Needleman's Truth

The concept of another reality, that exists and yet that we are unaware of except for hints and hunches, is one that resounds throughout this blog. I must elaborate that I do not support the concept of dualism. Rather, we create the dualism when we ignore the 'other reality,' thereby forcing us to call it just that. The goal (at least as I understand it now) is to unify the two realities.  Sometimes i just forget to think about those other things, making them the other. In fact a lot of the time. But so this non-other....Needleman summarizes its presence through human time quite nicely in his text The Heart of Philosophy, writing,

"Under the influence of the first stage of philosophy, man conceives of the world about him, the world revealed to his sense in space and time, as a tissue of appearances, more or less illusory. Beyond this world, inaccessible to ordinary knowledge and perception, lies another world, the real world of things in themselves; and the world we live in is at best a shadow, a reflection, of the real world. This idea, in many and varied forms, is the principal governing idea in the history of philosophy. Under one guise or another, its expression and development stretches from the teachings of Pythagoras through Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, the medieval epoch, the Renaissance, and the modern era" (146).

"The idea of a real self behind the appearances forms the central doctrine of every great teaching and tradition throughout the ages. It is always intimately related to the idea of a higher or absolute reality behind the appearances in the whole of nature. In Buddhism the Buddha-nature, enlightened Mind, is the true reality of myself and the universe. In Hinduism, Atman, the real human Self, is Brahman, the Absolute God-Creator-Destroyer-Preserver. In Judaism, the name of God is I AM, and Christianity reconstitutes this idea through the teaching about the Holy Spirit which is the ultimate Self (the "personal God," the Father) acting and suffering within all men...Pythagoras spoke of a central sun of the whole cosmos that was also within each man. Plato writes of the highest Being as like the sun within and outside of man, where reality and the Good are one and are the ultimate active, causal power - the soul in man, the power of which is to harmonize all the functions and appearances within individual human nature. In short, the idea