The New Monadology

● Some General Considerations

● The Subtlety of Holism and its Relation to the Individual

● The Trinity and Time:  A Comparison of Three Trinitarian Processes

● Speculations upon the ‘Interior View’ of Holism

              This is an abbreviation of the Neutral Monism chapter also presented in the present website.  A far more comprehensive presentation will be found in a future website under the title “The New Monadology”

  

Prolegomenon:  The Psyche, the Secular and the Sacred

 

              It is impossible to come to terms with personhood in the absence of a theory of its ontological grounding.  What is the nature of our Being, what is its source and where is it heading?  But beyond this, we are also in need of the broader context of a complete and comprehensive weltanschauung or systematic philosophical world-view.  It is the purpose of this file to explore both issues from the viewpoint of my own systematic philosophy of Neutral Monism.  While my treatment here is necessarily brief, it is, I believe sufficient for our immediate needs.   I much fuller account will be found in a forthcoming website:  The New Monadology. 

 

             This is the last of the set of four documents comprising the heart of this website.  Of the other three:

 

                Mind/Brain  presents a theory of the dependence of the psyche and mind upon the cerebral cortex –and the rest of the central nervous system –both in support of internal thought and for the two-way interaction with the body and world beyond. 

 

                Epistemology  examines –and dismisses- the fallacy of ‘naïve realism’ as a model of the relationship between the outside world and the inner world-view for which it is surrogate.  A very strong case is made for its replacement by a representational epistemology.  This has a substantial double impact.  First, a dramatic expansion in the significance of the ‘Cartesian theatre’ –as given in Real World perception.  In consequence, Mind has acquired the upper hand in the Mind/Brain ensemble.  Henceforth, Mind has the upper hand in the mind/brain ensemble.  Secondly, an entirely new and novel window is opened upon introspection.  Both of the operations of perception and praxis have to be thought through and understood anew;  What confronts us in the interior view is mental substance  configured in a topology/geometry far more subtle than that of its referents ‘out there’.   

 

                Psyche  addresses the essence of personhood.  It also serves as an existential manifesto and as such provides a natural interface or coupling node to the final ontology  file.  It connects the psyche to the context of a systematic philosophy through its existential window

 

            The treatment offered in the first two of the above prepares the ground for the third –for the way in which they invert the precedence and weighting of the mind-brain relationship.  What we are currently being offered is an epiphenomenalism in which the brain –in particular the cortex- is the principle player.  Mind is no more than an evoked co-presence that is totally non-efficacious, taking no active  hand in the unfolding stream of consciousness;  that it seems to be otherwise must be dismissed as an illusion.  What I am proposing upends this dominance in which it becomes the principle character.  The Brain is there to provide a substratum for incarnation, a support for the ongoing internal stream of thought, and also a two-way perceptual/praxial interface and interaction with own-body and the captive environment beyond.  Hence, before we ever get to tackle the psyche on its own existentialist terms, it is already clear than the role of mind is pre-eminent within the Mind/Brain ensemble.  In short, the prevailing polarization of Brain  >  Mind must be inverted.

 

            The ‘God Question’ –a Concept in Drastic Need of Reformulation

 

           Central within the concerns of Ontology is the relationship between the Sacred and the Secular, or that of Transcendence versus Manifest Existence.  This issue is usually presented in terms of the ‘God Question’ –a most unfortunate concept in urgent need of reformulation.  What we are being offered is a case-hardened choice between a more or less classical Theism and a Secularism -or Positivism with atheistic implications.  These latter are at times boldly and stridently declared while at others clearly implied or intended.  Each of the alternatives is –to a degree at least- demonstrably false, and each carries with it unfortunate implications.  An extended treatment may be found in the Neutral Monism file.  What is principally wrong with the question is the way in which it forecloses upon most of the very broad envelope of options that is truly open to us.  It imposes a severe limitation upon what is to be tabled for discussion;  one might say that it jumps the gun.  To put it another way, ask the wrong question, and the answers you get won’t  be even wrong (with apologies to Wolfgang Pauli).   

 

            If the Question be accepted upon the terms in which it is offered, the consequences are unfortunate, no matter which of the two options is exercised.  Each is burdened by errors of every kind –logical, existential and cultural.  It is important to be clear about the nature of these difficulties to which we shall now turn.  This being done, an attempt to reformulate the question will be attempted.  The closing sections of this chapter describe how the issue may be resolved and focused within my Ontology of Neutral Monism. 

 

           The ‘God’ option is both unsatisfactory for the image of divinity that it offers.  It is also replete with logical contradictions  First let’s harken to Tillich’s reproach:

 

"……The God of Theological Theism is a Being beside others, and as such a part of the whole of Reality.  He certainly is considered as its most important part, but as a part and therefore subjected to the structure of the whole.  He is supposed to be beyond the ontological elements and categories which constitute Reality.  But every statement subjects Him to them.  He is seen as a Self which has a world. as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and an endless time.  He is a being, not Being itself."

 

                "As such He is bound to the Subject/Object structure of Reality....God as Subject makes me into an object....God appears as an invincible tyrant, the Being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity.....This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control.  This is the deepest root of atheism".  . 

 

            At the same time, alternatively, it’s hard to see how you could assign God to a closed eternity of all time without violating an essential attribute of personhood –as of someone who is active within a linear temporal stream of some sort.  As Swinburne has noted, we saddle ourselves with this vertiginous antinomy: :

 

"......The idea of God existing timelessly and yet being aware of things as they happen has very considerable difficulties.”

 

                It is also plagued by a number of formal contradictions and fallacies listed below;  they are examined in detail in the body of the text further below. 

 

                First of all, only a Reality based upon the ultimate abstraction of the unity of the ‘All’ –as envisioned by Böhme in his ‘Ungrund’ can be self-necessary, self-sustaining and self-sufficient.  Any actual being –alike for an eternal as for a temporal one- would be contingent, and therefore not necessary;  it might not have been.  Second, any living being –individualistic or holistic, temporal or eternal must necessarily be incarnate –while no such material substratum is at hand to provide the necessary means.  Next, any notion of an infinite past is a formal contradiction;  in effect, it has sought to make the ‘open’ infinity a surrogate for its closed or completed counterpart.  An infinite future, as we have seen, brings added embarrassments;  how can He foresee every decision He shall ever make, without losing the essential spontaneity of manifest Personhood?   Yet if He is embedded in an open time, then he is trapped within the hell of Berdyaev’s ‘bad infinity’.

 

              The implications of secularism (or positivism or physicalism) are even more disturbing:  The alienation following upon a weakening or loss of essential values cannot but have destructive consequences. Viktor Frankl goes so far as to lay much of the blame for the unspeakable atrocity of the Nazi 'final solution' to the 'Jewish problem' upon the nihilist philosophy of our times:

 

".....If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may corrupt him.  When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case prone.

 

"…….I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz.  The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment -or, as the Nazis liked to say, 'of blood and soil'.  I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz ....were ultimately prepared, not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."  Viktor Frankl

 

To hold the human estate in high esteem is taken to be a holdover of outmoded religious beliefs.  Notions of the ‘dignity of man’ are greeted with derision;  current ‘political rectitude’ commands the acceptance of its antithesis –that of self-abnegation.

 

“……It is the height of intellectual perversion to renounce, in the name of scientific objectivity, our position as the highest form of life on earth, and our own advent by process of evolution as the most important problem of evolution”.                Michael Polanyi

 

                Nothing is spared from its depredations;  its secret poison infects magazines, film, art, literature, and the whole of the educational system.  Reach any book off the university bookshelf dealing with cognitive psychology or Neo-Darwinism;  glance at any such magazine as Scientific American at your local supermarket;  or tune into any educational program on these subjects -as put out, for example, by Public Broadcasting (in the USA).  Almost all of the intellectuals dominating the present scene and who are becoming increasingly known to the general public tell the same story.  It is one of a secularism which is misrepresented, sotto voce, as a plausible if not a necessary inference  from the discoveries of science.

 

                The trouble is that whole categories are omitted within the foundations of the lex naturalis.  There is not a word to be found there about the second modality of consciousness.  Hence its manifest intrusion onto the scene is one of acute embarrassment.  It has become the c word, the one that heads the list in the intellectual's lexicon of neo-obscenities. I do apologize, but the time has come for plain speaking.  So I'm going to spell it out -and can only hope there are no ladies present.  It is  c-o-n-s-c-i-o-u-s-n-e-s-s.  The dedicated positivist views its presence with the deepest disdain.  For him, it is as though the awake brain emitted a malodorous phosphorescent gas –a revolting self-conscious stench, as Sartre might have put it. Seemingly, there is some kind of abscess hidden deep within the medullary substance that becomes active during waking hours.  From it oozes a loathsome putrescence as the cortex threatens to go into autolysis –see figure 1a.  As Hartwig Kühlenbeck has noted, there is something incorrigibly corrupt about the carbon atom having perverse and surrealist consequences.  So, what are we to do?  Faced by this dilemma, the intellectual has vacillated between turning a blind eye to the whole matter, or alternatively, granting consciousness a grudging re-entrance -after being shorn of almost all of the properties that make it what it truly is.  It has been reduced to a mere non-efficacious epiphenomenon devoid of all influence upon the flow of events.  It is carried along as a helpless captive to the workings of Sherrington's 'enchanted' cortical loom.  The threat, of course, is not merely that of allowing a true agency  to take hold.   The problem is that of the whole world addressed by the richness of the mind/brain ensemble's subjective interiority.  There are too many things to be found there -unmentionable things within that same lexicon.   Click here for more images of consciousness.

 

                Equally obscene is their dismissal of the ethical imperatives that intrude upon us all –those earth-shaking injunctions that come from God knows where yet which we deem to be of commanding importance and significance.  We are now being assured by the current establishment as an important part in a doctrine of ‘socio-biology’- that ethical convictions are nothing but a stratagem concocted by the germplasm in the exclusive interests of survival and ‘competitive advantage’. 

                Those opting for a secularist world-view are justified in their rejection of the theistic alternative.  The trouble is, one might say that they had ‘thrown out the baby with the bathwater’, were it not for the way this otherwise worthy metaphor miscarries with the issue at hand.  Better, perhaps, to say that they have discarded the wine with the lees.  Regardless, I really must hasten to reassure the reader not to infer that I’m proposing a fundamental shift from a Holistic personhood to something like Spinoza’s pantheism.  It’s not a matter of if but of when.  The best is yet to come

 

Neutral Monism –A Proposed Novel Holism/Pluralism Inequality

 

The section that follows proposes an alternative ontology to that upon which the panentheisms are grounded.  I was motivated to take this step partly to contend with its lingering deficiencies, but equally strongly by the promptings of an inborn temperamental inclination towards a monistic ontology.  Once more, I felt myself to be have been both pushed and drawn.  One might say that while some of my reservations were objective –i.e. can be given an analytical justification- others were more a matter of personal taste.  It’s not easy to say where one ends and the other starts.

 

            It is the cardinal contribution of panentheism to have advanced the ontology of finite beings from  one of an objectivating createdness  to that of a begottenness.  Henceforth each of us is an ens spiritualis in full force.  We are true participants within the divine essence and person, rather than beings called forth out of an abyss of nothingness in the Léger-de-main of the infamous  creation ex nihilo,  And in the process of so doing, panentheism draws God into the process of time, in a way which makes Him, to a degree at least, dependent upon evolution to bring Himself to a full maturity.  Finally, we are no mere afterthoughts but are essential agents here to do things for him that He cannot do for himself.

               By way of recapitulation, the ontological shift I am proposing is the second of a two-stage reconstitution and reconfiguration of panentheism as typically presented.  The first, I believe was not an option but had to be undertaken to rectify logical contradictions within the paradigm.  Happily, this step turned out to bring a number of fringe benefits along with it  More than rectifying its contradictions, it also offers support for some other, non-fatal weaknesses that could do with some reinforcement.

 

 O Perhaps most important is the eschatological shift that it engenders.  Mainstream panentheism contemplates a contemplative eternity in which there is no new life but rather a deepening interpretation and understanding of the significance of what has already happened.  This has always seemed to me to sell eternity short –as much for God as for man.  It is replaced by an apocalypsis leading to an expanding,  creative life in eternity.

 O It breaks out of the strait jacket of an anthropocentric universe which continues to bedevil panentheism.  Any such notion is a complete anachronism in the post Hubble days in which we live.  In the process it provides justification for the vastness of the cosmos.

 O The delay of a living holistic person till the apocalyptic profoundly alters the nature and composition of the Immanent process from which I am begotten.  Gone is the overwhelming present of a fully constituted living divine person.  In its place is Eckhart’s Gottheit –‘Godness’ or the Godhead.  Gone is the Ogre from whom Luther cringed in such terror.  In fact, there are no two layers of personhood any more but a single hybrid Being whose upper face is the immanent presence and the lower the psyche that I know myself to be.

 O As a codicil to the above paragraph, one might say that the status quo Immanence of a ‘fully featured’ infinite, eternal  person sells our haecceity short.  

 

                So much for the consequences of what I take to be an obligatory reformulation of panentheism.  The second step –that of a shift towards spiritual monism- is optional.  It is an elective that one may -or may not- choose to exercise.  However, regardless of what may or may not be its appeal to one’s philosophical temperament, its adoption does seem to bring further benefits with it , that reinforce those listed immediately above.

 

  O First for the support given to the daunting task of devising a formal scaffolding within which the entire processing of Reality may be coherently put together.  An appropriate outline had already been formulated in meeting the crises of panentheism’s logical inconsistencies.  But the proposed ontological shift simplifies the operation -to produce a tidier frame of reference.  It seems to be ‘impedance matched’ to the job at hand.  It turned out to be particularly helpful in coming to terms with the chiastic wind up of cosmic evolution

  O It endows finite beings with an individuality invested in an authentic haecceity.  This contrasts sharply with the quiddity seemingly implied by mainstream panentheism.  Under this regime there is nothing to prevent a constitutional identity of a pair of monads –other than the huge improbability that this should be the case.  But within the neutral monism I am proposing, it is absolutely ruled out.  One might say that the entire spectrum of possibilities can only hang together as a unity save by conserving and embracing this unique set within itself.  The distinction between the quidditas and the haecceitas as models of individuality is precisely the same as that, in the physical world, between bosons and fermions.  Whereas it is perfectly possible for any number of bosons to occupy the same quantum state, Pauli’s ‘exclusion’ principle absolutely forbids such an event.  It is as though haecceity -conceived originally in classical Greece and was to be made so much of by the scholars of the Middle Ages has come to cast a faint shadow beyond its domain.  Nature is very witty.

  O Finally, it resolves a whole set of stubborn paradoxes that plague commonsense intuitions.  E.g. the seeming contradiction that, on the one hand, no person has a privileged location or significance among all others in the cosmos, yet each of us seems to himself to be the centre of creation.  The intuition seems irresistible –no matter how it may fly against commonsense judgment- there are ontological disjunctions among the pronouns.  The ‘ I ’ which I assign to myself alone seems distinct and intrinsically  distinct from the vast hoard of ‘yous’ ‘out there’.   For those who are monistically inclined, this comes through at double strength.

 

"…...(mind is) a microcosm which, though its existence at the heart of the physical universe is ceaselessly threatened nevertheless possesses a higher ontological density than that whole universe."                        Jacques Maritain

                      

"…..Every time a man dies a whole universe is destroyed". 

K. Popper, quoting J Popper-Lynkeus.

 

             As a final comment on the haecceity/quiddity contrast;  my guess is that they map respectively into ψ-Logos and μ-Logos.

 

Neutral Monism within a Graded Series of Four Ontologies

            What might seem at first to be something of a contradiction is the way in which a monist ontology should assign so commanding a presence to individuality –one thinks, classically of monism in terms of a universal solvent for personal identity.  Within the weltanschauung of Neutral Monism, pluralism is more than something tolerated, allowed, or made possible by that holism of an eternal infinite unity.  Rather, holism depends upon pluralism without which it could not be what it is.  I would be tempted to say that holism is ‘grounded upon’ or ‘composed of’ the set of all possible haecceities, were is not for the fact that such terms belong to the domain of μ-Logos alone.  Within the complementary ψ-Logos, it might be more appropriate to say that holism is inversely  dependent upon the haecceity set somehow harboured within it;  its elements hang from  its unitary apex-of-the-All.  In order to maintain this inversion it is necessary to postulate a closure link whereby the ‘contents’ of Holism fold back within itself.  This same point is made by Berdyaev and others who have pondered this enigma.  These are vertiginous matters, and here as elsewhere I found diagrams to be more appropriate than words.  A number of these follow Coming to terms with ontology is a vertiginous matter; here as elsewhere within the problems of philosophy I have found it helpful to resort to diagrammatic schema.  The first of these, Figure 4 compares four alternative ontologies in terms of a progressive closing of the gap between individualism and holism. The first and fourth images of the series provide the benchmarks bracketing the spectrum of possibilities.  The first emphasizes the virtual disjunction characteristic of the classical theisms.  We are not of His substance, being instead  created  entities –conjured out of thin air, as it were, in the celebrated creatio ex nihilo.  At the other extreme is the indistinguishable identity offered by classical Eastern monism;  In the Brahman == Atman that it proposes, these two are little more than different names for the same entity.  The second of the images conveys the twin advantages consequent upon the panentheism ontology.  We are no longer objects ‘out in the cold’ but are safely inside;  more than this, we are of the same substance as the Holistic context within which we find ourselves. That is to say we are begotten, rather than created;  we enjoy a diophysite ontology. We stand astride the Great Divide;  one foot in heaven and the other upon earth

                But my further step towards spiritual –or neutral- monism brings the two holistic and individualistic phases much closer together –though emphatically stopping short of the paradoxical fusion demanded by classical monism.  In terms of the formalism of inequalities: where panentheism might say:  I < H   I would rather put it:  I <= H.  For panentheists we are, so to speak, vanishingly small subsets within an infinite divine holism, whereas in my case each of us is  the whole from a unique point of view –that of our haecceity.  Whereas for them we are ‘normal’ –if infinitesimal- subsets of the whole, what I’m proposing is something nearer to the mathematician’s *‘improper’ subset.  We are aspects of  the Holistic presence, rather than just participants  within His presence.  Whereas for mainstream panentheism we vanish into the vastness of infinity/eternity, neutral monism allows us to have it both ways.  At one and the same time each of us is  the whole from the station of our haecceity, while completely vanishing into that whole.  Again, to come back to number theory;  the set of all prime numbers is infinite, yet the density of primes within the universe of all integers is zero.  And I take it to be the case that there are an infinite number of sets which share this all-or-nothing characteristic of the primes.   Perhaps a better way of putting this would be to say that pluralism is more than something tolerated, allowed, or made possible by that holism of an eternal infinite unity.  Rather, holism depends upon pluralism without which it could not be what it is.  I would be tempted to say that holism is ‘grounded upon’ or ‘composed of’ the set of all possible haecceities, were is not for the fact that such terms belong to domain of μ-Logos alone.  Within the complementary ψ-Logos, it might be more appropriate to say that holism is inversely  dependent upon the haecceity set somehow harboured within it;  its elements hang from  its unitary apex-of-the-All.  In order to maintain this inversion it is necessary to postulate a closure link whereby the ‘contents’ of Holism fold back within itself.  This same point is made by Berdyaev and others who have pondered this enigma.  These are vertiginous matters, and here as elsewhere I found diagrams to be more appropriate than words.  A number of these follow.  Coming to terms with ontology is a vertiginous matter; here as elsewhere within the problems of philosophy I have found it helpful to resort to diagrammatic schema.  The first of these, Figure 4 compares four alternative ontologies in terms of a progressive closing of the gap between individualism and holism. The first and fourth images of the series provide the benchmarks bracketing the spectrum of possibilities.  The first emphasizes the virtual disjunction characteristic of the classical theisms.  We are not of His substance, being instead  created  entities –conjured out of thin air, as it were, in the celebrated creatio ex nihilo.  At the other extreme is the indistinguishable identity offered classical Eastern monism;  In the Brahman == Atman that it proposes, these two are little more than different names for the same entity.  The second of the images conveys the twin advantages consequent upon the panentheist ontology.  We are no longer objects ‘out in the cold’ but are safely inside;  more than this, we are of the same substance as the Holistic context within which we find ourselves. That is to say we are begotten, rather than created;  we enjoy a diophysite ontology. We stand astride the Great Divide;  one foot in heaven and the other upon earth.

 

Figure 5  tells the same story, given a set of three individuals.  To advance from this figure to the Real World calls, of course, for a giant scale-up in numbers, but the same relationships and principles would apply.

 

This whole matter is brought full circle by the reportage of mysticism.  Those who have mastered this daunting discipline know of what they speak through the experience of direct participation. Let's listen briefly to what they have to say –and there is no better place to start than with Plotinus –as a –if not the- founder of Neoplatonism .   

 

"......Therefore this vision is hard to describe.  For how can one describe as other than oneself, that which when one saw it, seemed to be one with oneself"              Armstrong (1962)

 

Eckhart makes the same point in a variety of ways; following are three of his hyperbolic flourishes on the matter:

 

"......I am my own first cause, both of my eternal being and my temporal being.  To this end I was born, and by virtue of my birth being eternal, I shall never die.  It is of the nature of this eternal birth that I have been eternally, that I am now, and shall be forever.  What I am as a temporal creature is to die and come to nothingness, for it came with time and so with time it will pass  away.  In my eternal birth, however, everything was begotten.  I was my own first cause as well as the first cause of everything else.  If I had willed it, neither I nor the world would have come to be.  If I had not been, there would have been no God."     

 

"…...Therefore I give you yet another thought., which is yet purer and more spiritual:  in the kingdom of heaven, all is all, all is one and all is ours."   

 

"…..The soul must put off equality with God in order to realize identity with God."

            Eckhart, like many of his ilk had difficulty in making up his mind whether he was a monist or a theist –and, I believe with good reason.  For this ambiguity is precisely what the ontology in question is all about.  Hence the apparent contradiction to the above in his final caution:

 

"......Ego, the word 'I' is proper to none but God in His uniqueness."

 

In other words, there is a difference  within the identity.  That there must be a pluralistic offset is the most obvious of the distinctions between the two levels  Take a look at figure 6. While our relationship to the wholeness of Reality is clearly that of  one  <  One, the holistic viewpoint must be  One  >  many,

Since clearly this purview must include all  monads.  An ontological commonality of sorts can be asserted between any given individual and all of the rest can be maintained, but at most  it is second order and very much dependent upon what stage in the grand processing of Reality we are talking about. 

 

Progression of Three ψ-Emanational Couplings –in a 5-Man World

 

A comparative study of Figures 7, 8 and 9 discloses three other progressive trends in moving through these ontologies.  These are, respectively, the internal nature of the Holistic Being;  the form of Its presence at the immanent interface constituting the leading edge of the existence of each and every one of us;  and finally its degree of access of the resources of Holism to the larger material cosmos. 

 

The panentheisms resemble their classical counterpart in presupposing a fully-featured divinity –that is, with all three members of the Trinity in attendance.  Notwithstanding, classical theism’s divinity is stronger and more fully-formed.  It is unaffected by time, from which it both stands aloof, yet intrudes into.  The entire sweep of time, throughout the whole of eternity, is known at a glance.  The panentheist God, in contrast, is deeply and interactively involved in its passage;   it is dependent upon time (and upon us) to bring Himself to maturity and completion.  The distinction between the two holistic ontologies is suggested by the strength and distribution of the radial gradients in the two cases.  That of panentheism is not as dense and concentrates at the periphery –see figures 7 and 8.  But when we get to neutral monism –see figure 9- no living eternal Person is to be found at all;  the Second Person of the Trinity is conspicuous by His absence.  The First Trinitarian member –God the creator- is both at hand and busily involved in sustaining each of us in His immanent presence that heads our being.  We might say that while the second person is absent, the First and Third are very much in evidence.  Figure 9 also includes the Böhmian Ungrund residing as the ultimate Source within the heart of  the divine Presence;  God as creator continuingly emerges from it.

 

Where the impact upon the world and its creatures is concerned, classical theism maintains the strongest impact.  He has total knowledge of the world, enjoying unlimited powers over it;   He is both omniscient and omnipotent.  And He stands as the ultimate Ogre, towering above us all.  Notwithstanding, His powers over us harbour this one limitation: we enjoy a degree of freedom of the will with which we were endowed.  In figure 7,  note particularly the Brown > Blue > Gray  gradients in which the deity knows each of us as spirit, mind and body.  The larger  Blue  >  Gray  depicts His penetration of the vaster material, inorganic realm. 

               

In the Neutral Monism that I am proposing, there is no Holistic personhood at all, but only a multiple independent Creative Source at the apex of each and every monad or person.  He has neither knowledge of, nor powers over the goings-on in the vast material intergalactic cosmos;  likewise he has no control over our own destiny and is totally incapable of intruding into our sovereignty to implant ideas or impose his will upon us.  This is because all that stands at the apex of our beings is not a living eternal person but only the First Trinitarian aspect who has temporarily stepped up to the third Person.  He alone has the powers of creation but none whatsoever over what He creates. 

 

It might seem that these claims about the absence of a presiding holistic person is contradicted by the findings of many among the mystics.  But the God of which they report is but a local manifestation.  The Gottheit has but captured a part of the real estate of our minds within which to come into local personhood.  We but provide the needed substratum of incarnation  inseparable from manifest personhood.  This is confirmed by the deeper penetrations of mysticism.  Eckhart speaks repeatedly of the God who ‘comes and disbecomes’. Behind this is the Being itself, the ‘clear light of the void’.

 

"......There is an agent of soul which reaches father than broad heaven -so incredibly far that the distance is beyond telling. It goes even further than that."            Eckhart

 

In summary, everything that happens in the whole course of cosmic evolution is due either to the operations of natural law (including the complications stemming from quantum effects) or from freely willed acts of authentic monads of every stamp.  See Figure 9, noting particularly the very tightly circumscribed access of holism to the larger material world;  knowledge of this is our prerogative, and He is unable to reach into the objectivity of the world view within the minds of each of us –wherein to get this knowledge at second hand.  All that He knows of us is the depths of our subjectivity, and this with the ultimate closeness, for He is but the upper face of our begottenness.  He is ‘closer to me than I am to myself’.

 

            It is important to emphasize the total mutual isolation of His pluralistic immanent presence within all of the beings of the world. There is no integral ‘bridging’ across this multiplicity of immanent manifestations, whereby cross comparisons could be made, perhaps to be followed by local adjustments that take this larger overview into account   However, this ‘bridging’ limitation  applies only to the terminal link of the ψ-emanation, i.e. that where incarnation is reached.   But we have to remember that every instantional emanation takes origin much further back –all the way back to the watershed of being.  Given the propensity of a thoroughgoing monism to draw things together, it would be reasonable to assume that there is a confluence within the pre-existential leg of the pathway.  In fact this would seem to be virtually demanded for a couple of reasons.  The first is the need of maintaining the haecceity of each passing instantiation that shall ever have occurred in any monad.  This cannot be sustained in unquickened dispositional mind because of its finite resources;  it can preserve only the accidental uniqueness rendered by its quidditas.  I assume to the contrary that this opening leg of each emanational journey is preserved forever;  as such, it is eternally hyper-known.  And the second essential service that it renders is that of providing the audit trails so that we may find one-another on the far side of the eschatological recovery

 

Figure 8 shows how things stand from some hypothetical representative panentheism perspective.  Notice particularly, the narrowing of the holistic/individualistic ontology –though clearly it partakes of the same begottenness.  This is suggested by the withdrawal of its divergent component which makes of us all, aspects of  the whole rather than just participants within  it  The figure also portrays Tod Moody’s suggestion –that we render the important service of providing God with an overview of the cosmos that is beyond his direct reach.  As Tod Moody has put it, we are God’s “peep-holes” upon the world  Most panentheisms picture His hold upon the larger cosmos as being Deistic rather than theistic, as in the neutral monism that I am proposing –yet with this one important difference.  He has the sovereign power –that of the means of overriding the rule of law whenever He sees fit. 

 

            To return once more to the ontology of neutral monism.  Perhaps its most striking impact is in the reinforcement of the Immanent bridgehead of my being.  Whereas previously, I enjoyed no more than my aliquot, as it were, of God’s available resources.  But under the new regime, I luxuriate in an unstinting 100% of His being.  He is totally with me, yet at the same time in a form ‘impedance matched’ to the nature of my being and the immediacy of the moment.  This is my passing haecceity within an embracing holistic totality.  Exactly the same is true of everyone else.  Each within the privacy of his haecceity comes to enjoy the same totality as meets his passing needs.  This intensification of Being is what, surely, Eckhart had in mind when he said ‘He is closer to me than I am to myself’.

 

"......Half truth is not truth ........ God is truth and He is in a proposition altogether or not at all."        

                                                

"......Where they (the soul and God) are one in essence they are not equal, for equality coexists always with a difference. Therefore the soul must put off equality with God in order to realize identity with God."                    Eckhart

 

            Cusanus spoke of a God whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.  He also believed that somehow finitude was supported by the infinite, and like Eckhart, believed that there are no degrees of being, qualitatively, and that God is either totally in a thing, or not at all.  The universe, taken as-a-whole, cannot be contained within a center and a circumference unless these two limits are, so to speak, cyclically linked to two aspects of God, who is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Given the strong ontology I am proposing, exactly the same may be said of each one of us.  Now of course, it is a commonplace of everyday experience that one is indeed at a center of sorts, as implied by our assignment of pronouns.  There is but one ‘I’ –that is myself.  All the other beings are ‘yous’ –in a way which seems to imply more than a difference in perspective.  But what I am asserting is that it is quite literally true that each of us is at the (or a) center of the universe.  There is emphatically no ‘as if’  about it –however much this may run contrary to the political rectitude of present day relativism.  Physicist Erwin Schrödinger seems to have had something of this on his mind when he wrote

 

 "......There is but one Monad.  Briefly stated, this is the view that all of us living beings belong together inasmuch as we are all, in reality, sides or aspects of one single Being, which may perhaps, in Western terminology be called God while in the Upanishads its name is Brahman.  A comparison used in Hinduism is of the many almost identical images which a many-facetted diamond makes of some one object such as the Sun."      

 

I find ‘flatland’ geometries to be helpful here.  I take our cosmos to be closed upon itself.  Let this cosmos be the surface of a hollow 4-dimensional sphere.  That is, we now have a four dimensional ’space of dispositions’ with the 3dimensional surface as the ‘space of objects’.  At the center lies the Transcendent Source-of-All.  From it, an illuminate irradiation continuingly streams out radially in all directions towards the surface.   One way of conceiving this is as the 3 dimensional surface of a sphere existing in a larger four dimensional ‘space of dispositions’.  Let us place the Transcendent Source-of-All at its center.  Light rays stream from it in every direction towards the surface –see figure 10.  Where the monads of the cosmos are concerned, they will become visible, i.e. light up whenever the substrate of their dispositional minds is suitably enabled (that is, they are awake!).  Finally, the colour values (in terms of hue, saturation and brightness) will be determined by the nature of the persona in residence at the location.

 

Figures 7, 8 and 9 are all ‘snapshot’ views in which an evolving reality is caught at some instant of time –let us say that of the present moment.  But there are also differences to be noted over matters of time embedment and involvement.  In classical theism He is both the alpha and the omega of reality, yet in a way that is disturbingly ambiguous and contradictory.  For at one and the same time, his lifetime is simultaneously complete while he is yet moving within and interacting with the time in which we are currently moving.  To repeat Swinburne’s comment on this matter: 

 

"......The idea of God existing timelessly and yet being aware of things as they happen has very considerable difficulties.”

 

When we get to the panentheisms, we find the holistic person to have become more deeply time involved, and to a degree time dependent.  As in classical theism He remains the Alpha of existence, yet in a way still calling for a fulfillment that only time (and our cooperation) can bring;  His future –as is ours- is open, i.e. is not something vaguely preexistent, waiting for Him and us alike to move into.  Finally, in the neutral monism that I am proposing, His entrance is delayed till the Omega of the apocalyptic moment.  The saga of cosmic and organic evolution may be looked upon as the ontogeny of his personhood, yet in a way strikingly different from the embryogenesis that we see around us, and through which each of us has made his own entrance.  The whole ontogenetic sequence is frozen within time where it remains inactive.  It is only post-apocalyptically that this whole sequence is recovered to burst forth into eternal life.  We shall take a closer look in the following section.

 

Incarnation:  the Spiritual/Material Polarization.

 

            The role of matter  in the larger scheme of things has always presented something of a quandary.   For a start, theism in most of its forms seems to regard it as of purely passing, instrumental  value peculiar to created beings of the likes of you;  the divine living God has no need of it to be who he is.  Likewise, on the far side of apocalypses, we will find ourselves to be well rid of it;  its inertia and clutter would interfere with our ethereal life style.  Now let us turn to its antithesis, dominating the secular age in which we all find ourselves.  The ontology is one of material monism –or as close to this as the intellectual can get.  Matter’s spiritual and mental concomitants –that surface from time to time- are to be explained away or accorded a grudging presence as unaccounted for epiphenomena of matter –a mysterious phosphorescent glow.

 

                My own weltanschauung follows that of Plotinus and the latter day Miguel de Unamuno and Teilhard de Chardin in taking incarnation to be absolutely essential to all life as much to an eternal holistic Being as to us.  Plotinus, while recognizing the benefits a material embodiment bequeathed, grieved that these were only gained at the expense of vacating eternity.  But then, Plotinus, as was Bòhme many centuries later, trapped in a linear time. A broader topology which would allow us to have things both ways –once the price of admission had been paid.

 

                It being granted that life and consciousness require a substratum of matter, we now need to enquire about just how broad is the domain of each.  For a start, how extensive are mind and consciousness within the cosmos?  Setting aside the mind, this leads rather inevitably to a ‘functionalist’ viewpoint, as we might call it.  Leaving aside orthodoxy to which the intellectual spokesmen of the age are captive, and looking only at those who are prepared to meet mind on its own terms, we encounter two schools of thought, both of them falling within the broader envelope of panpsychism.  The first of these referred to by Hartshorne as ‘panechological’ has perhaps been the odds-on favourite.  Though it has been around for well over a century, present day interest takes its origin from Whitehead –more particularly his very recondite and daunting “Process and Reality” tome.  He sees consciousness as going ‘all the way down’.   That is to say, the fundamental particles of physics are to be regarded as monads manqué and molecules as primitive organisms.  Its most recent and articulate exponent, surely, is Guy Murchie –as set forth in his most thorough and enjoyable volume on the subject –his The Seven Mysteries of Life.  This kind of panpsychism leads rather inevitably to a ‘functionalist’ interpretation –as we would now call it.  The idea here is that assigning mental or monad concomitants to any object with a corporate ‘look’ or phenomena that seem willy nilly to be suggestive of purpose or intentionality.  He was -to a degree- anticipated 150 years ago, by Theodore Fechner –one of the founders of psychophysics- credited stars with souls of sorts, and we have recently heard those of a very hard-line secular and materialistic persuasion speaking of thermostats as striving after thermal homeostasis.  However, in this latter case the argument is running in the reverse direction.  What we are being invited to infer is that we have no more right to claim intentionality than a thermostat because we are equally nothing but the working out of causal processes. 

 

Murchie leaves us in no doubt concerning where he stands:  he takes up the thread where Thales left off: 

 

“……Every particle of reality is composed inseparably of the physical and the psychic….”

 

This leads him to a grand polarized overview of Reality that is a dynamic counterpart of Spinoza’s pantheism.  Unlike Spinoza, Murchie sees each individual as taking a real hand in the game –a game with very positive intent aimed at some surpassing spiritual climax or utopia.  Reality consists of a vertical continuum which passes –without modal or categorical shifts- from a Pantheist apex, down through organic forms of the likes of you and me, coming to rest, finally, within the ‘inorganic’ ground floor.  His God is the ultimate mystery;  we can no more hope to imagine His nature than a red blood corpuscle the processes of phylogeny and ontogenesis that brought it forth.  From Murchie’s viewpoint, there is no modal or qualitative difference between a candle flame and the stream of consciousness with which each of us is all too familiar.  In both cases we see an unending rebirth and reconstitution as each passing instant inherits the form of that which immediately preceded it.  Likewise the process of evolution isn’t limited to phylogeny, nor does it start there.  It starts from what, properly, ought to be regarded as no more than analogues of life, from the guttering candle, and the ‘memory’ of water in a bathtub, of the net rotational orientation of the water poured into it many hours previously –as is proved by the direction of the vortex which emerges when the water flows out when the drain cock is opened.

 

I am also supportive of panpsychism –but it is of the second flavour categorized by Hartshorne as ‘panmonadological’.  This approach is anything but functionalistic, demanding instead that life and mind only arise from an appropriately constituted substratum –for example from matter organized as it is within protoplasm.  Furthermore, what I take to be the bankruptcy of the ‘artificial intelligence’ movement, and of Neo-Darwinism as a  sufficient  explanation of organic evolution has led me to postulate that the immediate substratum of life and mind is an exotic form of matter –derived from its classical counterpart through what might be called a metaphysical phase change.  Yet the ‘meta’ prefix needs to be carefully watched, because the process is taken to be a purely physical one –if of a form that is yet to be acknowledged and recognized.  In other words there is a well defined –if currently unknown- continuum between the two forms of matter.  These questions are examined at length within the Psyche chapter of the present website and also within a second website:  http://ontodynamics.net/

 

Two Views of the Double ψ/μ Emanational Couplings

 

I have included one of the many figures to be found there herewith –see Figure 11. The material aspects of the mind/brain ensemble, together with that of the entire inorganic universe are sustained conjointly, though a nascent ‘staging’ that in the process continuingly maintains the ether itself.  This Exotic μ-emanation has its roots in μ-Logos and reaches its destination globally. The exotic matter of mind, however, has a more local origin in Logos, passing more directly to its target;  it breaks free of the commonality of inorganic matter to enjoy a much higher degree of independence in its ontological grounding within Logos.  But because the phase change is necessarily partial and incomplete, exotic matter remains conjoint to the classical residuum from which it emerged.  As I have suggested in the references given above, I suspect the phase-changed fraction is small, so that the properties of the classical residua will be little affected –though it must be conjectured that this apportionment shall increase progressively as life take a firmer and firmer hold upon cosmic evolution.  

 

                In my weltanschauung, it isn’t by any means consciousness ‘all the way down’.  In fact, with a marginal exception, I take the whole of inorganic matter, quantum waves, and the ether itself to be destitute of consciousness.  Save perhaps for a unrememberable spark of consciousness at the moment of a wave function collapse, consciousness emerges only upon a substratum of exotic matter.  In other words, matter is a great deal more widespread than consciousness.  Consciousness needs matter but matter doesn’t need consciousness.  This applies equally to exotic matter.  One falls asleep, but not at the cost of losing one’s mind;  upon awakening, there it is intact and in working order. 

 

                As has been argued above -both in my overview of  panentheism and the presentation of my proposed  “Individualistic  < =  Holistic”  inequality, there can be no question of a divine overseer who can view the world in the same way as we do. The Immanent presence heading the ontology of each of us knows only the inner subjectivity of each one of us.  There is no means by which He can gather together and integrate these into a global view that includes a perception of the cosmos within which we are locally dispersed.  This much being granted, is it possible that consciousness isn’t limited to the confines of each monad, but in one way or another also maintains a broader presence in the form of fields –perhaps even spanning the entire cosmos?  David Boehm’s cosmic ‘implicate order’ is seemingly offered as a promising source of fields of consciousness in general,  while Henry Stapp has proposed a cosmic-wide quantum field to furnish much the same service.  One also finds oneself groping towards something of the same in accounting for the quasi-magical insights that parasites seemed to have gained into their hosts’ anatomy, physiology and life style –yet the kind of group mind that this seems to imply at the germinal level  is hard to think through consistently in a way that is free of contradictions.  What of ESP (Extra Sensory perception)?  The evidence upon which it stands strikes me as being shaky, to say the least, though it is hard to dismiss the possibility.  I am inclined to reject all of these latter-day pan psychic notions of ‘panechological’ sort –yet I remain uneasy.  How on earth do some fish manage to make their way back to the river from which they came, after journeying far afield in the ocean?  One would have thought that whatever a distinguishing composition of the water of any given river might be, it would astonishing indeed if the fishes could sense the ‘homeopathic’ dilutions involved, and to derive the needed sense of direction.   

 

                An organism is a mind within a body, and it is obvious that although the mind (and its psyche) are grounded upon a substratum not encountered in the dissecting room, this is not true of the body, including the cerebral cortex.  By some means currently completely unknown, the germ plasm has mastered the art of devising and producing an organism grounded upon an incarnational continuum;  each of us is embedded within a concentric substratum whose inner zone is exotic and outer, classical.  Figure 12 derived from Figure 11, seeks to illustrate this distinction.  Exotic matter is aligned vertically, and classical horizontally.  Mind itself consists of two strata, an upper intrinsic and a lower extrinsic –or objective- one conjoined by an anamorphic interface;  again see Harrison ibid.  However, the mainstream scientific intellectual does not grant or recognize the possibility that extensions be needed to the current canon of natural law in support of life and mind   In so doing, he has saddled himself with two bankrupt paradigms.  First the ‘Artificial Intelligence’ program, and second, that of Neo-Darwinism as a theory sufficient  to account. for organic evolution. 

 

But what of the future?  My world view envisages a progressive takeover of the (currently) overwhelmingly inorganic cosmos by life, converging ultimately to a single organism –Omega.  Such a being will not be lost in the vastness of space, as is true of any of the life forms of which we have any knowledge at the present time.  The whole of the outer world shall have become captive to him, so that there will be a subjective/objective continuum in which the interior of the psyche passes progressively from the subjectivity that it is  through the mind that it has  to the world that it owns.  When Guy Murchie remarked,

 

“……..it’s earlier than you think……Man has hardly reached the dawn of his own history….his spirit as a whole has nowhere to go but up”

 

-perhaps he had something of the sort in the back of his mind.  To bring this thought into alignment with what I have /in mind,  ‘Man’ would have to stand surrogate for all of the future forms of intelligent life as may arise and come to be.

 

“Time-Elapsed” Images of Two Contrasting Ontologies

 

The form that the Holistic/Individualistic inequality takes varies in the grand odyssey that passes from the watershed of pure Being to the eternal life that is its raison d'etre.   In the large, it is a drama in the form of a play in three acts.  From the very  beginning, up to the eruption of cosmic existence, Holism was potential  only.  It was (and for that matter still is) Eckhart's 'Gottheit'.  This is no living Being though it is very capable of pre-personal activity, this taking the form of an epigenetic unfolding of the watershed of Being.  Act two is that in which we find ourselves at present.  Holism has an Immanent presence in every one of us;  it is the Source of our existence, though we only come into direct awareness of this in acts of mystical reflection or absorption.  As the essence of my begottenness, ‘He' -one gropes within the lexicon of English for an appropriate pronoun- is 'closer to me than I am to myself' -if I may steal Eckhart's lightning and thunder for a moment. 

   

            The third act opens upon Eternal Life -that of Nous.  Here as ever, we have the inseparable co-presence of Holistic and  individualistic faces.  In Eternal Life, everyone of us shall be  Nous -each from our own unique haecceitas viewpoint -yet one that is in harmony with Nous viewed Holistically.  This in turn throws light upon the significance of finite existence.  Evolution is to be regarded as Nous's ontogeny –or embryology.  [I have here expropriated the term 'Nous' as pointing to an entity that comes closest to what I have in mind.]

 

                The accompanying illustration (figure 13) offers a time-elapsed view of the whole of the processing of Reality -from the nameless Alpha of featureless Being, through the whole saga of cosmic and organic evolution, to pass, ultimately, through the eschatological singularity at the end.  In this figure, we can see an emerging eternal life already underway.  You may want to take a closer look.  It may be seen that the three acts of in the processing of the larger Reality are separated by abrupt changes in their bearing.  Act one is seen emerging into the plane of the page from the depths below.  The launching of cosmic existence requires an orthogonal shift in direction;  the entire saga of cosmic and organic evolution from the Alpha of the Big Bang to the unitary Being ‘Omega’ who shall enact the chiliastic termination, passes within the principle plane of the page.  Finally, the apocalyptic moment itself requires a second orthogonal shift in bearings.  Resurrected life emerges from the plane of the paper to proceed indefinitely upwards. 

 

                A final topological/geometric feature of this figure worth a mention is the way in which all three stages or acts in the drama remain within the safe embrace of a larger, ultimate Source –the Ungrund colour coded in black.  This is enabled to embrace all three of the stages because it is upstream of time and space in all of their aspects. However, what the figure fails to preserve is the distinction between transformation and epigenetic stages -for both processes are present within the larger sweep of time. 

 

                Animated Renditions

 

To illustrate the distinction, we need to call upon the services of  Animation.  As you can clearly see the early processing of Being and the preservation of the kernel of each conscious instant are epigenetic.  The latter is preserved in frozen past time, to be recovered at the eschatological moment.  You can also see that there is a closure loop which returns to the beginning of eternal life at each fresh instant;  it is this which provides the essential consolidation, if eternal life is to be supportable –i.e. something to be truly desired.  Non-epigenetic transformations are universal within the material aspects of inorganic and organic life -including whatever be the substratum of dispositional mind.  It will also be noted that the bulk of each moment of consciousness -its mantle- is discarded as frame succeeds frame.  This is as necessary  for eternal as it is for the finite flow of the stream of consciousness.  Were it not for this falling away into nonbeing, finite and eternal life alike would be groaning under an intolerable flatulence.  A full account will be found within chapters 7 and 8 in the forthcoming  The New Monadology website. 

 

            The second ‘elapsed time’ figure attempts to illustrate how the positivist Weltanschauung views the situation.  Given that there is no true eternity at hand, it must make do with a fatal "everlasting" substitute.  Almost all of their scenarios bring conscious life to an eventual termination;  one or two, however, envisage a seemingly endless cyclic repetition.  Both alternatives rob our existence of essential meaning.  The second goes beyond simple meaninglessness, confronting us as it does with a living hell of Berdyaev’s ‘bad infinity’.  You may wish to Take a closer look .  Also, as the animated version makes clear, there are no ‘epigenetic’ meta-transformational stages or episodes; the strict linearity of ordinary linear time forbids.  Some have sought to press general relativity into usage in support of science fiction time-travel notions, but these can only enter the realm of possibility if the Minkowski manifold be elevated to ontic status.       As the corresponding Movie makes clear, the transformational sequence, in moving through time, is strictly of a transient nature;  nothing of epigenesis is to be seen. 

 

 The Trinity and its Analogues

 

The Classical Trinity as Given in the Western Exegesis

 

            What follows may be regarded as the completion of the passage that opened this document,  The ‘God’ Question. It is also offered as a recapitulation

 

             These two topics have exercised the finest of minds over the centuries, and you can be quite sure that they have a significance and generality that stands above the forms that they have come to take in this or that established religious doctrine.  At any rate, I have never been in any doubt that I am in need of tackling both of them.  As the reader will discover, the changes I am proposing are substantial.  Yet I would insist that I have approached the Trinity on its own terms;  I have transformed the concept, not explained it away.

 

                Here are three concise definitions of the classical paradigm:

 

“……God who is three persons in one nature;  a Father or source, a Logos or Word, and a Spirit or Charity.”                                                                                               Martin D’arcy

 

“……[God’s} being  is the father, his wisdom the Son, his Life the Holy Spirit”.              John Scot Erigea

 

“……Being itself, which is God, possesses three aspects, levels or dimensions;  Power or primary Ground, Logos or structure and Life or Creativity”.                 Herberg, Speaking of Tillich. 

 

                In the central Western exegesis, three actual persons are envisaged, all of whom are eternally co-present.  No one member upstages the others, nor enjoys a deeper or prior presence that is in any way productive of its fellow members.  Nevertheless, all three individuals are aspects of an overriding unity;  The Trinity is Three-in-One.  Were this not the case, the overriding monotheistic presupposition would be fatally undermined.   All of these characteristics are preserved and displayed in the first of the four schema in figure 14. 

 

                The Christological aspect of the Trinity assigns a special role to its Second person who becomes incarnate in the historical Jesus –there to fulfill his redemptive mission.  Within the mainstream tradition, this does nothing to interfere with his prior eternal presence.  As Saint John makes clear: “In the beginning was the word;  the word was with God and the word was God.”  However, this has not been consistently true of the doctrine within the Eastern Orthodox church.  While its “Alexandrian exegesis” has continued to back Saint John, its “Antiochine” counterpart delays entrance of the Son until needed for the redemption of mankind.  He was to emerge only with the birth and baptism of Jesus.      

 

                However, for reasons already examined at length, no such Trinity can be sustained for a variety of reasons.  In very brief summary

 

(1) Personhood is essentially contingent, hence a reality so grounded would lack self-necessity and self-completion.  This applies as much to holistic, infinite personhood as to you and me.

(2) No actual person can simultaneously foresee the future and move meaningfully within time. Likewise, the assertion of an eternal past is a logical contradiction.

(3) For us to be created  rather than begotten  undermines our authenticity We are overwhelmed by an infinite intruding God  that caused Luther so much anguish.

(4) The ‘theodicy’ dilemma lingers.

(5) Monotheism can scarcely hold its ground in the face of the intruding numerosity of the Trinity

 

                The Trinity as Modified by Contemporary Panentheism          

 

                When we advance the underlying ontology from theism to panentheism, Time itself becomes an essential attribute of transcendent Reality,  As is true of the rest of us, this sets God before an open, undetermined future.  Our ontology is raised to the status of a begottenness –or something close to it.  The relation of time to eternity remains vague and insufficiently defined –although it may be consistent with at least a marginal instatement of Böhme’s Ungrund.  However, as the second of the four schema in figure 14- makes clear, all three members of the Trinity essentially survive, though perhaps a strict equalitarianism can no longer be maintained.   Regardless, many of the problems with which classical theism has confronted itself are disposed of or weakened.  (2) and (3) in the above list are dispatched while (4) and (5) are softened.  (1) remains, however;  it also harbours subsidiary difficulties in its linearization of time.  First, an infinite past for the divine Presence is seemingly assumed, yet any such notion is a formal/logical contradiction   Likewise, the infinite future that panentheists’ mostly contemplate substitutes the everlasting  for a true eternity.  .  

 

                If the panentheist paradigm is to hold its ground, something drastic must be done to meet item (1) on the above list.  At the root of the matter has been the neglect of Böhme’s very formidable Ungrund.  It has either been disregarded or has had its impact weakened or finessed away. Yet it must be accepted; for if it were not, the  “God process” would lack the canonical attributes of self-necessity,  self-sufficiency, self-creation  & self-regeneration.  Consequently, its instatement is mandated by the force of a logical or metamathematical imperative. 

 

                However, The Ungrund is not exactly what the medieval Schoolmen had in speaking of the Deus.!

 

"….[the Ungrund] starts from the dark nothingness, whence the Deity 'generates' itself perpetually.  What issues from the dark is a desire, an eternal hunger, a kind of suction of the abyss (Ungrund) which seeks after Being to absorb it but can only twist and fall back on itself:  it brings about it, as it were, a whirl, a wheel of insatiate dark fire.....It generates, by contrast, centrifugally, as it were, the will to overcome the inherent destruction and that it is that shines forth as light, clarity, spirit."  Giorgio De Santayana

 

                This installation of the Ungrund deepens the impact and significance of time’s entry into the constitution of the Trinity.  It imposes a definitive staging in the order in which the members may be said to have come into existence.  In the process it might seem to offer hope of contending with an infinite past, since the Ungrund, as conceived by Böhme, takes the form of a nameless abstraction –an ultimate invariant that stands prior to the emergence of time itself. Finally, it maintains the vertiginous antinomy of embracing Nonbeing within itself;  were this not the case, there might have been nothing rather than something. 

 

                Paul Tillich’s version of panentheism introduces a Böhmean corrective on the following terms: 

 

"......One could say that Being includes Non-being but Nonbeing does not prevail against it.  'Including' is a spatial metaphor which indicates that Being embraces itself and that which is opposed to it, Non-being.  Non-being belongs to Being, it cannot be separated from it.

 

"......Non-being makes God a living God.  Without the 'no' He has to overcome in Himself and in His creature, the Divine 'yes' to Himself would be lifeless.  There would be no revelation of the Ground of Being, there would be no life.

 

                The second schema in figure 14 compares Panentheism –as contemplated by Tillich- with the classical viewpoint of the first diagram. 

 

                Is Tillich’s theology secure?  Unfortunately, for reasons already advanced, I believe it to be demonstrably insufficient.  What it overlooks is the extreme marginality of Positive over Nonbeing –within the depths of the Ungrund –see the discussion in the chapter on metamathematics. . Were this the case the leverage of Positive on Nonbeing –in operating at the level of infinity-  would have to be anything but marginal.  We are driven, instead, to the opposite extreme, demanding that the process starts within finitude, and further, at the nadir of a point quasi-singularity –which is what I take the ‘big bang’ from which the cosmos was to take its origin.  Evolution –at both cosmic and organic levels- must work its way upwards from these humble beginnings, to converge ultimately within the unitary being of Omega –who must engineer the termination of the cosmos.  This eschatological final step in evolution must necessary be apocalyptic if eternity is to be entered.  Again, as discussed in the chapter on metamathematics, both the descent into finitude and the recovery of eternity at the end demands trans-mathematical formulations, if it is to be brought into any kind of focus. 

 

                Further Trinity Changes when Panentheism is Reconfigured

 

                Assuming such a mathematical framework to be installed –and dodging for the moment just how the trick is done-  what are the consequences to the nature of the Trinity?  The consequences of this installation of the Ungrund at the heart of the larger reality upon the concept of the Trinity is far-reaching.  Classical theism and panentheism alike take the second person of the Trinity to be firmly in place at both the Alpha and Omega of the larger reality.  But under the new regime that I am proposing He is to be the Omega of things only, not making his entrance till the apocalyptic singularity that shall close cosmic existence.  He is the Omega alone and not the Alpha.  He was not present at the beginning  nor does He emergence at any time during the course of cosmic and organic evolution.  He shall only come, fully formed, when ‘all is said and done’ on the far side of the eschatological process. 

 

                This Temporal displacement –this delay in the emergence of Trinity’s Second Member to the very distant future- automatically deprives us of His presence at the apex of the psyche of each of us.  There has been a subtraction, though certainly not of Divinity itself.  What is it that remains?  In Trinitarian terms, surely it is the third member –a third that exists in the absence of the Second.  Finally, just because Bòhme’s Ungrund prohibits, this Second Person cannot be infinite –though he may sustain finitude at a far higher level than you or I. 

 

                Hence, in summary, there is a double impact upon the character of the Trinity.  The Second Person must await upon the workings out of eschatology, while the Third Person is watered down from infinity to some sort of finitude counterpart.  Regardless, is this double cutting-back to be regarded as an impoverishment, a deprivation threatening to loosen our belief in, and hold upon  the domain of the Sacred?  At first blush, the answer might seem to be ‘yes’ –yet I believe otherwise, for these two reasons.  First, I’m no longer overwhelmed by an infinite, eternal intrusive all-seeing God standing above me, having total control over me, able at any time choose to exercise his divine prerogative at my expense as a helpless captive.  This was the ogre that so terrified Luther and offended Nietzsche -prompting him to declare  “…There cannot be a God, for if there were I could not bare not to be He”.

 

        Second, the absence of an infinitely powerful, holistic Being who grasps and oversees the cosmos as a whole means that the cosmic and organic evolution that is demanded is no longer and equalitarian joint venture or enterprise.  Evidently, we (and all intelligent beings who shall ever come to be) must do it all  -or mostly so- without benefit of a larger providence.      

“……Now since God cannot bring his will to exercise, working and causing changes without the creature, there it pleaseth Him to do so with the creature……God needs you  a thousand times more than you need Him.”                                    Eckhart

 

                -to which I’m tempted to add-

 

“….Nowhere is God so truly God as in the soul…….God needs man as much as man needs God;  without man, God wouldn’t know He existed”                           Eckhart

 

                It would seem that the myth of Atlas has suddenly shed its symbolic meaning to become reality itself.  So how are we to react, thus confronted?  Are we to groan under the weight of its burden –to be left wondering what still remains of the ‘pursuit of happiness’?  My reaction is the exact reverse;  I feel a deep sense of privilege for the way in which it gives an enlarged significance to my presence here –and of intelligent life everywhere.  It rubs home the insight, already recognized in Greek times, that ‘happiness’ –even when conceived in terms of a eudaemonism that transcends hedonistic pursuits- is a contingent value that is not reachable by frontal assault.  It is something that may be entertained ‘on the side’ if nothing of deeper significance is intruding at the moment, though as often as not it emerges as a fringe benefit from activity pursued with higher aim.  No one drives these points home than Berdyaev –as expressed in these pungent asides::

 

“…..Man strives for concrete values and goods, the possession of which may give him bliss and happiness, but happiness itself cannot be the conscious purpose.  When a philosopher or scientist is engaged in the pursuit of truth, it is the truth he is after and not happiness..”  

 

“….the idea that happiness is the end of life  and a criterion of good and evil It s the invention of those who hold the lowest moral theories –hedonism, eudaemonism and utilitarianism.”

 

“…..The teleological point of view, combined with the doctrine of free will may be formulated as follows:  man must subordinate his life to the supreme end placed before him”   [my emphasis]

 

                Analogues of the Trinity within Neutral Monism

 

                Having, seemingly, to have patched things upon, why not rest content?  Isn’t there something gratuitous about meddling with the ontological framework?  My answer is a resounding YES –for two reasons –the scourge of the stick and the attractions of the carrot.  First is the untidiness of the schema which frustrated my attempts to evolve the needed metamathematical scaffolding –within which to give the edifice a coherent and graceful form.  But much stronger has been the pull of the monistic temperament with which I was born.  I was propelled by its promptings to postulate –and to work out the consequences of- a Holistic/individualistic inequality of  H  > =  I,  as has been explored within previous sections of this chapter.  Its most immediate Trinitarian consequence is the replacement of a divine Person  –from whom I’m continuingly begotten at every passing conscious moment- by Eckhart’s Gottheit, a presence to be equated with the Trinity’s First person.  He is no person at all, as normally understood, but a raw creative potentiality lacking any form of corporate or articulate mind.  Rather, He is in possession of no more than a bare subliminal self-consciousness;  as Eckhart has put it: ”…God the father has perfect insight into himself by means of himself, not by means of any image”.  But we also have to credit Him with the hidden drive of Böhme’s dark, inarticulate will.  Its intent is the creation of personhood.  It will bring it into being wherever and whenever it discovers ground sufficiently and appropriately organized to receive it.  It has a hidden thirst for incarnation.  Like oxygen, it suffuses everywhere yet is inactive in itself.  It is forever in search of tinder to ignite into the flames of life and consciousness.

 

                Another way of expressing this shift in the emergence is to say that during the entire reach of cosmic and organic evolution –from Alpha to Omega- there are no longer two layers of personhood, one stacked upon the other. In the theistic ontology –including the mainstream versions of panentheism, there is a single entity ‘Upstairs’ identifiable as the Trinity’s Second Person –an eternal holistic, infinite all-transcending divine Being, and below, a vast pluralist domain of finite monads including the likes of you and I.  But when panentheism is regrounded upon  Böhme’s Ungrund, there remains but a single layer of personhood throughout the entire reach of organic evolution.  However, all personal entities or monads are hybrid entities, comprising a Holistic creative cap supporting an individualistic actual person -the lower being a begotten extension of the Holistic presence.  One way of putting it might be to say that each of us –at each conscious moment- is a failed attempt of the First Person to bring the Second into existence.

 

                A word about counter-arguments that have been voiced against this summary dispatch.  What of the reportage of mystics of their encounters with a divine Being?  Their assertions transcend inferences from arguments, nor are they the reportage of ‘observations’ as customarily understood.  They are speaking of something in which they have participated.  While taking their experiences  at face value, what they are speaking of is no  ipso facto  evidence that the ‘Second’ Trinitarian presence is, after all, safely installed and in control of things..  What the mystic encounters is a temporary divine presence who has contrived to make entrance.  It is as though the Gottheit had taken up a passing residence within the incarnation substratum that is a part of our real estate.  He lacks the power so to thrust himself unbidden upon us, but is there, as it were, by our invitation, or if more spontaneously, then only by virtue of ground that has been carefully prepared.  He is Eckhart’s God who ‘….comes and disbecomes……”

 

                Yet what the mystic encounters is very much a function of the depths of his inner vision. When superficial, the experience is one of an encounter with a personal God; An immanent presence transformed by the inward-turning eye  ":.... The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me." –as though the customary plain glass interface had become replaced by half-silvered mirror.  But a deeper mystical outreach causes this 'meeting' to be replaced by a merging in which the creature and God have become one -or, to put in more strictly monistic terms, the Atman becomes aware of its own true nature: 

 

"......There is an agent of soul which reaches further than broad heaven -so incredibly far that the distance is beyond telling. It goes even further than that."            Eckhart

 

                The fourth image of figure 14 is little different from that of reconfigured panentheism, immediately to its left.  The switch to the ontology of Neutral Monism intensifies the connection between holism and individualism,  so that the third person of the Trinity There are no two levels of Personhood that would require such a duplication.  Also, the intrinsic polarization –a ‘logical’ ordering, as Hegel might put it, compromises the possibility of a direct connection between the Ungrund.  However, such is the way in which things hang together, in neutral monism, that I have shown the coupling whited-out rather than eliminated. 

 

                Three trends are to be seen –in moving through the four images of figure 14 from left to right.  First is an increasing intrusion of time  and this in two ways.  First in committing members to an evolutionary process, and second in the ordering  of their emergence upon the stage of actual existence. 

 

                Second is an increasing prominence of individualistic significance in the scheme of things –something that at first glance might seem to be counter-intuitive, given that it is the consequence of a succession of steps in the direction of monism.  And finally, there is a progressive consolidation towards a truly monistic monotheism.  This non-negotiable principle has always been put at risk by the intruding numerosity of the Trinity.

 

            The Trinity in Time –an Overview in Images and Animations

1

                Figure 14 is static;  this follows rather inevitably from the way in which it clings to classical notions of how holism is constituted.  Figure 15 has been carefully put together in an attempt to transcend its limitations in a number of ways.  First, the distinction between Eternal and finite time has been mapped, respectively, into the vertical dimension and horizontal dimensions.  The pristine meta- epi-genetic ‘unfolding’ of the Ungrund is displayed in the top half of the diagram, while both finite existence –and its eternal counterpart to which it is to lead- occupy the lower.  Taking the figure as a whole, we might say that it is an elapsed time photograph captured by an appropriately

 

 

stationed celestial camera.    Pluralist, individual personhood precedes its holistic counterpart –Omega.  However, both aspects enter eternal life at the same apocalyptic moment. This entity –Nous as I have chosen to call ‘him’- is a dyophysite consummation of an evolving Reality in which a natural  quasi-infinite Omega is brought to completion through an engulfment by its eternal counterpart –at the apocalyptic moment.  As the figure makes clear, we shall all be participants within Nous;     We may be regarded as Nous’s ontogeny –so that cosmic and organic evolution need to be thought of in embryological terms. 

 

                In moving from left to right within the figure, the intention is to show that what is to be preserved of finite entities –and here it must not be forgotten that Omega will himself be finite, if of a very special ‘ceiling’ or limiting measure of finitude. The three black arrows depict the staging of time’s emergence and subsequent development.  

 

                In Figure 15 –essentially an elapsed time photograph- the actual passage of chronology cannot be unambiguously read out or inferred.  This is because the diagram does not preserve the distinction between temporal and metatemporal staging -that is, the difference between intervals of time that are merely transitional, vanishing after they have served their purpose- and those which are preserved  -or, as we might say, are epigenetic.  The Animated version of figure 15 attempts to rectify this omission. 

                Figure 16 has been added by way of complementation.  It illustrates the larger concentric nature of theogony and suggests a more subtle interrelationship between the three macrochronological stages.  It may be viewed as  one of a mutual orthogonality.  The initial cosmogony is convergent;  cosmic time unfolds linearly, in the plane of the paper, while eternal life passes upwards orthogonally out of it.  Again, an animated version is offered in an attempt to bring things to life;  this supplements one already given.    Finally, for good measure, the accompanying figure 17 stresses the holistic viewpoint of the processing of Reality;  it is annotated .  A click on the image will bring it to life.

 

A Re-examination of the ‘God Question’

 

                General Considerations

 

                The demand that Reality be cantered within Böhme’s Ungrund displaces the appearance of the Second person till the eschatological termination of cosmic and organic evolution, while Neutral Monism’s close bonding of pluralism to holism erases the distinction between the Trinity’s First and Third persons, the First absorbing the offices of the Third.  The Gottheit does duty as the Trinity’s First person –provided that we recognize that it is a raw creative Begetter of personhood, rather than a manifest person.  In terms of metatemporal priority, he is upstaged by the Ungrund –but by no more than a hair’s breadth –to the point where we might be tempted to say that we find ourselves in the presence of an absolute undecidability –as to whether He is, or is not to be regarded as copresent with the Ungrund at the very beginning.  We are brought full circle to Eckhart’s “…God is a mystery –even to Himself”.  Reality in its depths is a holistic monism which, regardless, falls just short of being a monotheism –again as this concept is normally interpreted, because it is upstaged by the Ungrund

               

            The Subtlety of ‘Holism’ & its Relation to the Individual

 

                We therefore find ourselves contemplating a metatemporal or ‘logical’ ordering, in coming to terms with the emergence of personhood.  The first schema below presents this staging which is colour-coded as follows.    

 

Mystery  >  1^st Person  >  Monadic Plurality  >  Omega’s ‘Holism’  >  Eternal 2^and Person

 

                Brown signifies authentic Trinitarian Presences -in the sense of being Eternal and Holistic.  Blue labels those entities that are finite and individualistic –the likes of you and I and all monads who shall ever come to be.  The darker colouration points to the unique Omega organism to whom the evolving cosmos shall converge –to terminate at the eschatological singularity.  Notice the mixed colouration of Nous –to signify its dyophysite ontology

               

                The second schema employs the same colour coding in displaying the odyssey of personhood.  Starting from the prepersonal mystery of the Gottheit, it passes to the Gottheit –a personhood begetter- thence to the first truly personal manifestations –as instanced by you and I.  Omega who terminates cosmic existence shall be very much ‘one of us’, though differing in the terminal complexity of His constitution.  This confers a unique enablement, whereby he is able to execute the chiliastic termination of evolution;  it has to do with a critical limit to finitude’s complexity –serving as a hinge about which it finitude may unfold –and refold-  into infinity. 

               

Ungrund  >  Gottheit  >  You or I  >  Omega  >  Nous

 

                Beware however, that neither schema portrays or suggests the double presence of all finite beings, though their re-emergence into eternity at the apocalyptic moment.

 

                Omega –coming at the end as he does- in inescapably suggestive of  Christianity’s-‘Second Coming’.  But he is nothing of the sort. For a start, he will be one of us –if written large- as opposed to a Divine import emerging through a trap door.  Secondly he lacks any redemptive function –this office having been taken over by the Gottheit.  Regardless, he does render us the absolutely essential of providing a portal –to open upon Eternity. itself- is not to be trapped within Berdyaev’s hell of  the ‘Bad Infinity’.  And finally, will need us as much as we need him, for He must be inseparable from his Ontogeny –that is to say, of the surviving traces off all monads who shall ever come to be. 

 

            The Trinity and Time;  A Tabulation of Three Versions

 

                The accompanying table illustrates the progression of a number of attributes of importance in the present context as a function of the ontology that one chooses to adopt:

                       

One of the above entries calls for an explanatory  word or more over and above what has been presented so far within this document.  It is the demand –laid upon us by the ontology of neutral monism- that confrontation and transcendence of Nonbeing –and indeed the entire burden of evolution and its eschatological climax is ours alone –100%  It has to do with very subtle matters of sequestered infoldings of the Ungrund.  This grounding entity contains both Positive Being and Nonbeing nodes, the first only preempting the second by the narrowest of margins.  Within its depths, the relationship between the holistic and individualistic aspects of Being is such, that while holism lies totally within positive Being, the potential of individualism is sited equally in both of Being’s nodes.

 

As a direct consequence of its siting in positive Being alone, holism is axiologically perfect –but it is the perfection of innocence, not of virtue.  The Holy Grail of eternal life can only be reached by the confrontation and transcendence of Nonbeing.  But due to its isolation from this node, holism can neither do the job itself nor make any contribution to the mission.  It has no recourse but to consign this labour to its individualistic alter ego –that is to say, to the likes of you and me.  Our ultimate grounding is distributed precisely equally between the two nodes.  This puts us in an unending dilemma in which a choice must be made between the axiological plus, and its negative counterpart through an exercise of the freedom of the will.  Clearly, if positive progress is to be made –no matter how turbulent- must look beyond its won resources for a positive incrementation.  This must come from the only available source –from the Immanent begetter standing at the apex of our innermost subjectivity.  We ‘do the right’ in proportion as we align ourselves with what Holism intends.  Those who have become spiritually regenerate can do this effortlessly all the time –and seem to themselves, in consequence, to be ‘doing nothing.  This surrender to the divine will, Eckhart insists, is no loss of freedom, but rather, freedom itself.  It is our  conscience  that provides the needed window of access to the needed corrective.  Here is Berdyaev on the subject:

“……Conscience is the organ of perception of the religious revelation, of goodness, righteousness and truth in its entirety It is not a special department or function of human nature, but the wholeness of man’s spiritual being, its centre or its heart in the ontological and not in the psychological sense of the term………Conscience is the memory of what man truly is, of the world to which he ideally belongs, of his Creator, of the purpose for which he has been created.”

 

                This brings us to the delicate matter of nomenclature.  Seemingly there are but two candidates;  the First person as manifest in the pure potential of the begetter, and the Eternal being to whom the universe intends and converges.  Is it appropriate to call either ‘God’?  Not the first, because he lacks personhood, nor the second since he is exclusively a product of nature.  I Have preferred to dodge a name that is so replete with unfortunate connotations. I have opted instead for Eckhart’s ‘Gottheit’ for the first, and Plotinus’s ‘Nous’ for the  second –in both cases for reasons that have been previously given. 

 

Speculations upon the Interior View of Holism

 

The time has now come to take a closer look at all aspects of the evolving holism of the Gottheit, in its passage from the Ungrund to the eternal life to be furnished by Nous –on the far side of the apocalyptic moment.  The account that follows is no more than an outline;  the reader will find a complete treatment in chapters two and three of a forthcoming website: The New Monadology. 

The odyssey  moves through these four stages:

 

● Within the Ungrund

● That of a Self-Liberated Gottheit Poised Ready to Launch Cosmic Existence

● As the Immanent Presence Standing at the Apex of Each Finite Being in Evolution

● Finally in its Association with Nous.

 

The Ungrund is a ‘mystery to itself’ that strictly speaking lies beyond every attribute of personhood and consciousness.  However, if it is not to be eternally frozen, it must be accorded some aspect of intentionality.  Böhme spoke of its ‘dark will’.  I prefer to think in terms of the Eros quality –of an urge to become which is still in its latency.  But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the Ungrund is the ultimate abstraction or invariant of the ‘All’ that is neither this nor that, here nor there but simply a mystery that is a seamless integral standing above both the spiritual roots of person and the material substratum essential for the incarnation without which there can be no life.  It stands above even time and eternity

 

But in the ‘beginning of the becoming’ which follows, the unitary, lower face of nameless abstraction stirs;  something in very poor focus is manifest.  In the process (or meta-process) the Gottheit becomes manifest.  Through something like an anamorphic eversion, He emerges from the darkness.  He is no kind of person as normally understood or defined, but raw creative potential whose raison d’etre is the creation of actual personhood.  Though not yet a person, he is a ‘fully featured’ begetter conserving the full sweep of formal resources able to initiate and maintain monads of every stripe –once the cosmos is launched.  Furthermore, this potentiality –that of Logos- is instantional rather than dispositional.  He has no population of protomonads hidden within Himself.  Were this the case, the gun, once again, would have been jumped, since a large part of the work of creation and self-organization will already have been accomplished. 

 

Since consciousness is inseparable from incarnation, then where the experience of the Gottheit is concerned, we might say -at most-

 

  “..…God the father has perfect insight into himself by means of himself, not by means of any image’.       Eckhart 

 

                Eckhart was here, surely, but reflecting the near-universal belief of theists of every stamp that for transcendent Holism, incarnation is optional, something not essential but may be entered as may become appropriate, in order to obtain goods not otherwise available.  Yet to claim that the Gottheit, in himself, is unconscious would commit the logical fallacy of claiming that a positive can come from a negative .  Perhaps it would be better to speak of his precosmic presence as nonconscious’.

 

                But once the cosmos has been launched, the Gottheit becomes far more than his erstwhile pristine self.  In all acts of betting He enters into a species of articulate self-knowledge which is inseparable from that of the innermost subjectivity of the instantiations of personhood that flow from him.  He has stepped up to an ‘Immanent presence’ –an apex from which we hang –in the sense of depend- rather than upon which we stand.  He gives himself totally to us, thereby making each of us a unique haecceity aspect of his Holism.  And at every moment, both the Holistic and individualistic aspects of our presence draw their ultimate origin from the very depths of the Ungrund.  Only thus is our presence truly made secure.  Finally, in His knowledge of the subjectivity of each individual among the vast population active at any one moment lacks an integral fusion;  there is no cross-coupling of what he knows of each of us.  We stand as spokes emanating from the same hub.  The distal end of each stands aloof in its own haecceity ‘degree of freedom’, while all enjoy a commonality of origins.  His knowledge of us is disjunctive rather than conjunctive;  we might speak of a logical OR versus a logical AND.

 

                Notwithstanding, there is  a rim to the wheel, but the connections it affords are purely epistemic, not ontic.  In our relationships with each other, there is no active, Gnostic knowledge whatsoever, contrary to a vivid intuition to the contrary.  I’m speaking here of the illusion of ‘naïve realism that is treated at length within the first of the four principal chapters of this website.  All that we know of each other is conveyed by bloodless symbols destitute of all intrinsic meaning to which they point;  they neither conserve nor carry any trace of the ‘second  modality’ of consciousness and subjectivity.  They are purely physical configurations of one form or another –only this and nothing more.  The meaning which they intend must be supplied by the imagination of those at the receiving end. 

 

                With some hesitation and a sense of the dangers of Hubris, I would like to speculate about the nature of the Holistic experience, within the Immanent interface.  First of all over the question of its reach.  Its domain of possible subjective entry is the innermost core of the psyche.  Emphatically we offer Holism no window ‘upon the world’ –at either of the levels of our thought processes or the outer world as known to us through the faculty of perception.  His intentionality towards us is one of ‘pastoral concern’ –sometimes rendered by the familiar ‘God is love’. I fully accept the commonly-held Christian doctrine that ‘God is love -while sticking to my own concept of what kind of  'God' is here being spoken of.  . Unfortunately, as normally advanced, the love in question is so often over-sentimentalized, seemingly dripping with maple syrup.  To the contrary love is a manifest value which is inseparable from the act of creation.  To bestow love freely, and without self-interest is to uphold being and hence is essentially creative.  So conceived, love is an act,  not a state.

               

                To come back once more to my beliefs concerning the divine participation in our agony.  The concern is there all right, he yearns for us, loves us, forever urges us on (to the extent that our compliance will permit).  Most of the agony is, however, truly ours, in the everyday, 'downstairs' stratum of our being.  I do believe, however, that his does indeed experience what, for a better word, I would call a 'shearing' pain resulting from our moral imperfections and departure from authenticity –a sadness, a regret, after the style of parental solicitude.  How severe this is I have no idea, but once more suspect that the agony of existence is chiefly ours, and to this extent our resurrection is something which is earned, yet regardless has nothing of an entitlement about it.

 

                His experience of us –and Himself- must depend upon the psychic posture that we have chosen, or are able- to adopt.  –as indeed also is ours of Him.  Most of the time, it must be for Him somewhat as looking through a half-silvered mirror admitting little in the way of ‘reverse traffic’.  However, mystical states –in proportion as the posture in question can be adopted- is quite the reverse, offering the deepest and most intense experiences of which we are capable.  It is one in which the begetter and begotten are almost entirely lost within a psychic commonality.  At the opposite extreme –in the states of alienation that all of us have experienced at one time or another- we seem to ourselves as having been abandoned, but Tillich assures us this is not so:

 

 ".....But although we cannot be forgotten we can forget ourselves -namely, our own true being, that of us which is eternally known and eternally remembered."

 

                What is the scope of his praxis?  What can He actually do  -on his own initiative?  The answer is very little –and that is the whole point of our presence.  In particular –to emphasize the point once more, He can take no part in shaping the persona which emerges from the ongoing act of begetting;  He determines solely that we are;  we decide –though mostly implicitly- who  we are to become, as instant follows upon instant.  He certainly cannot put ideas into our head.   He cannot respond to intercessionary prayer because His architecture is not such as to permit it.  As previously maintained He has no integral grasp over space, time or the multiplicity of monads.  He is simply not a person because he lacks a dispositional mind –there being, finally, no bridging substratum to provide the needed incarnation medium.  Certainly He is sensitive to overtures seeking His presence, in proportion as these have to do with the psychic state of our own person.  But here again, the response is not a ‘decision process’ on His part, in which a choice among a gamut of alternatives is made.  The point is a delicate one; “….the wind bloweth where it listeth.”

 

                We come at last to Nous and the eternal life which He opens up to all.  This living holistic being –in effect ‘God’, though a word I prefer not to use- bursts forth into a creative and expanding splendour.  It is hard to stretch the imagination to encompass this.  Nor is the mystic in all that much better position because this beatific state lies in the future eternity, hence is currently not available to access.  He best that I can come up is best expressed in a couple of quotations.  The first, from Van Ruysbroeck emphasizes the reflexive aspect of the experience –that of mutual enjoyment:

 

".....Now the rapturous meeting is incessantly and actively renewed in us according to the way of God;  for the Father gives Himself to the Son and the Son gives Himself to the Father in an eternal content and a loving embrace;  and this renews itself every moment within the bonds of love. and this is the active meeting of the Father and of the Son in which we are embraced by the Holy Ghost in Eternal Love."                Jan Van Ruysbroeck

 

                The mystic here was referring to a presumed primordial state, but it will serve equally well to purpose at hand.  I would also want to add that we shall be full participants within this experience.  But once again, this vision fails to capture the dynamic outward-flowing creative self-expression.  The following quotation of Traherne’s expresses what I have in mind:

 

"......You never enjoyeth the world aright till the sea floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars;  and perceive yourself to be the soul heir of the whole world, and more so because men are in it who are everyone sole heirs as well as you.  Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world......the corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped......I thought it had stood from everlasting to ever lasting. 

 

“…....The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates at first were the end of the world.  The green trees, when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me:  their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things

 

“……The Men!  What venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem!  Immortal Cherubim!  And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maid’s seraphic pieces of life and beauty. Boys and girls tumbled in the streets were playing, were moving jewels. The skies were mine, and so were the sun, the moon and stars."

 

                General Psychology texts of yesteryear often approached the subject matter of their discipline under the three headings of conation, cognition and affection, addressing, respectively, the strivings of a teleological outreach, the structural organization of perceptual and abstract thought, and the qualitative nuances of  sensory 'qualia', 'sense feelings' and the 'gut' emotive and hedonic concomitants riding upon genetically-endowed instinctual ergs.  How much of this 'limbic frosting' will carry through into eternal life?  What of 'dark-eyed virgins' and orgasms spanning centuries?  Will we be 'above' all that kind of thing?  The only quick answer I find myself able to give is a mixed 'yes' and 'no'.  For a start, the reportage of Thomas Traherne –as instanced in the above quotation- is suggestive of something that is much more lively –not to say sensual;  it seems to sparkle with aesthetically pleasing qualal embellishments.