REALITY, OR REALITIES?

The foundation of true happiness is the pursuit of Truth, which is the consciousness of reality and living with this reality. The reality, in the singular, because the profane man speaks of realities, and for him, the realities are as many as the individual phenomena or events that his senses can identify. He is, necessarily, pluralistic, since the senses reveal plurality without unity. However, the spiritually mature man is aware of the great Unity of the Cosmos. It does not mean that he denies plurality as if the phenomena were simple mirages, unrealities, the emptiness or illusion of our senses. No, he, being a seer, knows that the world of phenomena is not fictional, an existing projection of our Self; but he knows that these phenomena affecting our senses have no self-reality, intimate content, autonomous existence; he knows that the so-called “reality” of sensory things are merely external. This highly spiritual man is in unity and plurality.

The unique reality is here, where I am, where the animal lives, where the plant grows, where the mineral exists - but not all beings perceive reality in all its amplitude. There is an infinite range of perceptions, according to the ability of the perceiver. The degree of perception or consciousness, determines the perfection of a being, in the immense ascending hierarchy of beings. A fully conscious being is, for this very reason; infinitely perfect, and unique. A being without perception or consciousness would be nonexistent, a pure nothingness. All beings, because they exist as real entities, have a certain degree of perception or consciousness, which can be primitive, and which make highly perceptive or conscious human beings, consider these beings as non-perceptive or unconscious.

Failure to verify a reality can also come from an opposite cause, from a high degree of reality for the senses to perceive it, as happens, for example, with light waves of a frequency higher than the visual power of our eyes, and countless other vibrations which do not affect our sensorial organs, or instantly destroy them with its extreme power; just as we do not normally perceive, the reality of vibrations of very high sound frequency, which is for our ears “sound unreality”, or silence.

A similar thing happens at the level of consciousness; a high conscience escapes our conscious verification, affecting us as “unconsciousness”. No individual being can have a perfect, full and integral perception of God. God, the Infinite Consciousness, is so intensely conscious that its conscience seems to us, as vulnerable conscious beings, as unconscious.

The perceptive individual does not perceive reality as it is, but as he sees it, and as the ancient philosophers said: the knowledge is in the individual who knows according to his way of knowing.

Man perceives God according to his level of consciousness of this reality, but as he gradually becomes divinized, he will perceive God more divinely and truly. At first, there is an enormous distance between the perceived object (God) and the act of perceiving in man in his spiritual childhood, this distance is reduced as he matures spiritually, thus having a truer perception of God.

The profane man has a maximum of subjectivity, which only interests or belongs to him, and a minimum of objectivity, concerning the divine world - whereas the initiate, the mystic, the seer, the true saint, has a very high degree of objectivity and a minimal degree of subjectivity. And, as the known object is universal (God), the initiate becomes universal, cosmic, in the direct reason that it approaches God through its intuition. And, since God is the essence of all things, the initiate, being identified with God, is also identified with all the manifestations of God, the creatures, the phenomena of nature. Strange as it may seem, it is certain that no one is closer to nature, no one lives in greater intimacy with the creatures than the one who lives identified with the Creator, because, being “one with the Father”, it is also one with all beings who are one with God, for all seers and lovers of the God of the world, comprehend and are friends of the world of God.

Due to this divine intimacy with nature, an initiate is a man who is a friend and ally of nature and who uses natural laws with the same spontaneous ease with which a friend uses the goods of another friend because there is a communion between them.

The intellectualized profane thinks he has submitted nature to his will and thinks he is lord and sovereign of the world of physics and chemistry - a pure illusion! Nature serves man only because man has to submit to the laws of nature, of which he still knows little; but, at the same time that man contradicts only one of the natural laws, nature revolts implicitly or implicitly against man. Profane, intellectualized man is not a friend and ally, but an enemy and explorer of nature; nature does not cooperate with this man, as no slave collaborates with his tyrannical master; nature obeys man reluctantly, intimately revolted, in the face of the monstrous crimes that “civilized” and “mechanized” man commits against it, day by day, in the service of his abominable selfishness and greed. Man is divorced from nature and nature takes revenge on the exploiting man, not only in the form of thousands of accidents but also with a legion of diseases, physical and mental, which it unleashes, on an increasing scale, against its ruthless usurper.

The only man lord of the laws of nature is the initiate, the saint, the Christlike man: for only a friend and ally of nature can be lord of nature - and only the man identified with the Lord can be a friend and ally of nature, who is at the same time his greatest friend.

In a more spiritually evolved dimension, knowing is the same as power; knowledge is power. True knowledge is a vital and profound experience of man's creative intuition.

The infinite wisdom of God is the Omnipotent Creator of the Universe - and the divine wisdom of a man who knows God is his irresistible power which “removes mountains”, and for which there is no “impossible.”

The perceptual natural gift of beings, in the different levels, can be, for example, compared to a fishing net: a net of wide meshes correspond to the sensory power we have in common with the animal world. In these wide spaces, we catch certain phenomena of a very primitive and gross nature, as are the things of the material physical world, while the finest and more subtle realities escape through the wider meshes of the net.

A net of fine meshes symbolizes our intellectual power, a natural human gift, which captures things more refined than the sense organs, such as the facts of the immaterial, metaphysical, logical, rational world; the causal relations existing between the individual beings of nature, on which the entire scientific and technical culture of man is based. The very word “intellect” or “intelligence” admirably defines the specific function of this ability: by the intellect, man interprets the existing realities of individual beings, realities that for the wide meshes of the senses are unrealities, non-existent things because they do not affect these primitive organs.

Finally, the net of ultra-fine meshes, representing intuitive power, retaining the finest and most subtle in the Universe, the Spiritual Reality!

The merely intellectualized man cannot comprehend the realities of the spiritual world, because they escape the subtle meshes of his intellectual net. No matter how much the spiritual man tries to explain to his merely intellectual brother what God, Christ, eternal life, etc., is, he cannot capture the true meaning of those words, which pass unnoticed through his wide intellectual meshes; for him, “God” is a “sacred word”, or even a “poetic idea”, but by no means an “objective reality”.

When Saint Augustine was asked what God was like, he replied: “If no one asks me, I know what God is - but if someone asks me, I confess I don't know.” Which means, intellectually, he ignores it, spiritually he knew what God is; but, as this subtle reality caught by the net of the spirit is not analyzable and definable by the primitive net of intelligence, he can have the intuitive experience of God, without being able to give an intellectual definition.

What the intellectual man must do to comprehend the spiritual world is not to intensify his intelligence - which would be the continuation of the same horizontal line - but to take another direction - the direction of verticality. Evidently, one does not get to have a vertical by adding or multiplying horizontal and more horizontal ones; it is necessary to abandon this level and start a different course.

This shift from horizontal to vertical is what is called conversion, redemption, salvation, is a new beginning, an unprecedented direction, a “new life”, a “rebirth by the spirit”, the discovery of a new world hitherto foggy and ignored. It is not a “continuation” of something pre-existing, but it is a “new beginning”, a virgin fact, absolutely original - it is a dazzling light amid the darkness.

This is the reason why this “new beginning” cannot be manufactured by the “Adamic man”, from certain pre-existing materials and invented by him, but by a radical change of consciousness, in his unity with the Infinite, with the gradual abandonment of ego tyrannies, and the rebirth of a new man in Christ.