S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 2 5 Diego Pérez Lasserre dangerous positionality because it can easily lead to affirming that the world is constituted by human subjectivity. That is, we create the world from our horizon of meaning, and therefore that truth is some arbitrary human construction that we then project onto the world. As Heidegger himself comments when reviewing Nietzsche’s thought (1993, 3:29–30), the recognition of the projective nature of human understanding leads to asserting, knowing means to take hold of what shows itself, to guard the sight as the ‘view’ that something proffers, the ‘image’ in the… sense of phantasia. In knowing, what is true is held fast; what shows itself, the image, is taken up and into possession; what is true is the in-formed image. Truth is imaging. By this he means that the concept of truth designates the human perception of his own projections onto the world and not something that is independent of human nature. The danger, then, is that of nihilism (Heidegger 1993, 3:25). If there are no legitimate or adequate horizons from which to understand the world, then every interpretation that we project onto it is equally unworthy. If an apple is understood as a divine creation or as an improvised weapon to throw at someone, we do not like is irrelevant. Nothing really matters in this universe because the world that we perceive isn’t even real. In synthesis, modern and contemporary philosophers, such as Kant and Heidegger, led us to recognize the hermeneutical nature of human understanding. That is, we human beings understand the world from a series of concepts that we inherited from tradition, cultural and familiar context, among other circumstances. We call those series of concepts from which we apprehend the world horizon of meaning. This recognition is what allows us to affirm that what is shown to our mind as real and coming from out there, is a mixture between what is presented to our senses and what is projected from our horizon of meaning. The main problems that we observe in this thematization of human understanding are that it does not provide a mechanism for determining the legitimacy and truthfulness of different horizons of meaning (and therefore that it leads to nihilism), and that it does not articulate the relation between the hermeneutical nature of understanding and human happiness (which, according to our horizon of meaning, is the main task of philosophy). 3 Truth of the World vs Images of the World: The Mystical Perspective In this section, we will thematize the projective nature of human understanding from a spiritual perspective and then explain the subjective disposition that is needed to perceive the truth of the world (instead of the projections we throw at it). We intend to achieve these tasks through the revision of the ideas set forth by David R. Hawkins. David R. Hawkins, a contemporary American mystic [2], who considered himself as part of the non-dual metaphysical position termed “Devotional non-duality” (a form of Advaita Vedānta) [3], had as a premise an idea quite similar to the one revised in the previous section: The image of the world that we perceive through our mind has nothing to do with the reality of that, which is perceived. His argument goes something as follows: we human beings perceive the world through our senses. That information is then processed by our mind and an (intellectual) image of that, which is being perceived is elaborated and presented to our consciousness. We then, out of naivete, assume that such an image of the world is an accurate depiction of the world as such. That is, we believe that the world is as it is presented to our consciousness. The problem is that this assumption is not correct. It doesn’t consider that, in the process of synthesis of what the senses report, the human mind adds some elements of its own to the image of the world it produces. However, we as human beings are usually not aware of this, so we bluntly assume the reality of such image [4]. According to Hawkins (2015, sec. 3956), because the mind, by virtue of its innate structure, is unable to differentiate perception from essence, or res cogitans (interna) from res extensa (externa), it makes the naïve assumption that it experiences and therefore knows ‘reality’, and that other viewpoints must therefore be ‘wrong’. This phenomenon constitutes illusion, which is the automatic consequence of the limitation resulting from the mental process. Differently put, the human mind is innately innocent, and it is therefore incapable, in and of itself, to distinguish between what it is receiving from the world (what is there) and what it contributes by way of projection in every act of understanding. This assertion, though coming from a spiritual context, is surprisingly hermeneutical. What Hawkins seems to be in-
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