ULTIMATE REALITY

The Perennial Wisdom Tradition is organized around four important matters:  the nature of ultimate reality, the possibilities of human knowing of this ultimate reality, the nature of personhood, and the goal of human existence.  We will look at each of these over the course of upcoming blogs, beginning today with the first – the nature of ultimate reality.

However named, God is Ultimate Reality.  Language does not serve well to describe this Ultimate Reality since it is so profoundly supra-human and trans-personal.  Yet, humans need to name things and so across time and the various wisdom traditions we have adopted such linguistic handles as Spirit, Divine Presence, The Wholly Other, The One, or The Ground of Being.  All names for this foundation of existence point to the same reality – a reality that, at the same time, is both transcendent and immanent, not set apart from the world of humans and things but deeply connected to everything that is.

All names fail miserably in the task of capturing Ultimate Reality.  How easily we forget that language does not hold reality; at its best it merely points toward it.  Our problem, however, is that we confuse our puny concepts with the reality to which they, at their best, point.  The Jesuit priest, Anthony de Mello, tells a very short story from the Perennial Wisdom Tradition that nicely illustrates this.

The master encouraged his followers to look at the moon by pointing toward it but noticed that his followers inevitably looked at his finger, not the moon.

The story tells us that Ultimate Reality will always lie beyond all the fingers of our images and concepts that we use to point toward it.  We must, therefore, be ever vigilant in realizing the danger of getting stuck in our words and concepts rather than getting in touch with the reality behind them.  This is true in all of life, but nowhere truer than when we use words to attempt to point toward the Wholly Other that is Ultimate Reality.

Ultimate Reality is the source, substance and sustenance of all that is.  Nothing exists without it.  To be removed from this vital connection would be to instantly cease to exist. We exist because we are in relation to Ultimate Reality, or more precisely, because we exist within it.

Adapted from Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Living, an article first appearing in ONEING, a publication of the Center for Action and Contemplation, Spring 2013, Vol 1, No 1.