Dialogical Humanity:
In The Crucible Of Transcendence
The Great Tao flows everywhere.
It may go left or right.
All things depend on it for life,
and it does not turn away from them.
This is Chapter 2 in Dr. Darrol Bryant's Woven on the Loom of Time: Many Faiths and One Divine Purpose, New Delhi: Decent/Suryodaya Books, 1999, pp. 29 -56. It is reproduced here by permission of the author.
Dr. Darrol Bryant opens this chapter as follows:
"In the first lecture, I sought to outline several of the assumptions that inform my exploration of the theme of the Principal Miller Lectures and sketched, in an anticipatory way, the elements of our argument concerning life's purpose and meaning in relation to the Ultimate. In this lecture, I will turn to a more contemporary philosophical argument that grounds humanity in the Ultimate. The same point could have been argued on the basis of the classical religious traditions -- that we, in the language of theism, come from God and go to God, or, in the language of monism, that we are the Ultimate -- but I have chosen this more contemporary route. It too seeks to ground our vision of humanity in the Ultimate and provides us with a vision of the religious traditions as a dialogue with Transcendence."
Full text is available in he attached file.