Our Shadowy World They say reality is an illusion. For instance, maybe we’re dreaming. In the Zhuangzi, an ancient Taoist text, we find Zhuang Zhou’s famous butterfly dream. In it, the sage experienced himself as a happy butterfly. When he woke, he felt confused. Was he a butterfly now dreaming he was a man, or a man dreaming he’d been a butterfly? He couldn’t tell, for we can’t always trust our senses. [1] During the early twentieth century, the Baha’i teacher, Abdu’l-Baha, taught this same thing, that the world is an illusion. Reality exists only in God’s realm. What we see here “is only its shadow stretching out.” [2] Plato,…