a home is not a house

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in; but if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." -I John 1:8,9


As I began reading the first chapter of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth, I began thinking about other theories that attempt to explain reality. In all those that I chose to explore, a common theme is self-deception and its detriments. Each theory offers a slightly different perspective, and all hold at least something useful. Once you've finished, I'd love to hear what you think.


Plato's Theory of Forms suggests the existence of a level of reality or "world" inhabited by the ideal or archetypal forms of all things and concepts. This is more or less his idea of Heaven, where the absolute form of everything exists. Under this theory, a form is the "common nature" possessed by a group of things or concepts, and is eternal and changeless, but exists with changeable matter to produce the examples we perceive in the temporal world. Additionally, the Analogy of the Divided Line distinguishes between lower forms, the real items of which ordinary particular items we see around us are reflections, and higher forms, characterized by priori, that knowledge of them does not depend upon experience of particulars or even on ideas of perpetually well-known particulars.


Here, the temporal world is opinion, as illustrated in the Allegory of the Cave; just as the prisoners observing shadows cast on the wall believe such likenesses are the actual objects or reality, we are seeing shadows of forms rather than the absolute forms themselves. When we have false beliefs about the nature of absolute reality in each thing or concept we encounter, Plato places us as unable to reason. The prisoners suffer this gap in reality because they are bound and unable to move, and although we may be physically unhindered, Plato explains our metaphoric chains with the Metaphor of the Sun.


He states, "when the soul is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason, but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts into opinions hither and thither and again seems as if it lacked reason."


Rene Descartes is perhaps most famous for reasoning, "I think, therefore I am." As far as he was concerned, Plato's concept of our experienced world as shadows of absolute forms is skewed. Descartes saw thinking as the only thing that cannot be doubted, and that through perception and deduction, the judgement of the mind is the only means of explanation and understanding of our environment. Even further, he saw Plato's argument for an external world as absurdly placing sensory perceptions as involuntary and external to the senses.


He uses the example of speaking, postulating that although, "most philosophers assure us that sound is nothing other than a certain vibration of air that strikes against our ears...if our sense of hearing were to report to our mind the true image of its object, then, instead of causing us to conceive of sound, it would have to cause us to conceive of the motion of the parts of air that then vibrate against our ears." With this premise guiding his work, through the use of mathematics and calculations regarding the properties of light, Descartes even attests "that the face of the heaven...must appear to its inhabitants completely like that of our world." We will get to heaven in a little bit.


In the segment of the first chapter entitled "Spirituality and Religion", Tolle's discussion of ego offers an alternative to both Descartes' and Plato's theories of existence and reality. Ego, he attests, is an identification with form, primarily those of thoughts. When we remain in the realm of our own thoughts, we are trapped from recognizing oneness, much less attaining it. The relative reality of evil is, then, "complete identification with form...physical, thought, and emotional."


Such an unawareness of oneness with all others characterizes the dysfunction afflicting the "normal" consciousness of most humans. This original sin, of missing the mark of human existence, this maya, the veil of delusion, and this dukkha, mind-generated suffering and dissatisfaction, all result from such egocentric ignorance. This is living in Plato's cave and treating shadows as reality.


Basic tenants of Christianity provide yet another set of insights. The Book of Common Prayer, contains "An Outline of the Faith: the Catechism". It begins by reminding us that we are part of God's creation and made in His image. As such, we have been given the freedom to love, create, and reason, but we are separate from each other and from Him because we have misused this gift. This disconnectedness is similar to Tolle's ego; in using our God-given reasoning, skill, memory, and logic to unintended, self-serving ends, we distance ourselves from the essential oneness we began with and perpetuate our own ignorance.


In this text, sin is defined as a "distortion of the will of God that compromises our relationship with all creation." When our relationship with God, the unifier of the world, suffers, we lose our liberty by becoming entrapped by our egotistical, individualistic pursuits. This tenant is reflected not only in Tolle's description of ego, but also in Plato's Allegory of the Sun; when we ensnare ourselves in false beliefs of reality, we lose our connection with the unifying absolute. In Christianity, because we have been made in the image of God, we are all a part of the communion of saints, the whole family of God, and as such, we must honor and love each other as we love ourselves.


Hebrews 9:24 explains that, "Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are figures of the true; but into heaven itself." In this pointed distinction between the trueness of heaven and its contents and the world we experience, the parallel to Plato's World of Forms is uncanny. When we transcend our bodies, we are subject to the everlasting life that comes with ascension into heaven, "a new existence in which we are united...in the joy of fully loving and knowing God and each other."


I'll leave you with some words from Descartes.


"I..aspired as much as any one to reach heaven; the way is not less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead to heaven are above..the impotency of my reason. In order competently to undertake their examination, there was need of some special help from heaven, and of being more than man."


Regardless of route, the pursuit of heaven seems to require being more than man and his ego. On spiritual pilgrimage, the search for home is anything but physical or esoteric; to play with an old adage, a home is not a house. Coming home is a return to the inherent oneness unfettered by the ignorance of ego.