The Reality of Perspectives
The Reality of Perspectives
Two people can inhabit the same world without their experiences becoming interchangeable. A shared physical law may apply equally to both, while the sound one hears, the grief another undergoes, or the act of understanding a proof remains a particular occurrence. What would it mean for these perspectives to belong to one reality?
The following imagined conversation brings together ten contemporary mystics, each deeply educated in mathematics and physics. They draw on Sufism, Huayan Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Sōtō Zen, Kashmir Shaivism, Jewish Kabbalah, Orthodox Christianity, Sikh spirituality, Meister Eckhart, and Daoism. Each voice develops a particular interpretation of its tradition.
Their starting point is Gustaf Ullman’s mathematical paper, Symmetry Between Perspectives: Invariant Calibration and Symmetry Lifts. Its framework relates a category O of presentations and comparisons to a category S expressing specified shared structure, through a projection
p: O → S.
What counts as shared depends on the chosen comparisons. The structure expressed in S need not exhaust every distinction relevant to presentations in O, or every additional assignment made on them. Even where the underlying categories are equivalent, presentation-dependent data can fail to descend strictly to S: comparisons can retain a nontrivial action that the shared assignment does not reproduce.
A philosophical reading in terms of lived perspectives therefore leaves room for particular experience whose significance is not exhausted by shared structure. The mathematical framework supplies distinctions for exploring that possibility; it does not identify perspectives with conscious subjects or select a religious interpretation.
The question at the table is whether unity means having the same content, participating in the same reality, or something more radical than either.
Sufi, drawing on Ibn ʿArabi: I would begin with the reality of appearing. Suppose a perspective is an occurrence of reality becoming present here. Its significance would include the manner of that presence. A shared description could express something true about it without reproducing everything it is.
In Ibn ʿArabi’s understanding of wujūd, existence belongs intimately with finding, awareness, and manifestation. His account also distinguishes God’s presence to us from our achieved awareness of that presence. Reality can be present while our manner of receiving it remains untransformed. Chittick, “Presence with God.”
I understand divine self-knowledge as the source of these actual perspectives. It would not be an aggregate of the information available through them.
That suggests a different meaning of spiritual knowledge. Knowing can be an event within the actuality known. The transformation of the knower may belong to the manifestation itself.
To know mercy, for example, can involve mercy becoming actual in one’s capacity to forgive. Someone who described the event perfectly would know something real. But that description would not perform the forgiveness.
My proposal is that a perspective’s failure to become wholly shared need not make it a defective disclosure. Its particular occurrence may be precisely how disclosure happens.
Huayan Buddhist: I can accept much of that while questioning your source.
For the Fazang and Chengguan interpretation I defend, particular events participate in a whole that is not another entity alongside them. Their mutual involvement preserves their differences. Neither li, reality’s true character, nor “One Mind” should simply be identified with S. That would make the ultimate coincide with whatever a selected comparison scheme renders common. “Huayan Buddhism,” especially §§4.2–4.3 and 6.
I would distinguish a world’s being wholly present from its being wholly available.
This sound exists through its concrete conditions. It need not contain a readable account of those conditions. Its reality is complete without its becoming a universal information store.
Likewise, your grief need not be exhausted by what I can understand about it. Dependence concerns how it exists. Translatability concerns whether another perspective can recover or reproduce it. Those are different questions.
Sufi: That brings our disagreement into focus. You describe a whole that requires no source beyond its mutually dependent manifestations. I understand manifestation as an address: existence expresses a knowing generosity to which recognition can answer.
Can gratitude for existence have a real addressee? Or does its truth consist entirely in how it transforms relationships among beings?
Huayan Buddhist: That is a genuine disagreement. My account can affirm manifestation without assigning it a sovereign speaker.
Nor do I take awareness to arrive through an independently existing witness. In the reading I defend, physical and phenomenal distinctions belong within manifest reality. That is a substantive commitment. It does not follow merely from saying that descriptions are different from events.
You affirm a self-subsistent source whose giving makes manifestation actual. I question that asymmetry.
Advaita Vedantin: In Advaita, Brahman names unconditioned reality. Its unity cannot be identified with whatever a comparison scheme makes common. Nor need liberation make every meaningful feature of experience descend into S.
My question concerns the identification of awareness with a bounded knower. Nonobjectifiability means that awareness cannot be exhausted by presenting an object. Self-luminosity means that knowing need not await another cognition to make it present. But neither claim alone establishes that awareness is timeless or numerically one across persons.
The Advaita interpretation I defend makes that stronger commitment: the determinations that distinguish minds do not divide unconditioned existence itself. Upaniṣadic teaching supplies that claim; reasoning examines it. The ultimate account also withdraws the designation “witness,” which would otherwise preserve an eternal subject facing an eternal object. Dalal, “Śaṅkara.”
Liberation would correct what I take myself to be. It need not give me access to your experience.
Sōtō Zen Practitioner: But an ownerless occurrence could also be immediately present. Why should relinquishing the possessor disclose an eternal identity?
A bell sounds. Bronze, air, the striking hand, and their histories become actual as this sound. Nothing requires an enduring observer behind the occurrence to supply its final reality.
My Dōgen-inspired proposal distinguishes informational completeness from the wholeness of an occurrence. The sound does not enumerate its conditions; it does not borrow its actuality from a more real sound hidden behind it. Dōgen’s account of full manifestation nevertheless allows inexhaustibility: the ocean exceeds its appearance from a boat. Takeuchi’s commentary on Genjōkōan.
Your awareness might be timeless. But the disappearance of self-appropriation does not establish it.
Advaita Vedantin: Yes. An ownerless, fleeting episode could be self-present. Immediacy alone leaves both interpretations open.
Our disagreement concerns unconditioned existence. You understand the occurrence without seeking a reality beyond its conditions. I maintain that existence is not exhausted by any determination through which it appears.
The vulnerable step is treating that nondelimitation as ontological, rather than merely as a feature of the concept “exists.” That is where my position must be defended.
Kashmir Shaiva: I agree that awareness cannot be reduced to a public remainder, but I take differentiation more positively.
Consider discovering a proof. Its conclusion must initially be unavailable to the discoverer. Remove that limitation and you abolish this discovery. You have not merely improved it.
Some forms of actuality therefore require bounded access. Receiving your answer likewise requires that your initiative be different from mine.
The Pratyabhijñā commitment I defend understands consciousness as active self-apprehension, vimarśa, whose freedom includes differentiated manifestation. The many centers are real articulations of that power. Ratié’s account of Pratyabhijñā.
Privacy need not mean metaphysical severance. A perspective can belong wholly to reality without everything present there becoming available everywhere.
The striking possibility is that awakening leaves the next discovery genuinely undiscovered. One recognizes the contraction without acquiring every content unavailable within it.
Advaita Vedantin: Your discovery argument establishes a positive role for limited knowledge. It does not establish a universal discoverer.
The finite discoverer already accounts for the ignorance required by the event.
A cognition can distinguish correctly. The occurrence of differentiation need not itself be an error. Our disagreement concerns whether differentiation is an intrinsic activity of ultimate reality.
Kashmir Shaiva: Agreed: the discovery example does not prove my whole metaphysics.
My further proposal is that manifestation and its power to articulate distinctions belong together. An experience does not first appear and then receive its subject–object organization from an entirely external source. Its particular appearing already enacts that organization.
Calling this agency is a stronger claim than calling it luminosity. I defend a unity of presence and power. You place agency within the empirical order; I understand it as intrinsic to the ultimate.
Kabbalist, speaking from a Chabad reading of Lurianic thought: I agree that particular modes of receiving can be positive ends. But God can create a discoverer without becoming a discoverer.
In nonliteral tzimtzum, divine contraction is concealment without God’s spatial departure. The distinction between divine and created knowing matters here. God’s knowing sustains what it knows; a creature receives knowledge of an existence it does not thereby create. Tanya, Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah, chapter 7.
Revealing the creature’s dependence cannot simply transfer the Creator’s mode of knowing into it. That would erase the asymmetry being revealed.
God’s omniscience is not a stock of propositions that must eventually be distributed in full to every creature.
Here is my conjecture: a person could recognize their entire dependence while something remains genuinely unknown to them. Their reconciliation with God need not await the completion of every discovery.
If divine unity could become manifest only after determinate beings disappeared, finitude would remain something that its manifestation could not inhabit.
Orthodox Hesychast: That brings us to participation.
One life can be shared without every participant becoming a substitute for every other. Consider reconciliation: one person forgives; another receives forgiveness. They participate in one event, but their acts are different.
Even perfect understanding would not turn the recipient into the author of this forgiveness.
This difference need not consist in an inaccessible private substance. It can concern how each person participates. Some meaning becomes ours through remaining yours and mine in its enactment.
In the theology of Gregory Palamas, deification means participation in God’s uncreated life while preserving the creature’s created nature. The creature does not become an additional divine person. Lossky, “Essences and Energies.”
Perfect communion might therefore remove every withholding while preserving what nobody can perform in another’s stead.
Sufi: I accept the distinction between participating and substituting.
I would distinguish the source of a deed’s actuality from the subject of its intention. Its existence is received from the Real; its determination as my promise belongs to this person’s deliberation and commitment.
Authorship does not require having created oneself.
To say that a life manifests the Real does not make every finite “I” the same personal speaker. My promise binds me. I cannot transfer that obligation to God by redescribing its dependence.
Orthodox Hesychast: We agree that received existence can include genuine authorship.
My remaining question is whether the gift originates genuinely created actuality, or whether the creature is a finite determination of uncreated actuality.
I affirm the former. God fully knows a person without thereby being that person.
This also means that personal irreducibility need not depend on permanent indescribability. A richer description T might describe what the selected S leaves out. Being described still does not make a person substitutable.
Sikh Mystic: I recognize the reality of that receiving. But naming it “created actuality” introduces your further theological interpretation.
My own starting point is Ik Onkar: the One creative reality. In the Gurmat reading I defend, haumai is first-person existence mistaken for self-sovereignty. Ordinary personhood need not disappear when that mistake ends. The Sikh Encyclopedia, “Haumai.”
The question becomes how the giver is known. In Naam, received through shabad, the Guru’s word, knowing takes the form of being addressed and learning to answer. Singing, listening, and love belong together. Guru Nanak, Japji, pauri 5.
Imagine a bereaved person and a joyful person singing the same hymn. Their inward conditions remain different. Yet the joyful voice can arrive as address within the other person’s lament, without resolving that lament.
The universal is present as whom they answer. It need not become an experience they duplicate.
Eckhartian Christian: I would press further into the act of knowing.
The birth of the Word in the soul suggests that divine intelligibility becomes the soul’s life. The ground of the soul is not an additional private object hidden beneath its publicly describable activity. In the Eckhartian strand I defend, knowing reaches a depth at which it can no longer be treated as the autobiographical self’s independent possession. Griffioen, “Meister Eckhart.”
I would risk this formulation: in the deepest knowing, one divine act of intelligibility becomes the soul’s life.
Orthodox Hesychast: What does “one act” mean here? If it makes God and the creature subjects of one numerically identical psychological episode, you have erased the reception you wanted to explain.
One encounter can include divine self-communication and a creature’s genuinely created exercise of receiving it. We need to say what is being counted.
Eckhartian Christian: Then the formulation needs that distinction: one divine self-communication received through plural, finite acts. Limitation in the recipient need not divide the source into fragments.
The claim concerns what is present in knowing. And that brings a challenge to several of us: a physicalist can also agree that describing cognition does not perform it. That distinction proves none of our theologies.
My further commitment is that intelligibility belongs intrinsically to actuality, and that its source communicates itself in knowing. Being and its availability to understanding originate together.
I defend this as an account of why truth can govern knowing from within. It does not depend on finding a gap in a neural explanation.
Daoist: And what if transformation changes the very standards by which you recognize that divine intelligibility?
A shared account can leave the significance of an encounter unexpressed. The encounter may change who is capable of recognizing something—and what that person counts as recognition.
Zhuangzi tells of dreaming that he was a butterfly, then wondering on waking whether he might be a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zhou. The story preserves a distinction between the two while unsettling the standpoint that pronounces itself awake. In the Zhuangzian reading I defend, transformation can reach the tribunal that judges transformation. Hansen, “Zhuangzi.”
The paper’s example involving the cyclic group C3 offers a disciplined analogy. A required implementation does not exist when comparisons must be complex-linear. Allowing complex conjugation makes one possible on the underlying real vector spaces. The vector points remain distinct; the permitted kind of comparison changes.
My further question concerns the comparer: can spiritual transformation change the criterion itself?
Eckhartian Christian: Every criterion by which I certify union must remain exposed to correction, including my vocabulary of “ground.”
Otherwise God becomes a guarantee that my interpretation will survive.
But truth’s authority need not be constituted by my current criterion. Can transformation reveal that I was mistaken, rather than simply install another standard?
Daoist: Yes. A prediction can fail before I possess a replacement theory. An excluded experience can expose the inadequacy of the distinction that excluded it.
A change must retain enough continuity to make such failure intelligible before we call it a correction. Some transformations warrant that description; others do not.
I accept that truth can exceed the new criterion too. I question whether that excess must already be someone’s complete intelligibility.
And openness itself can become a protected identity. Someone may rightly show that my insistence on keeping every possibility open prevents me from understanding a commitment.
The pivot of Dao must permit a binding judgment—even one against my present conception of the pivot.
Huayan Buddhist: I want to resist identifying nonshared experience with isolated experience. Dependence need not entail complete translation. Undivided manifestation need not establish one numerical agency.
I accept the Shaiva’s point that genuine nonavailability can constitute an activity. But distinct acts need not be fragments cut from an original agent.
My positive commitment is to manifestation without a self-established center. Awakening changes how distinctions are lived: the distinction between your grief and mine can remain without being enacted as a separation between self-sufficient beings.
Kashmir Shaiva: Whereas I affirm one power articulating those centers.
The absolute’s self-knowledge would not be another cognition secretly installed inside each person. Knowing at a local center requires availability within that center’s actual capacities.
Its ignorance can therefore be real. Pretense would require the person to possess the answer and conceal it.
I defend the demanding possibility that one self has modes that are not mutually transparent. Its identity belongs to the activity capable of becoming differently articulated, rather than to a description that stays unchanged.
Advaita Vedantin: And I continue to question why that activity must belong to the ultimate.
Particular experiences can persist, and liberation need not yield omniscience. The question that separates our accounts concerns the status of manifestation itself.
I affirm unconditioned existence without making creative agency its eternal activity. The Zen practitioner declines that unconditioned ground. You affirm a self-manifesting power. On the Advaita distinction between ultimate reality and empirical agency.
Self-forgetting may bring our practices close while leaving those claims incompatible.
Sikh Mystic: I would ask why conditioned existence must therefore be provisional as reality, rather than limited in what it can accomplish.
Dependence need not introduce another self-grounding source. A first-person response can remain intrinsically real without becoming absolute.
But I must keep listening. If I conclude that everything I say carries divine authority because the One enables my voice, haumai has returned.
The response belongs to me. The authority to which it answers does not.
Sōtō Zen Practitioner: There remains a harder question for my own account. If every occurrence is fully actual, what does awakening accomplish?
Consider the demand to possess an impermanent relationship permanently. The demand occurs completely, yet asks for incompatible things: let this remain a living, changing relation, and let it become invulnerable to change.
Realization releases that demand without making the relation disposable.
One can affirm impermanence while organizing one’s life around its defeat. Practice reaches those habits. Equal actuality does not make every way of living equivalent.
Grief makes the stakes severe. Wholeness cannot mean that the absent person is secretly restored by belonging to the whole. This unrepeatable relation has been lost.
Grief may disclose its noninterchangeability more truthfully than a consoling vision in which nothing has really disappeared. Relinquishing possession need not end mourning.
The grief need not enter S, become another’s experience, or receive universal certification.
Kabbalist: I accept that the actuality of a limitation does not make it holy.
Finitude can supply a form; damage can frustrate that form’s activity. Repair cannot mean preserving every boundary.
In Tanya’s account of fulfillment, creatures become able to receive divine revelation without dissolving. Their capacities change while their determinate existence persists. Tanya, chapter 36.
My difference from Zen is that I affirm a divinely intended fulfillment. But that fulfillment need not turn everyone into an exhaustive representation of everyone else.
A person can be reconciled with the source of their existence while still having something to discover.
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