Theos-Talk Archives (August 1995 Message tl00479)

Liesel:

>Theosophists are forever talking about
>Reality, & with it they mean the reality that comes when one is
>centered in the spirit rather than in the lower personality.
>I'm at a loss to reconcile this with that I believe - that
>reality is relative. To me, whatever & however you happen to
>perceive, that's your reality for that moment.

If you take "reality" to mean the way things are, apart from your
personal perception of them, then it is relative. On a particular
world or plane, we each have our subjective preception of life.
For that world, though, there is the collective behavior of things,
called "laws", and those laws don't care what we think or feel.
The world has a consistent set of rules and life operates according
to them. Is that pure objectivity? No. It's relative objectivity.
On other worlds, we face different "realities," and in a bigger
since, our world, as a being in its own right, has its own subjective
state, as it tries to fit into the context of the world it finds
itself in.

>I can accept
>that as you grow more & more spiritual your perception of the
>world (whatever that encompasses) changes into something which
>contains more wisdom, detachment, compassion & etc. The
>perception becomes more mature & more at one with the All. But
>it's still a subjective reality. Devachan is subjective. Do you
>know an answer to this one? Does anybody?

Manifest life, here on the earth, when we're embodied and clothe
ourselves in all our seven principles, we have the closest thing
to objectivity that we'll get. Out of incarnation, in the
devachan, we're in a much more subjective state, because the
collective will of other living things on earth does not block
what we would do. In the devachan, we act as if in a dream world,
creating and populating the scenes before us; we're not subject to
the contrary desires and wishes of others to oppose what we would do.
Absolute objectivity, I'd suggest, is impossible.

-- Eldon