Ego is the true Perceiver, which perceives things correctly. As Patanjali says: “The soul is the Perceiver; is assuredly vision itself pure and simple; unmodified; and looks directly upon ideas.” For correct perception, the lower mind has to reflect the true perception of the Higher Ego, and that happens when the lower mind is cleaned of the dust of passions, biases, ignorance, etc.
Immanuel Kant spoke of the existence of the noumenal world behind the phenomenal world. He called the noumenon as the “thing-in-itself.” Kant said that the phenomenal world is the world of appearances which continually changes. The “thing-in-itself” must always remain “unknowable” because we perceive it through the threefold veil or prism, made up of time, space and causality, which distorts the reality of “thing-in-itself.” In the phenomenal world objects are limited in space. The rose that we see here cannot be present elsewhere at the same time. There was a time when it did not exist and there will be a time when it will cease to exist. These phenomena are seen as a causal series. Each phenomenon is the effect of the preceding one and will in turn become a cause for the next one that appears. Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” is quite similar to Plato’s Archetypal World or the World of Ideas.
[This article also appeared in The Theosophical Movement. For more articles published in this excellent magazine follow this link: https://www.ultindia.org/magazines/tm.html