Understanding Spiritual Reality
The Problem of Reality
I’ve focused on the question of reality for a long time. A decade ago, I wrote a series of weblog posts under the title Reclaiming Reality. Many of those posts were reworked and posted here last year as the Background Series: Reclaiming the Real. The entry essay for this series, and for most of what I write is The Spectacle of the Real. It describes the situation that I see that causes us to become detached from reality through hyperreality and simulated realities.
One of the reasons that I began to write about this topic was the realization that the denial of reality was serving a purpose that was detrimental to people, their organizations, and communities. I have written about this a lot. It is a whole section in Circle of Impact. It is the core idea in the twin books of Seeing Belong The Surface of Things and Where Did Trust Go?
When the way we think begins to deny reality, it fosters a trauma of delusion that becomes concrete in our experience. We don’t lose confidence in some conceptual sense. We lose confidence in a concrete sense. It is not merely an idea but something we feel in our bodies. We may become defensive. Our thinking becomes blurred. We have a hard time listening to people. We make decisions looking to avoid risk, rather than tangibly advance our mission. In our relationships, our capacity for transparency and intimacy becomes compromised. Then, we move into a protective mode by trying to convince ourselves that there is no reality. This is a delusional state that makes it difficult to know what action to take to change what I feel.
Reality can never be understood in its totality in this life. When I wrote about Adam and Eve committing the original sin by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, my purpose was to look at their experience. They gave up a relationship to a world where they could know reality in its whole character. They gave up living in a complete relationship with all that existed for the particulars of what is good and evil. Their knowledge of the world did not expand by their sin, it became restricted and broken. In other words, they lost a sense of meaning that is a product of the relationship that they have to the world. When meaning becomes subjective, or isolated in the personal, we assume that meaning is derived from within us. We cannot see that meaning is an experience of mutuality with people and the world. This is why, in my estimation, reductive thinking became such a powerful force in our time. It flattered our egos while blinding us to the larger picture of the world available to us.
Adam and Eve were the first to believe, not I think, therefore, I am, but “I know, therefore, I know.” It is impossible to know something as a comprehensive whole, using Michael Polanyi’s terminology, if you are also immersed at the same moment in self-reflection of your own personal knowledge. We see in part, we experience in part, and we know in part. Is it any wonder that our world is so fragmented when every one of us lives with a partial understanding of reality? This fragmented understanding of the world is universal.
It means that the power of Abstract thought is not absolute, but rather a limited form of perception. The consequence is “that even the best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray.”
The Problem of Structural Design
I see this pattern of behavior in the inability of leaders and their organizations to understand the social and organizational structures of their own organizations. In their minds, they have a map of the structure. It is a perception, an abstraction, as much defined by what they excluded as by what is included.
As is frequently said, “The map is not the territory.” When they would hire me to address a problem, often that problem was a symptom of a deeper problem. In order for them to fix that problem, it required them to give up their perception of the company’s structure to see a larger reality.
The implications for such a transition are huge when everything is predicated on a minimalistic picture of organizational reality. The least bit of change can disrupt the whole organization. As a result, my clients would live with their problems. The stakes were high, and without a guarantee of significant success, little action would ultimately be taken.
Social and organizational structure is not simply the marriage of Abstract design and the built world. Structure transcends its Abstract/Concrete nature. Bad design has a spiritual effect on people. It does so because the built world, whether it is a building or a room in a school, has a spiritual relationship to each person or child who encounters it. This spiritual relationship is the reality of existence.
My assessment of many organizations is the inability of the people to perceive how their organization’s structure affects them. This is a spiritual problem. In the context of reality, it is a particular problem that may be religious or philosophical, or even cultural. However, it only can make sense when it is understood as a spiritual problem.
As I seek for understanding, I am operating with a view that the spiritual realm is that of reality. It is beyond our capacity to know it completely. Yet, we have access to it at extraordinary levels if we only choose to let ourselves.
In order to approach reality with anticipation and humility, we need a framework of understanding.
The Three Orders of Reality
Spiritual - “the world where all is connected and in a relationship will all.” It is the context of all existence or reality beyond our knowing and experience. It is a transcendent realm where consciousness exists as more than a biological function in human beings. It is the realm of all that has been created.
Intellectual/Philosophical - “the world of human thought.” This is the world of abstraction, ideas, and communication. This is where sensemaking begins. We articulate what we see and experience.
Culture - “the world of human-built culture.” This is the world of concrete action where ideas have been turned into physical representations of the ideas of people. Here we find institutions, cities, art, literature, and every consumer product. This is the realm of personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters.
This is an order of the contexts of
Perception, Understanding, and Engagement with Reality.
The Order of Reality is a discovery process.
We seek to Understand what we Observe (Abstraction) and what we Experience (Concrete)
so that we better understand how our relationship to Reality (Spiritual) functions as a Relationship to the Comprehensive Whole of Existence.
The Nature of Modern Relationships
One of the peculiar outcomes of the modern industrial world is the diminishment of our humanity. In particular, the triumph of Utilitarian philosophy.
Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described utility as:
That property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness ... [or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.
The result is that people become objects of utility for individual and collective benefit. The history of slavery, industrial work, and pornography is that of objectifying persons to gain wealth, power, or pleasure. The influence of utilitarian philosophy creates social movements where relationships are transactional, rather than mutual.
Relationships of this type are competitive and conflict-filled. Whether it is a marriage or a work team, if the members are objectifying the other members to exploit them for personal gain or status, then every person is not real, but an abstract social construct. They are objects to extract some benefit from.
Expand this understanding of relationships of utility to a global society, and we get “consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong.” It is the ethical ground for authoritarian cultural policies. The ends justify the means.
All this operates as a form of society-wide Abstraction that makes it difficult to see the value and dignity of people.
The Spiritual Realm of Relationships
As I have thought through the consequences of postmodern thought and culture, my only conclusion is that it ends up destroying the planet as a way of perfecting society. Listen to the leaders of the various globalist movements that speak openly about depopulation. They see people as objects to be exploited and tossed aside when they no longer serve the interests of those in charge.
This is not just a cultural or intellectual problem. It isn’t just that cultural institutions are corrupt and divisive politically. The Spectacle of the Real describes this world. It is just not happening at a cultural level. It is represented by a deep breakdown of intellectual coherence and integrity where the only concept for society to live by is the will or quest for power. Its effect is that truth, history, values, and faith are not commodities that the cultural institutions use to seduce people to join their movement. Those words which once were living concepts inspiring people to lives of greatness are now social utilities to create a simulated narrative of life today.
We have before us a deeply Spiritual problem. By the Spiritual, I not speaking of the language of religious and cultural institutions. The concept of the spiritual in postmodern usage is a sacralized version of secular narcissistic individualism. Talk with many people about their spirituality, and it becomes clear that it is essentially personal and individualistic. It is a way of building an impenetrable wall of isolation so that one’s own consequentialism is their governing ethic.
As I have looked deeply at this societal problem, I have come to three conclusions about the spiritual.
The Spiritual encompasses all of existence, and this existence is reality. It is the Comprehensive Whole of all that exists. We can access it, but never in its entirety. The problem here goes back to the Cartesian idea that “we think, therefore, we exist.” It centers an understanding of the world not in a transcendent understanding of existence beyond our knowing, but rather what we know by our own empirical understanding is the only reality is can exist. In other words, reality is a social/ intellectual construct that requires authoritarian institutions to manage the conflict that exists between all persons because the individual is the center of being. I believe this is incorrect. Rather, reality is existence. It is spiritual because it is neither simply an Abstract or a Concrete reality, as I wrote about here.
The Spiritual is the realm of relationships. Not just human relationships, but the context in which we relate to everything. Because this environment is relational, we recognize that relationships that are exploitive, utilitarian, and transaction are a corruption of what relationships should be. We know what a healthy relationship isn’t, which means it is possible to understand what a healthy relationship actually is. There are hundreds of thousands of coaches, therapists, and ministers who provide counseling to people on how to create healthy relationships with their partners and teams in an organization. We know that what we have does not work. But our current intellectual and cultural life rejects relationships of respect, trust, and mutuality because it means sharing and sacrifice instead of domination and control.
The Spiritual is the well of consciousness. Consciousness is that which makes the spiritual order and the presence of reality intelligible. Whatever we think and know within the Intellectual or Abstract order of Reality is partial, incomplete, and filled with uncertainty. Consciousness is available to us, but never in a complete form. Not only is consciousness the thought of existence, but it is also the substance of space and time. We become conscious of the presence of space. The dimensions of space take on meaning because we see ourselves in relation to the distance and expanse of space. We become conscious of time’s effect as we experience aging. The experience of time reveals to us in concrete terms the effect of time functioning in space. As a result, consciousness is not simply the mental apprehension of the meaning of transcendent reality. We are conscious that our mental and bodily connection to the world of existence is beyond our complete knowing.
The Order of Reality
As I have shared elsewhere, The Order of Reality is a hierarchical order. The order is this.
Spiritual - “the world where all is connected and in a relationship will all.” It is the context of all existence or reality beyond our knowing and experience. It is a transcendent realm where consciousness exists as more than a biological function in human beings. It is the realm of all that has been created.
Intellectual/Philosophical - “the world of human thought.” This is the world of abstraction, ideas, and communication. This is where sensemaking begins. We articulate what we see and experience.
Culture - “the world of human-built culture.” This is the world of concrete action where ideas have been turned into physical representations of the ideas of people. Here we find institutions, cities, art, literature, and every consumer product. This is the realm of personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters.
As a hierarchy, it means that the Spiritual defines the Intellectual and Philosophical. It is not the reverse. The context of relationships becomes the measure of our ideas and of the cultural institutions and artifacts that we create.
In this sense, I must seek to understand how the Abstract and Concrete must serve the Relational. It is not clear, for it was, our relationships would not be in question.
The next stage of a description of this idea of The Order of Reality is to look at what do these relationships look like. It is a very challenging topic.