The Center for contemplative practice
A Lay Cistercian Looks at Spiritual Reality
THE SIXTY SECOND CATHOLIC: What does reality look like?
You may, or may not, have heard of the book, The One Minutes Manager by Ken Blanchard. It was popular in my day, but, like all fads, it vanished. I thought of it once again as I was trying to come up with a condensed version of some ideas raised in my Lectio Divina meditations (Phil 2:5). I thought of my own spiritual attention span, probably somewhere between fifteen seconds and ten minutes at my optimum. The spiritual attention span is important because it is the rate at which we can focus on things spiritual. I have an attention span as part of my secular existence, but it lasts 5 or 6 seconds.
I am writing about themes with a sixty-second read. You read it and may get thoughts about the subject. You may agree or disagree with these opinions. Your choice. My choice is to make them as they come to me in my Lectio Divina meditations.These are my thoughts and don’t reflect any Cistercian or Lay Cistercian official opinions.
MY ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THREE UNIVERSES YET ONE REALITY
There are three univeses, each one part of the other as one, but each distinctive with different measurements, and each one is real.
The Physical Universe
The physical universe is the one we know the best because it is our framework for living our life. It has matter, energy, time, and is composed of visible and invisible. Without the physical universe all organic life, especially humans would have no platform for survival.
The physical universe contains inorganic and organic life (birds, animals, all living and inorganic gases and rocks). Humans are a part of this. We evolved from this natural progression, call it what you want.
The physical universe existed long before humans began to know that they know. This morphed into the next universe of reality, the Mental Universe.
The Mental Universe
At some point, humans bubbled over the line from animality to rationality, or so says Teilhard de Chardin, scientist and Catholic priest.
Orthodoxy of Teilhard de Chardin: (Part V) (Resurrection, Evolution and the Omega Point)
The question is: where is everybody? This is called Fermi’s Paradox. We in the mental universe are looking at the physical universe and asking where is life out there, much less sentient life? The mental universe is one which gives answers to fulfillment and meaning in life, by knowing what is, and what was.
Also, humans are the only creatures on this known planet to have reason. Why is that?
We have the freedom to choose what is right for us or not, unless coersed by a religion or an ideology.
It is only very recently that humans have invented instruments to measure and search the stars, as well as the atomic structure of matter, and to map out the human genome. Science, far from limiting spirituality, complements it, if understood properly.
The Spiritual Universe
To recap, we find ourselves alive on this rocky ball of gases, able to choose what we want and able to discover every expanding knowledge of all that is. Only humans live in the mental universe.
The spiritual universe is one which gives answers to fulfillment and meaning in life, by knowing what is, and what was and what will be.
Some can see this spiritual universe and some will never be able to do so because of their assumptions about what is real.
This is the universe of where the unknown is a mystery of faith, faith informed by reason, where we find meaning to what is not only visible but what is invisible.
God had to help humans boil over from mere humans to those living in three universes (physical, mental, and spiritual). God’s teaching was to make sense, spiritual sense, to the place the World could never look.
WHY THREE UNIVERSES
God told us that, if we live in three universes, we live in a foreign land while on earth (our destiny is to be with God)
Christ came to show us that the World (two universes), while seemingly answering the questions about purpose in life, can’t provide us with how to prepare to live…Forever.
Christ came to show us the sign of contradiction by adding the spiritual universe. The purpose of life is to love God with all your heart, your whole mind and all yourself and your neighbor as yourself. (Deuteronomy 6 and Matthew 22:38).
When you live in three universes, you can take it with you when you die, all those people, events, animals, sunsets, vacations, that you linked to the love of God and for which you give Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. The God who is, who was, and who will be, now and forever.
All of reality proclaims the love God has for each one of us. All are ultimately one in Christ as Christ is one in God in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
The Center for contemplative practice 