Coming to terms with Reality

Reality is one, many dimensional, not separated

At birth, most of us received five senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. These senses gradually enable our brain to sort out ways to understand reality. The world as we know it is constructed in our mind through the use we make of our sensory perceptions. One of the principal ways in which this happens is through rational thought. It is generally thought that the rational process kicks into action beginning around the age of seven. However, even before this, we are able to make sense of the world around us largely through another capacity called feeling. This is not exactly the same as emotion or sentiment. It is an intentionally driven faculty that allows us to sort out and interact creatively with the world in order to meet our needs and those of others. It will continue to play an important role in knowing throughout our life. Poets and artists build on this capacity to create their art; religion is largely grounded in this dimension of our capacity to relate to the world.

Reality is one. There are not separate realities. Reality, as we perceive it using our five senses, is the only one that exists or, more specifically, the only one we can know anything about. That does not mean that reality is one-dimensional or that there is only one way to understand and know reality. History is one way of understanding; psychology is another; physics and biology are still others. They do not study different realities but rather different dimensions of the same, one reality. For religion, there are not two realities: natural and supernatural. There is one reality that can be understood in religious terms based on the identical sensory perceptions used to develop other forms of knowing. This grasp of complementarity in knowing is extremely important for our contemporary world, which has to a large extent tried to distinguish different realities to be dealt with rather than recognizing that different sciences are always dealing with the task of understanding the one same reality using the same method inscribed in our mind but with different techniques.

Since there is only one reality, the same “event” can be examined by any of the sciences from their own point of view. So, what religion or poetry speaks of can be considered by psychologists, sociologists, historians and biologists – and vice versa. Ideally, each will enlighten and assist the other.

Knowing in poetry, theatre, art, can draw significantly on imagination to move us toward new ways of knowing. Sometimes these new “truths” may be difficult for us to accept and push us beyond our limited horizons. As is the case with the best in religion, the goal is not to comfort but to challenge. Imagination can also turn to fantasy. However, even fantasy can also contain a kernel of meaning that helps us engage with reality.

Religion, like art and poetry, has a particular significance in that it makes a very different use of sensory perceptions in order to engage the level of feeling (of “heart”) in knowing and responding to the reality around us and, in fact, also in us since we too form part of the reality we try to know and engage. To say that we know through feeling does not free us from the arduous task of “verifying” our convictions. We still have to examine whether our knowing is consistent, for example with other beliefs. But, more importantly, we need to assure that what we know through feeling does not contradict what we know through other channels or disciplines. Just as a biologist who took a position that contradicted what is known in physics would be hard pressed, so also for those who voice religious beliefs. There is one reality and our knowing of it needs to be coherent.  Otherwise, we are dealing with magic and, while magic has its own allure and fascination, it cannot replace dealing with reality. 

(I have spent most of my life thinking about this question. My response here draws from people like Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Henri de Lubac who, though being religious, refused to separate the natural from the spiritual.)