The other day my friend Heidi related a story about a chaplain who visited her while she was in the hospital. He asked her to look out the window and describe what she saw. Then he asked her what she would see if the glass was tinted green, or red, or purple. Of course she would see the same trees, the same streets, the same buildings just in different tones. He went on to point out that the world would not change of course just because the glass she was looking through was different. This he told her is what the different religions are like, they are all looking at the same God, the same source and just seeing it differently because of their different cultures and frames of reference.
I would add that ultimately those different colors are part of a spectrum of light. Ultimately a white or clear glass would include all the colors. I think our view is always by it's very nature of being a single point of view incomplete. Not wrong necessarily but not completely right either.
This reminds me of the Rumi allegory about the blind men viewing the elephant. Do you remember the one? One man is on the trunk, the other feeling the leg, another the side, one the tail, and another the tail all thinking the elephant is different things like a tree trunk or a wall or a piece of rope, etc. I was planning on including the poem here but when I searched for it instead of Rumi's poem coming up instead I found an older version attributed to Buddha, and since this in fact a blog about my relationship with the Buddha I will include this one instead.
In the Buddha's version it is a bunch of monks and priests arguing about the nature of God and he sums up the tale this way, ‘Some monks and priests are attached to their views and having seized hold of them they wrangle, like those who see only one side of a thing.’
I think as humans we are gifted with a unique view of the world. For some of us, the world is a spiritual adventure, for others this view is preposterous, and there are many many other varieties in between. When we stop looking for the one truth, we can start seeing all the different paths towards the One Truth. When coming upon a path that's different from our own rather than taking it upon ourselves to judge them there is another option of seeing the other's point of view as an important piece of the whole. Rather than arguing about which of is right (is the elephant a tree trunk or is the elephant a piece of rope?) we can enlarge our view to include both. For in reality even if we include multiple points of view we are still not able to see the whole truth.
I remember as a child wondering if colors looked the same to everyone. What if my version of sky blue was actually different from other's. I noticed that there is a slight shade difference even just blinking one eye open closed and then the other so what if from person to person there were drastic differences. Perhaps some people didn't like the color orange because it came through as an ugly shade? Of course this line of questioning led to some interesting conversations with my Mom about color blindness and such but ultimately I had to be satisfied with the notion that we really can never know for ourselves how it looks to view the world through someone else's eyes. But we do know we are looking at the same world.
