Reality is our code-word for What Is. If something is, it is real or has reality. We often speak of Reality as what stands beyond, or on the other side of, our veils of meaning – of what’s on our minds or only in our imagination.
But what if there were no human minds or imaginations to hang veils in front of Reality?
Obviously, nothing would be said about It, nor could anything be known – at least as humans think we know Reality. With no humans around to sense It, perceive It, process perceptions and form opinions, theories, stories and beliefs about Reality – just imagine. No, check that.
Perhaps the most appropriate name for this ineffable something-that-is-no-thing is the Present Mystery of Reality.
We capitalize the term to remind ourselves that Reality is not this or that particular thing, or even the sum total of all particular things. With Paul Tillich we can say that Reality is the power to be (or be-ing) in all that exists. It is here and now (Present) but cannot be named or known (Mystery), except by the slanting picture language of metaphor.
Without human minds and imaginations, of course, there would be no metaphors or the experience of meaning they make possible.
Once self-conscious human persons poked their heads above the sea of sentient consciousness enveloping the earth, Reality suddenly split into two distinct realms: a realm “around me” and another “within myself” (my self).
The center of self-conscious personal identity from which these dual orientations are taken is named “I” (ego in Latin).
Whereas thousands of generations of many millions of sentient species before humans had perceived Reality via their sense receptors and nervous systems, Reality for them was not – and still isn’t – divided as it is for us, between around and within.
Such a split orientation is only possible as reflexive awareness (proto-ego) is sufficiently inflated with the possession of myself that it breaks above the surface of pure sentient consciousness to become self-conscious as me, “out here” in the middle of everything yet paradoxically feeling all alone.
Now, you might think that existing (literally “standing out”) above the sea of spontaneous sentient experience is some kind of catastrophe that shouldn’t have happened so many millenniums ago – but also a million times each day around the planet, as two-year-olds wake up to themselves as separate egos.
You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that.
A majority report among the world religions insists that our human rise into a separate center of self-conscious identity (ego) was actually a fall from (or out of) a more perfect state, and that things got worse for us after that, not better.
As a consequence of this fall from grace (aka paradise or Pure Spirit), humans are mortal, insecure, and selfish. If something isn’t done, we are going to fall even farther down – or get thrown there by a god who can’t manage, or perhaps doesn’t care enough, to save us.
Interestingly, this religious diagnosis of the human condition – minus the offended and exasperated deity at the end of the story – is in essential agreement with our earlier account. Whether our separation into self-conscious identity is the outcome of an emergent rise from something deeper or a disintegrative fall from something higher, both metaphorical accounts can be true.
Before the religions invented heaven and hell, and then later flipped things to the horizontal timeline, a vertical fall-into-separation was how the ancient tradition of Sophia Perennis depicted the human condition.
At the beginning of the First Axial Age (800-200 BCE), a new paradigm of emergence from below started rippling across the higher cultures of East and West. Its more ‘organic’ model would serve in the West as the theoretical foundation of the Life sciences and their eventual consilience in a unified theory of evolution.
For this reason, it is easier for modern Western scientific minds to envision the separation into self-conscious identity as a rise rather than a fall. Still, there are many modern Western religious minds who prefer the Fall metaphor – although for them it’s not metaphorical but an historical event that occurred around six thousand years ago, according to their literal reading of the Bible.
Let’s not get hung up in the difference. Remember, the Present Mystery of Reality is unqualified, ineffable, and meaning-less – until human minds and imaginations begin draping their veils of meaning over it.
To help you appreciate how the two accounts (fall and rise) are really complementary perspectives taken from the vantage point of your self-conscious ego, I will ask you to get centered in your own personal identity. Acknowledge when you have reached the place from whence you can look “around me” as well as (but not simultaneously) “within myself.”
This place is named “I” (ego), and your entire quality world turns on it.
Notice I didn’t say that Reality turns on your ego. That’s a privileged position reserved for the superego of religion’s god, which, as you have probably already figured out, is an important character embroidered on its sacred veils of meaning.
From this location of ego, everything around you appears as a multiplicity of random, disconnected things. Because you are looking out through space, each particular object or cluster of objects seems to be contained in a vacuum and set apart from other objects. The space between things is, in its own way, a kind of evidence that each thing is separate from everything else.
What you don’t realize is that the separation evident all around you is really an effect and function of the fact that your “I” (ego) had to withdraw to its own unique and separate center in order to exist (stand out). You see things as separate because you, in your ego, have separated yourself from it all.
In Reality, all things are connected in a harmony of higher wholeness, as a system of reciprocal interdependent relationships. You also are included and fully belong to this All-that-is-One.
Now turn your attention to the complementary orientation and look “within myself.” This move may be more challenging than the one of going out and beyond (i.e., transcending) your ego to the inclusive wholeness of Reality. Instead of an experience of being united with everything “around me,” this second path requires consciousness to release and drop away from the outpost of your ego, deeper “within myself” where “I” cannot go.
Here the experience is a communion of deeper oneness, sinking and dissolving into the Source of your existence, what Sophia Perennis names the Ground of Being. Deepest within, Reality is Nothingness (no-thing-ness) and you are Nowhere (now-here). In following the descending roots from mind into body, and from body into soul, awareness finally arrives at the terminus – and simply lets go.
Tracts of Revolution 