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SUTRAS
THE KEY TO THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
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work accepts fundamentally that other perspectives and partial truths - different from its own - may be equally valid.
This understanding is the basis of a sovereign tolerance towards differing views, opinions, religions and philosophies that looks for its equal. The fundamental recognition that we cannot possibly comprehend reality in its entirety56, makes us understand that others can also only see and interpret the world from their particular angle. They voice their views with exactly the same legitimacy we assume for our own positions.
This sovereignty and tolerance make us realize how many philosophies interpret the world from only one particular point of view while at the same time demanding absolute and universal validity for their partial perspective.57
Tolerance towards the partial views of others allows us to accept that even contradictory perspectives might well be in harmony with each other if we only regard them as different aspects of one and the same reality.
Yet partial sight (raya) is far more than a precise analytical instrument. The seven steps do not only help us to examine and broaden new insights, or to arrange reality in such a systematic way that its infinite variety can be more easily understood. The seven steps stimulate us to search for ever more subtle and more fundamental levels of understanding and this inevitably opens our consciousness to broader regions of reality.
56 except in the state of omniscience 57 This ambition often leads to the exclusion of extensive parts of reality.
The missing parts are usually either plainly ignored or substituted by dogmatic beliefs that do not permit questioning. Philosophies or belief-systems with this kind of ambition therefore hardly ever agree with the unrestricted and independent development of our full potential.
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