The Personae of the Real

Abstract

If the Real is present to all forms of existence as the ground of their ever-changing being, and if ‘things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’, finite persons will naturally tend to be conscious of the Real as a divine Thou. And so we find that from the earliest forms of archaic religion through the still-developing post-axial traditions the forms of experience in which, according to our hypothesis, the Real is present to human consciousness have usually (though not always) been hypostatised divine persons.

The Real is one — sages name it variously.¹