The Heart of Philosophy

“Philosophy as an influence of orienting man to another reality within and outside of himself has nearly vanished from our culture.  It is time to bring it back.” (Needleman, Pg. 134).  Man was never the center of the Universe until the entrenchment of religious dogma.  He was always the plaything of the Fates, the child of nature, the child of the earth, one with everything, understanding the finite nature of his existence.  And then we became the ‘Sons of God’, elevated above a world which now revolved around us.  This became our reality until science slowly began to prove that no; we were no greater than the ants that Needleman studied when he was only a child and came to his own realization of the finite and infinite of reality.  We have fallen from a pedestal of immortality, becoming nothing more significant than dust.  This is daunting, terrifying and dulling.  We want to matter, we want proof that we exist and that the world in which we live would be less without us. 

“Why does it haunt the mind for so many of us, sometimes through the whole of our lives?” (Needleman, Pg. 139) It haunts us because it is so terrifying, the thought that we are potentially insignificant, meaningless; nothing more than a mote of dust dancing on sunlight.  We are nothing to the powers that be, the creators of the machine.  It haunts us because we are creatures who create, we can see the patterns, the lines.  It is the patterns that terrify us because they are not random, they are not chaos.  And if they are perfect, then we are nothing more than another perfect pattern, inside the perfect pattern. Perhaps that alone is the main reason we turn away from deeper thoughts of self actualization.  We are afraid to open Pandora’s Box and find there is nothing left.

Resources:

• The Heart of Philosophy by Jacob Needleman