ABSTRACT
The central belief of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is that God intervened in history and revealed Himself to human beings, but the seers of the Upanishads had reached knowledge of Brahman without such an intervention. They arrived at it through the powers of their own reflective intellect. In The Future of an Illusion what Freud describes as God is an idol. It is based on a sense image; in his case, it is the image of father. When the Old Testament prophets fulminated against the worship of idols, they meant an image of Yahweh rather than Yahweh himself. Mystics, such as Meister Eckhart and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing emphasize that the reality of God is obscured through the word God. The word conjures up in the mind an image that blinds to the reality that the word God is supposed to designate.
