Multidimensional Spiritual Reality

Jan 29, 2005, 12.00am IST
S H VENKATRAMANI.

True spirituality is beyond thought — it is transcendent and therefore incomprehensible. How can we describe something that’s beyond comprehension? Hindu philosophy stresses the point that the essential nature of ultimate reality transcends all opposites, all qualities and all concepts. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that God cannot be described for He is without any qualities. God is above and beyond all thesis and antithesis; a synthesis that transcends all the cycles of Hegelian dialectics. God is a subject for which there is no predicate.

The Kena Upanishad says, "There the eye goes not,/ Speech goes not, nor the mind./ We know not, we understand not/ How would one teach it?" The ultimate spiritual reality transcends even the duality or dvaita of existence and non-existence, the opposites of being and non-being. When we understand something intellectually, we do so in relation to something else. We do not know it intrinsically nor do we directly experience its innate essence. We identify the broader group it belongs to. Then we try to specify what makes it distinct from the other members of the group. That is how we define anything.


How do we define a human being? We see that humans belong to the larger group of animals. We find that what distinguishes man from the rest of the animal kingdom is the fact that he is rational; so we conclude that man is a rational animal. The human mind pieces reality together by dissecting, differentiating and relating. Science tries to understand reality as a mechanism, taking apart its components and reassembling them.

According to modern physics reality is fundamentally indivisible. It is inseparably interconnected as a cosmic web. The essence of reality, it turns out, is not mechanistic but metaphysical. Quantum physics has highlighted a fundamental limitation of the scientific method of understanding reality through observation and measurement. Einstein’s theory has demonstrated that there is nothing absolute or immutable about a distance in space or a span of time. Modern physics says that there is no such thing as an objective reality. An observer is not independent of the observation. The very act of observation affects what is observed. Consciousness too cannot detach itself from physical reality. Sri Aurobindo explained that the material object becomes "something different from what we now see, not a separate object on the background or in the environment of the rest of nature but an indivisible part and even in a subtle way an expression of the unity of all that we see".


Another way of understanding is through direct sensory experiencing. We understand pain as a sensation. We understand winter by experiencing the cold. We have to hoist ourselves out of the fundamental and circumscribing construct of our minds to stir ourselves in the profound spiritual depths of our being. The human mind discovers patterns among mentally stored abs-tractions of sensory experiences. It mechanically pieces together the jigsaw of physical reality through space and time sequences. We have to rise above this basic mental paradigm, which derives from the historical accumulation of man’s sense perception, to become alive to the spiritual dimension.


The direct mystical experiencing of reality is non-sensory. As William James explains it, "Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different".