L.J. Milone shares a reflection on the Second Sunday of Easter Gospel reading from John, chapter 20.
Spiritually speaking, objectivity comes from authentic subjectivity, which happens by the purification of the subject’s biases and illusions.
What do we believe today? Whom do we trust? There’s fake news all over the place. Or is there? If one were to peruse social media – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest – vastly conflicting accounts of the same incident might appear. How are we ever to gain objectivity? How can we know what is real? In this regard, I am struck by a statement from the Jesuit, philosopher, and theologian Bernard Lonergan. He once wrote, “Objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.” No one can know objective truth without seeing beyond all the illusions that have encrusted our real identities.
Most of us live a kind of robotic existence. We have mental-emotional hot-buttons. When someone, for instance, says some, anything about the president, they are pushing one of our buttons. We may react positively or negatively, but it is a button nevertheless. We are not free. Instead, we seem to prefer the same tight loops of thought-feeling-behavior to reality. We are so enmeshed with our ideas about values, gender, social expectations, ways of doing things, politics, and religious beliefs that we do not see how suffocating our psychological prisons have become. We are not open to objective truth. Neither is Thomas in the Gospel.
When the other disciples testify to seeing the Risen Jesus, Thomas says he will believe only what his eyes and ears tell him. He represents a materialist worldview, which is the default worldview in our society. He is attached to a certain way of knowing. Our spiritual tradition affirms, though, that all suffering comes from attachments, which are over-identifications to what we think we are. A lot of our pain comes from people over-identifying with a race, a nation, a religion, an ethnicity, a political viewpoint, a political party, or even being busy. The identities we manufacture keep us pivoted away from the reality of God, from objectivity, and locked in very limited and often illusory worlds. Our problem is we over-identify with everything.
If objectivity comes from authentic subjectivity, then the purification of the subject’s biases is absolutely necessary. We have to let the ego’s illusions be stripped away. Authentic subjectivity refers to the soul purified of all bias and prejudice. There is a need to cleanse the lens of selfhood to see reality as it is. Truth is when mind conforms to reality, not when our minds look to bend reality to our way of thinking. The point is to dis-identify with everything we think we are – including our ways of perceiving, our judgments, our opinions, in short, our thinking – to awaken to who we really are.
What are some of these illusions? In America today, nostalgia for a past when America was presumably great blinds us. There was no such time. We were always a nation all-too-willing to oppress people of color, often to the benefit of the rich. Additionally, we cling to bias against immigrants and Muslims. Even more, without recognizing white privilege, white people may be the most blind of all people. We become more self-deluded the more privileged we become. So, wealth, having money and financial assets, grossly warps our perception of reality.
The authentic subject is the kind of person who can know objectively, once attachment to beliefs, politics, or nationality is surrendered. Such a person is a mystic, for she or he, bereft of illusions supporting injustice discovers our reality is the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings, that is, our deepest identity is found in the mystery of God who is always sides with the poor.
The Risen Jesus appears to the disciples again and this time Thomas is present. After seeing Jesus, Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” He now knows the truth, only after Jesus has shattered his previous way of knowing by simply appearing before him. Jesus then says, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” To dis-identify with the ego and so realize the objective truth of our innermost reality as the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings, we must have faith. It takes pure faith to stop reinforcing these attachments by mental chatter and complaining. It takes faith to let the divine nothing to show us the truth, which may not be what we like or want. It’s an unconditional openness to the mystery of God even when it contradicts our private opinions and beliefs. Of course, that’s not being objective. We’re seeing reality not as it is, but as we are. It takes faith in the Risen Jesus to know objectively.