The World

The physical world as we ordinarily see it is basically empty, and populated only by material objects. It is a material reduction of manifestation, with forms that are visible, but without their ground and true nature. This world produces the worldview of the ego, the ground for greed and aggression, possessiveness of material objects, and adulation of power. The emergence of divine love challenges this view and highlights the ego structures that embody it. (Inner Journey Home, pg 287)

All the dimensions of the journey of descent reveal the absolute to be immanent in manifestation, but the quintessential divulges perfect and complete immanence. The manifest world is the crystal radiance of the absolute that is perfectly coemergent with its emptiness, with no distance to separate them. Yet it leaves transcendence untouched; for even though the world is inseparable from the absolute, it cannot and does not contaminate its simplicity and emptiness. The absolute remains in its absolute purity, unmixed and undefiled, even though it is completely mixed with manifestation … The quintessence is the complete immanence of the absolute, yet it is transcendence. We can say that in the quintessence transcendence and immanence meet. Or alternately, the concepts of transcendence and immanence lose their differentiating boundaries at the culmination of the journey of descent. (Inner Journey Home, pg 439)

What we normally call the world is nothing but Reality seen with obscurations veiling its underlying ground and substance. The conventional world is nothing but Reality shorn of its true nature. Only the differentiating outlines of the forms of Reality are then left for our conventional perception. Since we perceive these outlines without the ground that manifests them we believe they are separate and autonomously existing objects. The ground that is their source of manifestation is what unifies them, and so without it in our experience we simply perceive objects in physical space. This is the essence of reification, taking a manifest and inseparable form and holding it in the mind as a separate self-existing object. In other words, what we call the world is nothing but the reification of the forms of Reality. (Inner Journey Home, pg 444)

World and Perspectives

The way we ordinarily see the world is not the way it really is because we see it from the perspective of our judgments and preferences, our likes and dislikes, our fears and our ideas of how things should be. So to see things as they really are, which is to see things objectively, we have to put these aside -- in other words, we have to let go of our minds. Seeing things objectively means that it doesn't matter whether we think what we're looking at is good or bad -- it means just seeing it as it is. If a scientist is conducting an experiment, he doesn't say, "I don't like this so I'll ignore it." He may not personally care for the results because they don't confirm his theory, but pure science means seeing things the way they really are. If he says he is not going to pay attention to the experiment because he doesn't like it, that is not science. Yet this is the way most of us deal with reality, inwardly and outwardly. (Facets of Unity, pg 141)