Paraphrasing the words of Goethe’s Faust, “two selves dwell within our breast.”

One part of us is meant to live and function in the world we see around us — to eat, sleep, and produce our children, to answer the challenges of the natural and social world: in the words of Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, to be born and die, to kill and to heal, to build and destroy, to weep and to laugh, get and lose, keep and cast away. This is human life “under the sun,” the world that we see and know and call real.

But God, the “something,” is above the sun, above all that our eyes can see and our mind can name, and there is a higher part of ourselves that senses that and calls to us.

We are two-natured beings. Such is the ancient teaching.

Jacob Needleman, 1934 – 2022, American Philosopher, Money and the Meaning of Life