That which can be seen objectively is superficial

That which is deep cannot be objectified

There are fundamentally two ways to see the world, to understand the world. One way is objectively, and by this we mean looking at the world in a way which others can agree upon. We come to a consensus as to the reality of life. This is the way of the West, the way of science, of knowledge. Since the so-called enlightenment in the West, we have become truly wedded to the objective view of the world. We dissect things, we look at the physical world, the anatomy of life, and we try to understand the processes as a secondary phenomenon, the physiology of life. But all of this is done in an objective way, cutting things apart, pointing at things. Everything has to be tangible, provable, repeatable. This is the objective approach. And it yields many benefits. When we are agreed upon something we can work together, we can develop technology, we can make life more comfortable, a little more secure. All of this is the way of the objective perspective. But there is a fundamental difficulty: that which is accessible to the objective view is always superficial. It is on the surface. It is trivial, mundane, of no real significance. And there is a great part of us which is yearning for depth. It is yearning for deepest possible truth. It is yearning for god.

This depth, the depth of our being, the depth of existence, is not accessible to the objective perspective. It cannot be seen in that way. We can feel it, we can sense it in the moment, but we cannot objectify it. There is nothing solid that we can point to, nothing quite tangible to grab hold of. It is a subjective experience. So with all that is important in life, if we are to appreciate it, live it, we have to let go of the need to be objective. We have to accept that our actual experience of life is subjective and it always has been and it always will be.

With this subjective perspective, everything has a different quality. Things are not so rational. Nothing can be classified. Nothing can be labelled. We cannot compare things. We cannot measure things. We cannot put a word to that which is significant. Neither can we put a number to it. We cannot weigh it. It has no metric. This is the great difficulty that we face. The truth and the absolute is subjective, and we cannot really communicate it, not explicitly. We cannot talk about it, except in poetry, with allusions, with parables. We can hint at it indirectly, we can dance it, we can paint it, we can sing of it, but we cannot hold a rational discussion about it. That which is essential is not rational. It cannot be rationalised. It is not accessible to the rational mind at all.

See the simple truth of your life, that everything that is important is irrational. How can you quantify love? How can you measure when you are looking into someone’s eyes openly? What can be said? And if you have known those depths that meditation can take one to – that place which is beyond words, the great silence, the utter stillness, the unbounded space, the absolute, god – if you have touched that space, if you have your own subjective experience of it, what is there to say? What can be conveyed of it to another who has not experienced it for themself? It is beyond words. So we can only give hints. The subtle aroma may come through us, that suchness that pervades the whole of existence like a perfume. In this way, god can speak to us and through us. But there is nothing to hold onto. There is no object, nothing to measure, nothing to compare, nothing to label, classify. There is this being, the essence of all that is, within each of us.