It is easy to agree on objective matters.

When an object is viewed by a group of people it is rare for any individual in the group to disagree on the fact that the object exists and possesses specific physical properties. The status of a “thing” and a “property” is easily understood, perhaps because they are so often discussed and agreed upon.

When we wish to understand something abstract, we reach for the metaphor of object, but we are so accustomed to this metaphor we fail to recognize it is a metaphor.

Many, many of us have only this one metaphor — the object with properties — for understanding everything. For such people truth and objectivity are identical, and when someone attempts to communicate a different truth-form, the content is reduced to things-and-properties, and often the meaning is entirely lost.

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We’ve come to the point where we believe agreement is possible only where agreement is nearly effortless. But what if the most important agreements are difficult to reach and depend on mutual trust? What if objectivity is only the foundation of truth, not its essence?

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The subjective, reduced to object-form, becomes one’s private feelings and opinions about particular things, confined to a person’s own mind, which is understood spatially to exist in one’s own head.

But really: what object isn’t known through experience as experience? Isn’t our knowing also experienced? In a sense, our objective universe is contained entirely within our own experience — our mind? Religious Perspective 101. The first line of the Dhammapada: “All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”

But before we go nuts (as everyone seems to the first time they grasp the significance of this completely irrefutable fact), and proceed to reduce the entirety of existence to exclusively spiritual terms (aka succumb to idealism), consider the question of whether you really love anything/anyone for its phenomenal properties. Do you not throw independent existence behind the apparent being of all your loves? Can we love our sensory experiences, with all alterity (otherness) subtracted out?

The spiritual person knows the future and past are enfolded in the present, the other together with one’s own passions is really only ego, and all the things in vast space is the interpretation of appearance. The ego “dissolves” into all that is, because the I and all are the same. The religious person differs from the spiritual person in desiring the unprovable existence of the Other for the sake of love.

Spiritualism prefers isolation to the risk of impingement. Religion prefers the risk of impingement to the certainty of isolation.

Spiritualism only seems exotic in contrast to materialism. In fact it is the subtraction of all transcendent being from one’s interpretation of existence. It is a preference for denial of otherness. It is a reductive denial of the reality of the constant experience of otherness, a reality which does not have the form of objectivity, but is, nonetheless, a reality.

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To have truth, we have to take seriously the importance of experiencing the entirety of what is, understanding each entity on its own terms, being willing to be shown, and being ready to show. Synesis, aletheia, logos.

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Faith knows that sometimes we need to be shown before we see.

Faith is fulfilled when what is shown is actually seen.

But there has to be a genuine expectation that one will see, otherwise the faith is misplaced and cannot do its work.