Seeing What Is Real
Seeing What Is Real
Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent – March 18, 2020
A spiritual practice is a contemplative practice if it helps you see the truth about God, self, others, and the world. Life is as simple – and as painfully difficult – as that.
Most persons never question their perception of the truth. They experience life through their own filters (attachments, beliefs, fears) and never take time or energy to consider the filters. And for many persons, over the course of a lifetime, their filters never change. They die in old age clutching the same filters through which they saw God, self, others, and the world when they were 10 years old.
The role of spiritual practice is to help us cut through the illusions of life. A good spiritual practice will help you see what is real more clearly. When you see, you may not like what you see, but then, liking what you see is not the point. Do you want to see the truth? Or are you content to continue seeing an illusion?
[Before any of us start thinking of contemporary examples from culture – and there are plenty, to be sure – realize that we all have our own blindness and deafness. We all, in different ways, reinforce what we want to confirm, and shut out that which we wish to avoid. So don’t go tossing too many stones at this point!]
So I say, find spiritual practices that help you to see . . . not that make you feel better, not that confirm what you already believe, not that create suspicion, not that insulate you from reality. In fact, those would not be true spiritual, contemplative practices. Discover for yourself contemplative practices that help you to see what is real, what is true.
When you come to that place, you will begin to see more love than fear . . . more compassion than hatred . . . more rootedness than panic . . . more wholeness than scatteredness.
In his own unique way, here is how Anthony de Mello begins to get at these ideas:
Look at it this way: You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. If you wish to see them as they are you must attend to your attachments and the fears that your attachments generate. Because when you look at life it is these attachments and fears that will decide what you will notice and what you block out. Whatever you notice then commands your attention. And since your looking has been selective you have an illusory version of the things and people around you. The more you live with this distorted version the more you become convinced that it is the only true picture of the world because your attachments and fears continue to process incoming data in a way that will reinforce your picture. This is what gives origin to your beliefs: fixed, unchanging ways of looking at a reality which is not fixed and unchanging at all but in movement and change. So it is no longer the real world that you interact with and love but a world created by your head. It is only when you drop your beliefs, your fears and the attachments that breed them that you will be freed from the insensitivity that makes you so deaf and blind to yourself and to the world.
[Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello, (New York: Doubleday, 1992).]
For Reflection:
o Anthony de Mello calls the selective way we see life “illusory” and “distorted.” Thomas Merton called it our “radical falsity.” It is not based in reality, in the truth of God, of others, or in our own truth.
o Letting go of these illusions and falsities is the most difficult work we will do in our lives. It is, however, the essential work of spiritual growth.
o What spiritual practices help me see what is real? What contemplative practices help me cut through the illusions and falsities of the world?
Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent – March 18, 2020
A spiritual practice is a contemplative practice if it helps you see the truth about God, self, others, and the world. Life is as simple – and as painfully difficult – as that.
Most persons never question their perception of the truth. They experience life through their own filters (attachments, beliefs, fears) and never take time or energy to consider the filters. And for many persons, over the course of a lifetime, their filters never change. They die in old age clutching the same filters through which they saw God, self, others, and the world when they were 10 years old.
The role of spiritual practice is to help us cut through the illusions of life. A good spiritual practice will help you see what is real more clearly. When you see, you may not like what you see, but then, liking what you see is not the point. Do you want to see the truth? Or are you content to continue seeing an illusion?
[Before any of us start thinking of contemporary examples from culture – and there are plenty, to be sure – realize that we all have our own blindness and deafness. We all, in different ways, reinforce what we want to confirm, and shut out that which we wish to avoid. So don’t go tossing too many stones at this point!]
So I say, find spiritual practices that help you to see . . . not that make you feel better, not that confirm what you already believe, not that create suspicion, not that insulate you from reality. In fact, those would not be true spiritual, contemplative practices. Discover for yourself contemplative practices that help you to see what is real, what is true.
When you come to that place, you will begin to see more love than fear . . . more compassion than hatred . . . more rootedness than panic . . . more wholeness than scatteredness.
In his own unique way, here is how Anthony de Mello begins to get at these ideas:
Look at it this way: You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. If you wish to see them as they are you must attend to your attachments and the fears that your attachments generate. Because when you look at life it is these attachments and fears that will decide what you will notice and what you block out. Whatever you notice then commands your attention. And since your looking has been selective you have an illusory version of the things and people around you. The more you live with this distorted version the more you become convinced that it is the only true picture of the world because your attachments and fears continue to process incoming data in a way that will reinforce your picture. This is what gives origin to your beliefs: fixed, unchanging ways of looking at a reality which is not fixed and unchanging at all but in movement and change. So it is no longer the real world that you interact with and love but a world created by your head. It is only when you drop your beliefs, your fears and the attachments that breed them that you will be freed from the insensitivity that makes you so deaf and blind to yourself and to the world.
[Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello, (New York: Doubleday, 1992).]
For Reflection:
o Anthony de Mello calls the selective way we see life “illusory” and “distorted.” Thomas Merton called it our “radical falsity.” It is not based in reality, in the truth of God, of others, or in our own truth.
o Letting go of these illusions and falsities is the most difficult work we will do in our lives. It is, however, the essential work of spiritual growth.
o What spiritual practices help me see what is real? What contemplative practices help me cut through the illusions and falsities of the world?
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