Robyn E Lebron tic Spiritual research, on the other hand, is verified with direct sense perception where possible, using rigorous reason and insights and personal experience of other investigators (prophets, sages, philosophers and seers) Life by Spiritual Understanding In living by spiritual understanding, we seek to mediate between two levels of reality: immediate and ultimate In day-to-day life, we face a material reality of sense perception This is our everyday reality, which may be termed immediate This reality is finite, definite, and separative: It tends to divide “me” from “you,” “us” from “them,” animate from inanimate, human from lower life forms, and so on In addition, we have a spiritual reality that is totally imperceptible by the cognitive senses Since definite knowledge comes through our cognitive senses, we cannot definitely know the spiritual reality It is not clearly perceptible by our mind because the mind only has perception of its own existence and anything perceptible with our five senses Spiritual wisdom around the world has arrived at a totally unseen, infinitely subtle reality as the underlying truth of the universe, consisting of the subtle and the gross, the animate and the inanimate This is referred to as the ultimate reality, as opposed to the immediate reality of everyday experience What is the nature of this ultimate reality? No one knows because it is not definable in our sense of definitions All definitions spring from our knowledge of the senses The ultimate reality is not sense-perceptible, because if it were, it would be just another object of the universe We perceive the immediate reality as a universe with an infinite number of diverse beings, some animate and some inanimate The ultimate reality is a reality capable of expressing itself in 42