SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, part I

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, part I - by Guenther Zuehlsdorf, translation from the original German edition into Portuguese by Huberto Rohden and translated into English by Flavio de Mello.

Any attempt of wanting to express the ABSOLUTE TRUTH through words and images of our language and our mind, reaches only the periphery of the garment of Truth. The true essence of the Infinite Reality transcends all our representations, conditioned by time. Our thoughts, subject to the categories of time, space and influences of cause and effect, are unable to unravel something which is no time, no space and not subject to the influences of this relationship of cause and effect.

This, recognized the wisest of the wise.

---   Lao-Tse designates the Eternal of the Universe as the Unspeakable, the Nameless.

---   From Buddha it is said that he never preached the Truth, because it was within man himself.

---   Christ speaks in parables, analogies, comparisons, and when Pilate asked directly what was the Truth, Jesus became silent, because nobody was able to comprehend truth, not even his own disciples.

---   Sri Ramana Maharishi, the great Hindu seer, said that silence is the only language of Truth, and that our talk interrupts that language. 

However, the Eternal Reality, although it can not be expressed by our usual expedients, it is not far from us; the fact is that we seek through by an erroneous and inefficient manner. The Truth is revealed to us not through forms and images - Truth is a direct and immediate experience. It's not like the experience of a material phenomenon, but as something that transcends the whole experience of the objective world. Or, according to the words of the apostle Paul, "the Truth is silent and hidden, that never any ear heard, nor eye saw, neither have entered into the human heart; but God revealed to those who love him".

Through all religious and spiritual history, man has always tried to "remove the veil"  which hides the Reality; sought, on the level of relative things, traces of the Absolute; tried out to discover in certain ways and experience - as miracles, visions, voices, etc. - manifestations of the supreme Reality. Due to the false concept that he has about the spirit, man showed that he is interested in pseudo-experiences, because he ignores the genuine mystical experience. We can even speak of a transfer or gravitation or balance of the soul, from inside out, in consequence of which man has not directly perceive the answers from within, but projects that experience out in the form of dreams, images, visions and other phenomena. Man confuses his intellectual thoughts with the reality of spiritual experience. The ideologies of his mind appears as a spiritual reality; and the external phenomena are taken as evidence of the spiritual world.

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