A sound spiritual philosophy must be firmly rooted in truth. This requires that we strive to perceive reality as accurately as possible. How exactly can we achieve accuracy when trying to perceive the true nature of reality? We can’t just use our eyes and ears to look up the meaning of life.
A practical solution to this dilemma is to view reality through multiple belief systems in order to seek the big picture. Your beliefs act as lenses that cause you to focus on different aspects of reality. A Muslim, a Buddhist, and an agnostic may all view the world differently, yet there are clearly areas where their perceptions overlap. When we dismiss the incongruencies, we find there are areas of consensus. What’s most notable is that the commonalities consist of the universal principles of truth, love, and power. To the degree that various spiritual philosophies agree with each other, they all encourage their practitioners to seek greater alignment with truth, love, and power. In the areas where they don’t agree, you’ll typically find falsehood, disconnection, and disempowerment. Despite the wide range of spiritual belief systems, it’s wonderful to see that the common denominator is that we all inherently value these three fundamental principles.
Stereo vision is one of our more fascinating human abilities. Our eyeballs capture 2-D snapshots of our environment, and our brains and visual circuitry rapidly combine them into 3-D images. Even though each eye perceives reality in two dimensions, by combining the data from both eyes in a specific way, we perceive our visual fields in apparent 3-D. This image is richer than either of its 2-D components. You could also say it’s a more useful representation of reality than the raw, preprocessed data taken in by our eyes. The combined input from all of our physical sense creates a rich web of sensory information. Consequently, when we go out to dinner with friends, the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of the evening create an experience that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Spiritually, we also have access to a rich set of input. Unfortunately, most of us are taught to devote our attention to a small subset of that input and tune out the rest as irrelevant or misleading. This spiritual blindness creates functional problems for us. Such problems manifest in many forms, including depression, loneliness, hopelessness, and meaninglessness.
Just as your physical senses act as lenses through which you perceive different subsets of reality, your spiritual senses also act as cognitive filtering mechanisms. These filters allow you to focus on bits and pieces of preprocessed information which may or may not be useful to you. The more spiritual sensory data you can access and comprehend, the richer your spiritual life will be, and the more accurately it will model truth.
Your spiritual sensory equipment includes:
- First-, second-, and third-person viewpoints (I/we, you, it/they)
- Subjective (consciousness is primary) and objective (physical world is primary) viewpoints
- Intuition and gut instincts
- Feelings and emotions
- Logic and reason
- Dreams and visions
- Religious and philosophical beliefs (Christianity, Buddhism, atheism, skepticism, Darwinism, romanticism, and the like)
- Cultural, social, political, and economic beliefs (stereotypes, gender roles, fashion preferences, citizenship)
- Functional beliefs (how to earn a living, what to eat, how to communicate)
- Personal beliefs (goals, values, expectations)
Suppose you’re cooking dinner for yourself. You can use your eyes to measure the ingredients, your ears to listen for the timer beeping, your nose to inhale the aromas, and your tongue to taste the result. If you wanted to do so, you could rely solely upon just one or two of your senses to prepare a meal, but you’d probably find it more difficult to achieve a good outcome.
Similarly, when we confront the key spiritual questions of our lives, such as Who am I? and What is my purpose in life? we can consult the full spectrum of sensory channels available to us, or we can limit our input to a small subset of those channels. In general, when we limit our input too severely, we end up making things harder than necessary, much like trying to prepare a meal while wearing a blindfold and earplugs. This is what happens when we say, “I’m only going to consider this single spiritual point of view because it’s the one and only truth.”
Our perceptions are the lenses through which we view reality, but they aren’t reality itself. What we perceive is invariably preprocessed to one degree or another. We aren’t consciously aware of individual photons of light or oscillating atmospheric compression waves. We simply observe a photograph or a song. Whenever this kind of sensory compression occurs, a tremendous amount of raw data is irrecoverably lost. Each of our senses compresses and repackages the field of perceivable data in different ways, and it’s this heavily processed output that finally reaches our conscious awareness.
Our beliefs and other cognitive filters give us similar glimpses into reality, but they also provide us with highly compressed and processed afterimages of the underlying data. For example, suppose you attempt to perceive nonphysical entities. What will you consciously experience? Through the lens of Christianity, you may connect with angels and saints via the mechanism of prayer. Through a Native American lens, you may perform a vision quest to consult with ancestral spirits or animal guides. Through an atheistic or skeptical lens, you may perceive nothing at all or perhaps something very fuzzy and inconclusive. Through a psychic or mediumistic lens, you may conduct a two-way conversation with a spirit guide or deceased person. What’s actually there, however, is none of these things. You don’t consciously perceive reality as it truly is because the raw data would overwhelm your cognitive abilities. Instead, you must attend to the highly compressed versions.
Even though each channel of input has limited expressiveness, if you can access a diverse enough set of channels, each one compressed and filtered in different ways, you can develop a more accurate and complete picture of reality. Each belief system you consider provides another way of viewing the same underlying data, thus helping you develop a better understanding of the whole.
Just as we can augment our physical senses with technology such as night-vision goggles or radio antennae, we can also significantly improve our spiritual senses. Exploring different belief systems and considering unfamiliar perspectives allows us to create new data filters that we can then add to our collection of cognitive tools. These filters process the same underlying reality as our standard physical senses, but they present that information in different ways, often revealing important patterns that our previous filters overlooked.
Our eyes may be able to see well enough, but they perceive more information when augmented with a microscope, telescope, or oscilloscope. Similarly, a single belief system such as atheism or Christianity provides some insight into a greater reality beyond the physical, but any singular filter is full of informational holes, gaps, and incongruences. Think of these problems as compression errors. However, if you consider the viewpoints of a half-dozen belief systems, the big picture finally begins to take shape.
How do you know which particular lenses will provide the most relevant information for a certain situation? You figure it out in the same way you learn to use your physical sense. Do you ever make the awkward of trying to get to know someone by tasting them? Perhaps you did when you were a baby, but most likely you favor your eyes and ears for that now. Through trial and error, you learned which senses are most appropriate for each situation.
We still make sensory mistakes, however. Sometimes we become fixated on the wrong input channels. Have you ever caught yourself ogling someone you’re attracted to, not remembering a word that was said? Or have you ever put too much emphasis on your taste buds, shoveling food into your mouth while your eyes couldn’t help but notice how overweight you were becoming? Despite these occasional failures, however, it’s still the case that life is much richer with a variety of sensory channels instead of just one.
By learning to consider reality from multiple perspectives, you’ll overcome many of the limitations of individual belief systems. You’ll gradually shed false beliefs that distort your perceptions, you’ll fill in gaps in your understanding, and you’ll come into greater alignment with truth.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina