We Choose Our Realities

We choose our realities.  I do not mean this in some informal way.  We choose our realities--our existences--in as profound and substantial a way as anything else we might think of.  This is the acceptance of a state to which this blog's logic ("roused, readied, reaped") leads us inevitably.  As a matter to be examined, we can conceive of our lives as bounded by our limited horizons of understanding, or as bounded by a template of infinitudes that we understand as extending without limit or--what amounts to the same thing--finding limit in conjectures of hyper-dimensions that are by virtual definition beyond our experience.

Time, as we conceptualize it, continues unceasingly--or it doesn't.  Time, as we experience it, continues unceasingly--or it doesn't.  The same is true for all dimensions of our understanding.  If we call our conceptualizations "true," we might be correct, but we have made of ourselves godlings.  If we call our experiences "true," we might be correct, but we have made of ourselves godlings.  In either event--or if we vacillate between the two modes--we are choosing our existences.  We are choosing our realities.

There is, however, a reality.  We address our existences as images--perceptions, memories, conceptualizations, experiences--perhaps true and perhaps false.  We decide if existence can be trusted because of whether or not our experiences can be trusted.  It is not at all surprising that we might be wary.  If a single element of a momentary experience-field is false, the result might be fatal or damning to us--or at least we feel that way.

In our unsurprising desire for self-preservation, we collect to ourselves hoards of memories, experiences, and perceptions that constitute our self-pronounced "lives."  We guard them against the imagined encroachment of falsehood.  The desire to expend energy and ability in such a way is understandable, yet it is the chance to expend effort in protecting that something called a "life" that is the reward.  We might thereby be simultaneously "rewarded" with a collection of treasured falsehood.

What then is the true "reality," that inimitable thing of which life consists?  Every experience might be false, but each experience is understandable to us only in that the vista of any given moment consists of understandable elements perhaps contaminated by one or more falsehoods.  The vista of our fears, however, must consist of the truths of any imagery in order to elicit any response from us to begin with.  A fearsome hound that might or might not exist must look like that wondrous creature of God before we can be tormented by the thought of it.

Life is one thing and one thing only--enlargement on instants of truth.  A person who is not experiencing an instance of truth is not alive.  To be alive is truth.  To exist is truth.

And so it is in the teachings of Jesus.  We have been exercised for millennia (and unlikely to stop) about the Holy Spirit.  We do, however, have the chance to look calmly at the gospels and see what Jesus said.  A person might harbor any number of ideas about the Holy Spirit (and harbor a cache of wincing moments of wondering about having perhaps committed The Unforgivable Sin Jesus associates with the Holy Spirit.)  Unavoidably, however, a student of the teachings of Jesus must confront the idea that the Spirit of God is to be understood in connection with the most basic of understandings about life and existence.

And yet when Jesus speaks at length about the topic in John, he does not speak of spiritual gifts, or of empowerment, or of the guidance of the Church as an institution, or of revivals--at least those things are not at all what Jesus emphasizes.

Read for yourself.  In the great dissertation at the end of John, Jesus speaks of the "Spirit of truth."  Truth is what life is.  Truth is what reality is.  In spite of our untruthfulness, in spite of our fascination with untruthfulness, life--whether we like it or not, whether we resist it or not--is the scattering, glittering profusion of elements of truthfulness.