Transcending Sense Perception

Our senses make us perceive the world as a mindless aggregation of individual beings, animate and inanimate. Ordinarily, this perception dominates the state of the human mind and prevents us from noticing the common threads that connect us. If we do not educate to reach beyond our minds, we will get bogged down in the domain of duality and multiplicity and there will not be any appreciation of our shared humanity.

In fact the purpose of education is to take us beyond our multiple mental constructs and obvious sense perceptions and replace them all with the best understanding of our collectivity.

In the material world, science has taken us beyond the superficiality of sense perception. Our senses perceive matter as infinitely diverse. Science shows us that this immense diversity is underlain by a common thread, energy; matter is energy congealed. It is energy that becomes the sub-atomic particles which it causes to configure differently in the atoms of different elements. It is energy which causes the different elements to combine in infinite diversity of various compounds. Imagine the material benefits to humanity accruing from public education in science!

Spirituality is about human connectivity through love and compassion. In our spiritual search, we start with the mental constructs available from our particular religion and/or culture. Our spiritual scientists have shown that the core spirituality of our religions is capable of leading us beyond the obvious and perceptible forms of our religions to the Light of the One Truth beyond duality. Imagine the human benefits of love and compassion that can accrue to the world if education spreads this understanding!

A recent book entitled Paths to Transcendence is a notable study of such spiritual science. It is based upon the doctoral thesis of its author Reza Shah-Kazemi at the University of Kent. He studied three seers from diverse backgrounds, Shankara from Hinduism, Ibn Arabi from Islam and Meister Eckhart from Christianity. Of note is the prime conclusion, “…that, based upon the pronouncements of the mystics studied here, one can justifiably speak of a single transcendent essence of spiritual realization, whatever be the religious starting point” (Shah-Kazemi, Reza, Paths to Transcendence, World Wisdom, Bloomingdale IN, 2006, p. 3).