A passionate concern of mine is that we don’t see reality, we only “see through a glass darkly” at best.  One might even say that I am obsessed with this notion as I have found it a valuable insight in my life and believe that it could be relevant to others.  This insight has an humbling impact on me, helping me to realize that when I discourse, or “hold forth” as in this blog, I am not presenting Truth but merely my own perception of “truth.”  If suddenly, the world discovered me and understood this perspective and said, “Aha, this is It!”, then civilization as we know it would immediately collapse.  For this is a perception that is not valid for everyone and certainly not valid for the billions and billions of people who keep this “dog and pony show” afloat with their “less enlightened” outlook on life.

I’ve quoted Anais Nin before, “”We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”  And so what we see in the world, what we say about the world, says a whole lot about us.  Our version of reality is just that, “our version.”  Just yesterday in Huffington Post, I discovered Gangaji who noted: 

People who live their lives unaware that they are telling themselves a story consider their thoughts to be descriptions of reality. If someone else has a conflicting description, that person is considered just to be wrong. It is a leap into maturity to realize that our descriptions of reality are our versions of reality. Certainly there is nothing wrong about a version of reality, but the recognition that it is a version, rather than reality itself, is humbling to our version of ourselves!

And so it all comes down to humility.  Can I find the Grace of God which will allow me to humbly accept that I am a finite being, with a finite grasp on the world, and therefore be a bit more open-minded about those who see the world differently?  T. S. Eliot declared, “The only wisdom we can hope to find is the wisdom of humility.”  And then he added, “And humility is endless.”