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

H.G. Wells and the Idea of the Superman

So, I've been reading this H.G. Wells book. Most people assume it's one of the classics. But to be honest, like everyone else I've talked to so far, I had never heard of "Star-Begotten," released in 1937. I shouldn't be surprised, really, that this text discusses the some of the more philosophical points of religion and Nietzsche's Superman. 'Why not?,' you ask. Well, H.G. Wells was friends with that whole cliquey of philosophically pondering fantasy sci-fi writers from the early 1900's = C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, E.R.R. Eddison, (geeze dudes: what's with all the initials?) Olaf Stapledon, and others. So here I am, getting towards the end of the book, and I come upon the following passages:

"It banishes Thunderclap's nightmare of a lot of little active hobgoblins swarming and multiplying and desecrating our homes and everything that has made human life et cetera. In the place of that we have to suppose an increasing number of individuals scattered about the world, who, so far at any rate, never seem to have a suspicion that they are not just ordinary human stuff, but who find life tremendously puzzling, much more puzzling than other people do...As children, like any other children, they will have begun by taking the world as they found it and believing everything they were told. Then
as they grew up they will have found themselves mentally out of key. They will have found a disc[on]certing inconsistency about things in general. They will have thought at first that the abnormality was on the side of particular people about them and not on their own. They
will have found themselves doubting whether their parents and teachers could possibly believe what they were saying. I think that among these Martians, that odd doubt - which many children nowadays certainly have - whether the whole world isn't some queer sort of put-up job and that it will all turn out differently presently - I think that streak of doubt would be an almost inevitable characteristic of them all"

'You spoke just now of stale religion,' he went on. 'Such a lot of
things in life now are stale. Out of date.... I agree....'