Finding God in the Void
The Razor-Thin Margin Between Irreligiosity & Monadic Spirituality
Latest revision: October 22nd, 2024.
Objective
The purpose of this essay is fourfold: 1.) It seeks to reconcile various metaphysical systems, ontologies, principial theological abstractions, and formalistic mythological traditions in order to arrive at a unified consensus on the nature of God in the monadic sense. 2.) It seeks to utilize the understanding of God as the Absolute or Monad, wherein God is viewed as a profound nothingness preceding existence & nonexistence and beyond all content (ex. Nirguna Brahman), in order to “reach across the razor-thin aisle” and make an appeal to irreligious atheists who often unconsciously assent to such notions as “creatio ex nihilo” and the return of the “soul” unto oblivion (which we argue is a state of impermanent potency), and the idea of nothingness (Sunyata) being the only constant in a provisional world. 3.) This essay then seeks to convince these irreligious atheists of the necessity of adopting a spiritually monadic perspective (without respect to any particular tradition) in order to remedy various ontological errors made by them—the prescription for such errors is a qualitative deduction (following either Aristotelian or Platonic metaphysics) which finds at the empirical level the necessity for a cause qua cause that is Existence Itself and at the Absolute level is the Subsistent Act beyond all quality which precedes Existence. This essay will also argue against numerous atheistic perspectives in its third chapter, such as accidentalism, annihilationism, eliminativism, materialism, physicalism, and panpsychism. 4.) Finally, this essay seeks to clear misconceptions held by many irreligious atheists regarding the mythical or “formalistic theological” traditions of natural religions, instead elucidating a perennial (universally-derived) abstraction behind the myths demonstrative of a common consensus on the metaphysical organization of Reality and quintessential truth itself, via examination of the hermeneutics and perennial themes founds in such formalistic traditions.
It should be noted that this essay is intended for “beginners” into metaphysics and principial theology. This essay employs a fair amount of “common-speak” so as to make its contents more accessible to a wider audience.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: THE THOMISTIC APPROACH
Ch.1 Part A: Overview & Definitions
Ch.1 Part B: The Argument
Ch.1 Part C: Dealing with Skepticism via a Secondary Approach
CHAPTER 2: THE QUINTESSENTIAL METAPHYSICS APPROACH
Ch.2 Part A: Overview of Quintessential Metaphysics
Ch.2 Part A - Segment I: Introduction to Quintessential Metaphysics
Ch. 2 Part A - Segment II: Universal & Quasi-Universal Principles
Ch. 2 Part A - Segment III: Quintessential Principles, Genre, Species, & the Transpositive Degree
Ch. 2 Part A - Segment III, Subsegment A: Overview
Ch. 2 Part A - Segment III, Subsegment B: Solving the “Ship of Theseus” Problem
Ch. 2 Part A - Segment III, Subsegment C: Solving the “Problem of Universals” & Dealing with Plato’s “Perfect Forms”
Ch. 2 Part A - Segment IV: Three Alternative Perspective of Total Universality
Ch. 2 Part A - Segment IV, Subsegment A: The Domain of “All Things”
Ch. 2 Part A - Segment IV, Subsegment B: “Total Possibility”
Ch. 2 Part A - Segment IV, Subsegment C: “Total Existence”
Ch.2 Part B: Formulating an Ontology with QM
CHAPTER 3: THE TWO ONES
Ch.3 Part A: The Two Ones, An Introduction
Ch.3 Part B: A Third Approach: Atheism & the Necessity of Sunyata or an Equivalent
Ch.3 Part C: Mystification & The Meaning of Water
Ch.3 Part D: Brahman, Consciousness, & Reconciling the Two Ones as One
Ch.3 Part E: Arguments & Objections for Awareness as the Final Nature of Ultimate Reality; Differentiating Awareness from Consciousness
Ch.3 Part F: Provisionality, Maya, the Lotus Pond, & Divine Self-Actualization
Ch.3 Part G: The Problems of Evil & Free Will, and God’s Plan/Design
CHAPTER 4: DISPELLING THE MISCONCPETIONS OF ATHEISTS AND SHUDRAS
Ch.4 Part A: Formalistic vs Principial Theology
Ch.4 Part B: The Error in the Reification of Spiritual Entities & The Heterodoxy of True Superstition
Ch.4 Part C: Religious Traditions as Cognates without Confliction
END NOTE
Introduction
“Modern science is based on the principle: Give us one free miracle and we will explain the rest.” - Terence McKenna
When the renowned ethnobotanist spoke these words into audience, a ripple of nervous laughter showered over them, for they were not meant to agree. The atheist—which by my usage of this word, I mean those secular materialists of this age—demands insistently that the Divine demonstrates itself in the mundane, not knowing that the latter is but an emanation of the former. “Give us a miracle”, he begs, as if petitioning an enlightened sage to regrow the limb of an amputee and sprout matter from the void. Yet the atheist bears witness to—and finds his being inextricably inseparable from—the most monumental miracle spanning the totality of his phenomenal existence: the birth of the entire universe out of a deep nothingness.
Chapter 1: The Thomistic Approach
Chapter 1, Part A: Overview & Definitions
This chapter will focus primarily on an ontological approach of qualitative deduction. Specifically, it is a combination of arguments made by the Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas found in his “Five Proofs”, which chiefly rely on Aristotelian philosophy. However, I will first begin this chapter by defining some more general terms found throughout the essay which are employed by those of us hailing from a system of perennial thought. Specifically, perennialism is the position that most natural religions have mystified what is in fact the same quintessential truths regarding the metaphysical structure and organization of Reality. It is not the position of “all religions are true”, but rather, it is the position that most religions speak to the same abstract truths which are obfuscated in myths that must be demystified. Neoplatonism and the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta are two examples of perennial traditions. A third tradition of thought which is niche and small is Praxism, which will also be referenced throughout the essay, especially in the second chapter which provides an overview on the relevant faucets of Quintessential Metaphysics as a response to this chapter. QM is Platonic as opposed to Aristotelian, and I find it to be a more “flawless” approach to a proper understanding of the verticality of Reality, yet the Aristotelian approach is more suitable for making an ontological argument, and thus we begin with such.
The Monad refers to Ultimate Reality, Total Unicity, the Absolute, or Eternity—it is The One. In simplest terms, it is God. But to comprehend the precise nature of such terms, we need to begin with ontology, a field of philosophy primarily concerning causality at the “empirical level”, by which I mean the physically observable and provisional universe. One might also refer to this as the level of “subjectivity” since it is from the perspective of us, the observers. Most commonly, I will use the term “relative”, since it is from a point of relation between us and the “Absolute”, where the Absolute is “beyond” the relative. At the level of the empirical, subjective, or relative we are primarily operating in terms palatable to an irreligious materialist, so this is only the beginning.
Chapter 1, Part B: The Argument
An ontological argument of causality is one that hinges on Aristotelian deduction. In theological terms, it is apophatic, or “negative”, in that it seeks to deduce God as the efficient cause of the universe by qualitative differentiation. This is in contrast to “positive” or cataphatic arguments which seek to prove the existence of miracles or evidence of mythohistorical accounts, which are never convincing, nor are they useful in understanding the nature of God.
Thomas Aquinas, in my opinion, offers the best apophatic arguments in his Five Proofs, which should be taken in conjunction together. Similar ontological arguments based on Aquinas’ work, famously the Kalam cosmological argument, have been made, but are only sufficient in providing a theistic framework, as opposed to one that is truly monadic. Aquinas himself, however, has the edge in that he alludes to the Monad. The difference between theism and monadism is night and day: Theism is a more mundane position, namely that one or more literal “divine being(s)” is/are “out there”, treating God as if He is an item in the grand repository of all things. This is obviously silly when examined under scrutiny, since it would imply that there is a “container” that is beyond God. This incongruency in logic is enough to likewise dismiss the notion of pantheism, which equates God with the universe, despite the fact that the universe is clearly conditioned by principles and laws greater than its scope, such as temporality or mathematics. The only ontologically justifiable position is one which is monadic, emanationist, and panentheistic: asserting that Ultimate Reality is a Unicity which all things are reducible to, that all faucets of Reality are contained within that Unicity, and that this Unicity both contains and is beyond the scope of the universe itself, respectively. This is the position which will be advocated for throughout the essay. You will find that we thus reject notions of “creationism” and the like. For if Creation is separate from God, then it begs the question as to what is the substrate or hypostasis that they both share? What would Creation be “made from”? If the answer is “nothing”, then is “nothingness” the superior context upon which both Creator and Created rest upon? No, this is all silly! As monists, our position is that there is only God. “Creation” is only an apparent emanation contained within God.
French theologian, Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, summarizes the combined propositional argument of Aquinas and provides a definition for the principle of causality:
“First: whatever begins has a cause. Second: every contingent thing, even if it should be ab aeterno, depends on a cause which exists of itself. Third: that which has a share in existence depends ultimately on a cause which is existence itself, a cause whose very nature is to exist…” Reality, A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought (pg. 92)
To break each of these down:
1.) The first article of this three-fold synthesis holds “that what exists as an effect necessarily presupposes a cause.” Superficially, this is a replicable and perennial fact of reality: that things as they are, once were not, and thus were caused to be. It is demonstrably observable to the point of gross obviosity. Every effect presupposes a cause, and every atomic fact which presently exists was preceded by some cause acting upon potential. (The language is important here, as the state of an effect is always one which is reduced from potency (potential) to actual being.) When dealing with the philosophy of LaGrange, however, this “cause” presupposed is not of the colloquial variety, such of which would itself be presupposed by another cause ad nauseum. Rather, he is presupposing a “proper cause”, or one that has no prior cause to appeal to. It is a cause qua cause, an uncaused cause. A proper cause is necessitated to prevent the “slippage” of the ad nauseum into ad infinitum, so to speak, lest we contend with an infinitely regressible chain of physically realizable events, an oxymoronic positing as an infinite set of atomic facts is physically unrealizable.
However, one may, in the absence of further extrapolation, argue for a purely material cosmological beginning as a self-sufficient proper cause, especially as such a beginning (such as the Big Bang) could be argued to be timeless/eternal in the literal sense and therefore “beginningless”. This fails, however, as such a beginning could only operate in the domain of local motion (translation from one state of act to another) as opposed to ontological motion (transformation from potency to act). That is to say, for a material cosmological beginning to be sufficient in acting upon beings in a series, it would need to be capable of transforming potency to act, since beings are—to reiterate—preceded by some cause acting upon potential. In the context of the Big Bang, we are left with the question of how this “beginningless beginning” was able to transform from a state of potency to act (singularity to expanding universe) in the absence of a preceding cause. The problem, thus, is that it is still dependent upon a cause. The source of all motion would have to be that which is not itself reliant on another actor to reduce it from a state of potency to act; the source would have to be an agent which occupies a state of “pure act” such that it requires no initiation. (This is not to say that the Big Bang is a bad theory, but in an irreligious context it is an incomplete theory.)
2.) The assertion of a material cosmological beginning can be refuted further by examining the relationship between causality and contingency. Thus, we are brought to the second article: “That causality can be necessitated as the contingent being upon non-contingent being,” even if the contingent being in question is “eternal”. That is to say, if contingency (the dependence upon something for its present existence) is contained in the essence (quality sum) of a being—even in cases where a being is timeless—then presupposed is that which exhibits necessary existence as the non-contingent point whereupon contingent beings are causally dependent. In the context of the first article, it is helpful to reify a “contingent being” as “an existing thing which has a cause”. In this sense, as something which exists—even if forever (such as the Big Bang)—presupposes a cause beyond itself, then the contingent being in question is not self-explanatory or “uncaused”, since contingent beings must instead appeal a proprio to explain their present existence as an effect. Therefore, contingency as a matter of quality applied to contingent beings necessarily presupposes dependence upon that which is not contingent and instead necessary.
3.) This leads into the third article: “That which partakes in the act of existence, or rather, is endowed by existence, presupposes [that] which retains ‘the ability’ to endow existence—it would be, that is, [that] which is existence itself.” Following from the extrapolations on causality and contingency, whereby contingent beings—and by extension, contingency itself—are found not to be causally self-sufficient, it can be presupposed that that which partakes in existence is contingent upon existence itself, wherein existence is seen as the non-contingent and causally necessary function or “source”. Since “existence itself” satisfies the conditions for causality, non-contingency, and ontological motion, it is presumed to be God. In other words, God is said to be “Subsistent Existence Itself” and thus is “in all things” and “contains all things”. (However, for now let us just use the word “Existence”. I will explain why later.) Furthermore, we conclude that it could only be God which occupies a state of “pure act”, being the source of all motion.
Additionally, it is worth noting that we perennialists take things a step further, arguing that because God is Existence or Being itself, that He is inseparable from the Reality that He creates; all being is Being. This idea will be explored more throughout the essay.
Chapter 1, Part C: Dealing with Skepticism via a Secondary Approach
While I do believe Aquinas provides a solid argument, I am critical of his reliance on Aristotelian metaphysics as opposed to Platonic. Nonetheless, I still cannot deny the efficacy of his ontological argument. Now as for the main issue: Aquinas assumes that contingency is a property contained by the “essence” of a thing. Essences are a product of Aristotelian thought, whereby all the qualities of a thing are said to be contained by that thing and summed as the essence of that thing. For example, the essence of a tree would be its “treeness”, and every quality that makes a tree is found within its treeness. To Aquinas, contingency is just one such property that would be found contained within the treeness of a tree. The fatal issue in this approach, however, is that it opens the door for skeptics to invoke a problem of epistemology, in which they question whether we have epistemic access to the essence of things and whether certain qualities like contingency can be known to exist in the essence of those things. While it is true that Thomistic metaphysics has answers to such questions, it derails the discussion away from real ontology and makes productive conversation cumbersome. The more room there is for disagreement on parallel discussions, the harder it is to convince.
A second issue with the Aristotelian/Thomistic approach is that it creates a special exemption for existence, wherein existence is seen as the only quality that “contains” existing things, whereas all other qualities are contained in the essence of those things. This case is made in that the essence of a non-existing thing can still be described; so if existence was contained within a thing’s essence, then the thing in question could not fail to exist, yet we see things enter and exit from existence periodically. Thus, “existence is not merely an intrinsic property of a being’s essence, but rather something predicated of it.” While this is a good justification for the exemption, the presence of an exemption still creates an issue in the minds of some skeptics.
In lieu of these two issues, I find that the Platonic approach of Quintessential Metaphysics is more compelling, as it circumvents these problems entirely. This is not to say that the Aristotelian approach is “wrong” (In fact, I believe they are simply two different ways of describing the same “verticality”.), rather I see QM as simply offering less “wiggle room” for skeptics to exploit. QM’s approach will be examined in the next chapter.
Chapter 2: The Quintessential Metaphysics Approach
Chapter 2, Part A: Overview of Quintessential Metaphysics
>Ch.2 Part A – Segment I: An Introduction to Quintessential Metaphysics
Quintessential Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy regarded as esoteric, in that it is a contemplative study that abstracts and reifies the organization and functionality of Reality. An overview of QM is effectively synonymous with how it approaches the question of God. “Praxius”, the founder of Praxism, explains its overall goal in more detail:
“The purpose of esotericism and esoteric study in particular is to be able to both identify the traceability of a composite being back to its most fundamental sources, but also to be able to identify a being's most fundamental essence, or the timeless and essential principle of which the being is a manifestation. The esotericist, thus, comprehends the corporeal form by a number of abstractions which sequentially precede the being that is being observed, which itself is, again, a manifestation of various metaphysical essential principles. To be able to comprehend this, one must understand the nature of the corporeal form and physical reality itself, and that nature ultimately amounts to symbology.” – (untitled essay)
The terms he uses here will be explored throughout this chapter. For now, the goal of this branch is to unify “the objective nature of Reality with the subjective worldview of one who comes to understand this nature”. Its approach is “inverse” to that of an ontological argument, as it transcendental and begins with the presumption of God as the Absolute and then extrapolates the consequence that this presumption entails for the varying “orders” of Reality. It is also the inverse of how Aristotelian metaphysics operate. Instead of viewing essences as being contained by things, QM views things as manifestations as being conditioned by principles that also contain said manifestations, thus allowing QM to sidestep a problem of epistemology invoked by skeptics. (However, though these approaches appear inverted, they are really expressing the same notion. Thus, we will see that the terms “essence” and “principle” can be used interchangeably, along with the terms “universal” and “archetype”, which we will get to later. We will also see later that another term for physically existing things is “substance”.) Additionally, it holds that principles themselves are conditioned and contained by other principles in a lineage that is traced back to God. At the top of the chain of the empirical or relative level of Reality, God is considered to be the First Principle, known as Total Universality. In this regard, God/Existence/Total Universality is not rendered as some exception wherein it is the sole container of things, rather QM holds that Reality is defined by a vertical procession of containers. (Truthfully, however, regardless of which of the two metaphysical approaches we take, one result is the same: things embody their qualities.)
Diving into QM is best begun with an example. Here, Praxius illustrates and elaborates on one such:
“Picture, for example, the symbol of the cross, painted on a canvas. The cross itself does not express anything unless there is something qualitatively prior and fundamentally superior for it to express. Most universally, the cross symbol has represented the union between the vertical and horizontal planes, or, in other words, metaphysical reality and physical reality, or Heaven and Earth. This symbol has been adapted into many cultures and traditions because of its objective mathematical appeal, and within these cultures, the cross takes upon new meanings. The Christian significance is the sacrifice of Jesus, and so in the Christian tradition the Cross has come to represent the humanly principles of sacrifice, virtue, and the Savior. In certain pagan cultures with little to no contact with the Christian world, the cross symbolizes everything from protection to equity to strength. The quantity of crosses painted on a canvas is one. However the cross is a symbol that conveys a multitude of meanings, both mathematically or ontologically objective, or sentimentally subjective. The cross, upon observation, gives a person an awareness of the meaning being conveyed, and yet each of those meanings have no physical form, they look like nothing. The cross, therefore, is one of, but not the only, way to symbolize and convey the aforementioned principles.” – (untitled essay)
(Please note, regarding any excerpts from Praxius or other individuals whom I quote: If I have not indicated a specific work that the quote was taken from, it is to be assumed that it originated from personal exchanges or private dialogues.)
The “aforementioned principles” here would be all properties which the cross “embodies”, so to speak. We might say symbolically that the cross embodies the intersection of physicality and metaphysicality, or that it embodies the principles of sacrifice, virtue, and salvation/the Savior, or that it embodies protection or equity or strength. The intersectionality is in my opinion the easiest to demonstrate because it is a principle reflected in the shape of the cross itself! So, when one draws a cross as an attempt to visually portray the idea of intersectionality, we always see that intersection! All these principles influence those who construct or paint crosses, as they attempt to capture some abstraction or historicity in the design. Further, it is that the cross as a shape is the definitive tangible “output” of these principles that attests to their play. However, one may also look beyond the shape and refer to the material, color, size, or other determining attributes of each individual cross—these individuations of the cross which we call manifestations. For instance, was the cross constructed of wood to embody a historicity of the Crucifixion, or of metal to embody strength? Was the cross made large so that it may embody the grandiosity of the Divine and therefore humble worshippers, or was it made small as on a necklace so that it may embody the personal aspect of the relationship between the worshipper and the Divine?
Of course, however, we have no obligation to view principles symbolically. One may refer directly to a principle without contextual regard. If for instance, the cross is blue, one may, rather than invoking the symbolic tranquility of blue, refer to the domain of “blueness” as quintessential: it is the greatest possible abstraction of blue; blue as a “quintessential principle”—a term we will explore more soon. Or one may even take the cross generally, saying it belongs to the domain of “crossness”; the cross as a quintessential principle. Just as ideas of intersectionality or historicity play a role in each individual manifestation of the cross, so do qualities like the color blue or the idea of a cross itself. While it may be true that blue was chosen as a color for the cross since blue embodies tranquility, the color blue itself—and not just the notion of tranquility (though both are important)—is said to be responsible for the manifestation of that cross, as blue is that which is actually “transposed” upon the cross at its manifestation. Further, the principles that condition each manifestation of this cross are not just a collection of equal (horizontal) principles interacting with each other to produce that manifestation (such as intersectionality, blueness, metallicity, and smallness together), but also a hierarchical (vertical) series that condition each other. For instance, we might again say that blue is conditioned by tranquility, metal by strength, wood by historicity, etc., since each of the former items are a result of the latter items.
>Ch.2 Part A – Segment II: Universal & Quasi-Universal Principles
Now let us zoom out from common imagery to the universal: The quintessence of Quintessential Metaphysics (pun intended) is the “universal principle”. Universal principles are said to be “timeless, essential, and universal”. That is, they are “timeless as they exist outside of time and [operate] regardless of it, they are essential in that they possess a certain fundamentality to them that manifested beings do not, and they are universal insofar as they possess a domain under them in which it is possible to find a derivative multiplicity [of things].” (“Things” here refers to other principles or conditioned manifestations).
The only truly universal principle in the strictest pluperfect sense, which may be described as timeless, essential, and universal in the pluperfection of those words: Eternality, Quintessentiality, and Total Universality—would be God. (Though again, we are here only speaking of God at the relative level, since this is still an attempt to understand God through relation.) All other universal principles may be distinguished by referring to them as “quasi-universal principles”, since they are only universal in a partial way rather than a true and holistic way. (Again, “universality” or being “universal” refers to the status of a principle as possessing other principles or conditioned manifestations under its domain. So, lower principles are less universal in that they possess few principles under their domain, while Total Universality possesses all principles under its domain.) However, since we have determined here that God or “Total Universality” is the only truly “universal principle”, we may also refer to God or Total Universality as the “Universal Principle” with a capital U and P, or as the “First Principle”, so as to distinguish It from all other principles, which are quasi-universal. The quasi-universal principles are also often called “composite principles” in the vocabulary of Praxius, since each one is conditioned by at least one other higher principle, and therefore are “composed” of/from other principle(s). Nonetheless, all principles, both Universal and quasi-universal, may be considered “pure” in that they adhere either partially or totally to the qualities of being timeless, essential, and universal.
From the domain of Total Universality (which we will later learn has other names, including those which view it from a different perspective, such as “All Things” or “Total Possibility”), we may delineate down to the domains of Total Compossibility and Total Impossibility. From Total Possibility, we may delineate down to more familiar quasi-universal principles such as those from the above example: historicity, strength, blueness, or even crossness. As we can see, some quasi-universal principles are closer to the domain of the familiar since they are closer to a final manifestation, whereas others are more abstract. For example, blueness is closer to the final manifestation of a blue cross than the principle which contains blueness is: colorness. One can more easily attempt to “visualize” blueness than a vaguer idea of “colorness”. Yet colorness may still be easier to “envision” than the principles preceding it like “opaqueness” or even “total visibility”.
>Ch.2 Part A – Segment III: Quintessential Principles, Genre, Species, & the Transpositive Degree
>>Ch.2 Part A – Segment III, Subsegment A: Overview
Now, let us turn back to our example of the cross. Here, “crossness” is not just a quasi-universal principle but is also an example of what we call a “quintessential principle” because it is the greatest possible abstraction that we can conceptualize of a cross—the “quintessence” of a cross. Any other quasi-universal conditioning principles which we can speak of, such as those concerning its color or size or material, are “transposed” upon the cross at the moment of each manifestation. And we can imagine that these principles are transposed via a “threshold” denoted as the “Transpositive Degree”. Praxius defines it as such: “Transpositive Degree is what procedurally solidifies the abstractions found in more general terms such as ‘Total Possibility’, ‘Metaphysical Law’, etc., and principles undergo conditioning in this degree.”
An interesting function of quintessential principles is that they each act like a “genus” for a specific thing. For example, “crossness”, in being the greatest possible abstraction of a cross, is also the “genus” that contains all possible manifestations of a cross. Each cross might then be treated as like a “species” of that “genus”, with each species having unique principles transposed upon its parent genus or “quintessential principle” via the Transpositive Degree.
Praxius provides a good breakdown of this with an analogy on trees:
“If I told a room full of people to picture a tree, some people might envision an evergreen tree while others would envision maple trees or palm trees. Evergreens are not palm trees, and palm trees are not maple trees, but each of these are individual manifestations of the tree principle. Now each manifestation has a specific emphasis on one aspect which is neglected in others. For example, the evergreen tree and the maple tree have many branches, and the palm tree for the most part has none. The maple tree loses its leaves in the winter while the evergreen and palm trees for the most part do not. All of these have an equal validity and share in being treelike, however they contrast in manifestation and form. It is therefore impossible for a single tree to possess all of the qualities available to a manifestation, because to do so would require the tree to both have a lot of branches and have none, and to both keep its leaves in the winter and lose them. It is possible, however, for each individual manifestation to participate in the reality of being a tree, regardless of any contrast in temporal qualities.”
Or, if we wish to start “from the top”, at the most abstract levels of Reality, and work our way down to the tree:
“Conditioning properties are those properties which are acquired by a given principle at the time of its derivation from a higher mode. For example, there is a condition that Reality acquires from the higher domain of All Things including Total Possibility and Total Impossibility, to simply the domain of Total Possibility. This condition would be the impossibility of impossible things, and therefore All Things are divided into Possible Things and Impossible Things, of which there are infinitely more than Possible Things. The tree principle, when it enters into manifestation, acquires time, place, type, color, etc., every same property that every other temporal being has in regards to its ontologically hierarchical position. In this regard, the manifestation possesses the conditioning properties, while the principle, which remains logically prior and necessary for the manifestation, remains without properties save for that by which it is identifiable in principle.”
Putting together the tree analogy with everything we have learned in this chapter so far, Praxius summarizes:
“A quintessential principle by definition is either a non-contingent principle, or that highest principle which serve as the contingency for contingent principles, or both. It is the beginning of what you might call a ‘principial lineage’. They are non-contingent principles at their highest, and they are the least conditioned variant of a given thing which can still be conceptualized at their lowest. So for example, the ‘tree’ principle I referenced is the most essential and abstract you can get while still conceptualizing a tree; it is quasi-universal in that it encompasses all treelike things, and beyond it you can go no further while still remaining in the domain of ‘tree’. This can be considered the ‘quintessential tree principle’, in that it is the most essential version of a tree. These principles undergo a certain conditioning when they are transposed from the higher to the lower planes of existence.”
(At this point, we have well established that one cannot definitively “capture” what a principle (including a “quintessential principle”) “looks like”. There is no singular manifestation of a principle such as blueness, crossness, or treeness, since there are many shades of blue, many varieties of blue objects, and also many varieties of crosses and trees. Certainly then, we can make no attempt then to visualize Total Possibility, or even Total Universality. This is because principles are not things. They can only “look like something when given form by being conditioned into a single manifestation” since, “one given manifestation is not the totality of forms that may be taken by the principle (the totality of possible forms may be indefinite)” and because “one given manifestation is also the product of a number of different conditioning properties, and may also be in part a manifestation of another principle.” Further, “the same principle can be manifest multiple times.”)
Praxius then goes on to tie in the tree analogy with the overarching philosophy of QM, explaining: “In this analogy, the principle of the tree corresponds to Quintessential Metaphysics, and the different trees themselves correspond to individual interpretations or expressions of metaphysics, including the transposition of principles from one degree of higher universality to one degree of lesser universality.” Or to reach back to the example of the cross:
“So, again, the cross is the symbol, the paint is the substance, the canvas is the domain, and the meaning or idea conveyed is the priority, just like the being is the symbol, the atoms are the substance, physical reality is the domain, and the pure metaphysical principle is the priority. However, the most fundamental conclusion is that physical reality itself is the symbol, composite principles are the substance, the more conditioned degrees of reality are the domain, and the interaction between the metaphysical principles is the priority. Because esoteric study is conducted from the corporeal form outwards, trying to identify the principles in their purest individual state, what all esotericism ultimately amounts to is the study of symbology.”
Or more generally, Praxius summarizes it as such: “Physical reality is the symbol, composite principles are the substance, the more conditioned degrees of reality are the domain, and the interaction between metaphysical principles is the priority.”
>>Ch.2 Part A – Segment III, Subsegment B: Solving the “Ship of Theseus” Problem
Perhaps my favorite application of the concepts of the quintessential principle and Transportive Degree is in respect to solving famous “Ship of Theseus” problem. This problem has us consider a ship which undergoes continual repairs until all the materials composing the ship have been exchanged, and then asks whether it is the same ship. To solve this problem, we can begin by imagining that there is a “quintessential Theseus’ ship principle” that contains every possible iteration or manifestation of that ship. This is in the same manner that the most quintessential tree is a genus which contains every species of tree and every individual specimen of a tree. The materials which comprise the physically manifested ship at a given point in time, like the distinguishing properties of a unique cross or a unique tree, and are transposed upon the quintessential principle of that ship at each instance in time, resulting in a unique manifestation of that ship. Principially, it is the same ship, even if some of the conditioning factors have changed. A contemporary of Praxius and I, who goes by the alias “Renaissance Emoji”, adds: “In terms of the ships it provides a sure resolution to the question, ‘Which is the real ship of thesis?’ because both ships have an equivalent weighting to the truth claim because both ships are derived from a higher ideal form that exists beyond physical space.”
>>Ch.2 Part A – Segment III, Subsegment C: Solving the “Problem of Universals” & Dealing with Plato’s “Perfect Forms”
Using what we have learned about principles and transposition, let us demonstrate how it is that QM can solve the famous “Problem of Universals”. This problem asks such questions as, “Do redness and roundness exist outside of red and round balls?” To answer: Yes, indeed they do! Manifestations, like a red and round ball, are only “provisional” or “temporary”; they are things which “come and go”, entering and exiting existence. Yet quasi-universal principles like redness or roundness are timeless, essential, and universal, and can always be transposed onto new manifestations even when no objects that embody these traits currently exist. This is such that if no red and round balls were found to currently exist, new ones could always be created because the principles of redness and roundness as principle are “timeless as they exist outside of time and [operate] regardless of it, they are essential in that they possess a certain fundamentality to them that manifested beings do not, and they are universal insofar as they possess a domain under them in which it is possible to find a derivative multiplicity [of things].” The implication here is that these principles persist regardless of whether there are any objects to embody them.
QM also allows us to deal with Plato’s “perfect forms”. When Plato supposes that all imperfect spheres are “shadows” of a truly perfect sphere, what he is speaking to is the idea of a quintessential sphere principle that contains all other spheres. This quintessential sphere is “perfect” but also general enough that it cannot be definitively portrayed as is, but instead has to be portrayed through individual manifestations which are “corruptions” of the quintessential sphere principle. Again, one can think of this quintessential principle or “perfect form” as a “genus” containing many “species”.
(It is worth noting, however, that Plato actually went so far as to hold that the ethereal domain of his perfect forms was the “real world” and that our world of material manifestations is a “projection” of that higher reality, like the shadows on the wall in his cave allegory. The implication here is that our world is “symbolic”, or composed of symbols which stand pro for (or symbolize) higher principles or “archetypes”. Following this: In the same way that the most quintessential tree is the archetype of any given conditioned tree, where the quintessential tree is the “true tree” which all other trees are merely projections of, then there must be a “Quintessential Reality” which is the “truest reality” that all other realties are derived from and manifested of. This Quintessential Reality would have to be “Total Quintessentiality” or Total Universality. In the same way, but using a different vocabulary, we might also say that there is a First Archetype (equivalent to the First Principle or Total Universality) that all things derive from and are “symbols” of. (Speaking of vocabulary differences, it can be noted here that “Quintessential Reality” can also broadly refer to what is known as “principial reality” or the domain of principles, which is contrasted with the “symbolic reality” or domain of “symbols” or conditioned manifestations.)
>Ch.2 Part A – Segment IV: Three Alternative Perspectives of Total Universality
>>Ch.2 Part A – Segment IV, Subsegment A: The Domain of “All Things”
As an afternote, Praxius will sometimes in his writings refer to the “domain of All Things” (as we saw in one of his quotes), which is sometimes described as a delineation from Total Universality, and at other times as equivalent to Total Universality. This can be confusing, so I asked him to provide some clarification, which I will expand upon. Praxius explains: “I would specify that All Things are contained by Total Universality, considering that Total Universality includes the containment of All Things, Total Universality being a unicity and All Things being differentiated to a certain degree.” What he is getting at here is that “All Things”, as the naming would seem to imply, quite literally refers to all things in the universe. We can take Total Universality to be a “singularity” or starting point or “Source” that conditions all other principles and which all other principles have to emerge from. Total Universality also reveals to us, through two of its other names, Total Quintessentiality and the Universal Principle, that it is the “quintessential universe principle”—the greatest possible abstraction of the entire universe, the essence of the universe, or the singular principle that the universe embodies.
Since the universe, as the manifestation that embodies Total Universality, is a collection of “all things”, All Things as a domain can thus be interpreted as an accumulation, aggregation, or collection of all the universe’s contents, while Total Universality is the singular notion or essence of “universe”. Thus, while All Things in an accumulation or aggregation of parts, Total Universality is an undivided whole which is greater than the sum of these parts. In this respect, we might also say that whereas Total Universality is viewed from the “top-down” like the tip at the top of a pyramid, that All Things is viewed from the “bottom-up” like all the layers of that pyramid.
All Things is thus also the “sole actualization” of Total Universality, meaning it is the one and only manifestation of Total Universality, since it is the aggregation of everything that is ultimately conditioned by and manifested from this Universal Principle. (By “actualization”, I mean that a principle has found its actualization in another being. That is to say, when a principle “actualizes”, it has conditioned into another principle or a conditioned manifestation which is held under its domain. Another term for “actualization” is “realization”.) This makes All Things the sole exception to the rule that a principle cannot have only a single representative manifestation. (That rule is highlighted by this excerpt from our dialogues: “...one given manifestation is not the totality of forms that may be taken by the principle…”) As Praxius explains in his essay, the Verticality of God’s Plan: “…the degree of the First Derivation, or the degree of the infinite, contains All Things as an essential universality, and the only actualization is that this infinitude exists, meaning that in the degree of the First Derivation from the Monad, all things are contingent upon the Monad.” (Here, “First Derivation” is yet another term for Total Universality. Likewise, “Monad” equates to “Total Unicity”, a new term which will be defined in the next chapter.)
>>Ch.2 Part A – Segment IV, Subsegment A: The Domain of “All Things”
As an additional afternote, “Total Possibility” is another terms which has a confusing overlaps with Total Universality, but just like All Things, Total Possibility represents a different perspective of Total Universality—one which emphasizes that just as all things are contained by Total Universality, so too are all possibilities. That is, God can be called “omnipotent” or “all-possible”, hence such aphorisms as “With God, all things are possible” are a popular motif. In this respect, Total Possibility is the container of all “compossibilities” (which are held in the subdomain of Total Compossibility) and all impossibilities (which are held in the subdomain of Total Impossibility). To explain the former: Compossibles are principles and manifestations which can coexist together in Reality without creating contradictions, while impossibles are those that do create contradictions. This is because all things seek to crowd each other out or compete for and “obstruct” one another for space. One might think of dualities, such as light and dark, cold and hot, or life and death—or the essences of these: lightness and darkness, coldness and hotness, and life-ness and death-ness. One cannot be hot and cold in the same place at the same time, nor experience the essences of these simultaneously. Neither could there exist a space which is pervaded by both light and dark. And no creature could be both alive and dead. One might object by saying that there is no such thing as darkness, coldness, or death in a positive sense, but rather that the “negatives” of these dualities are only the deprivation of the “positives” of these dualities. However, this criticism misses the mark: All essences are experienced, and thus to the observer, there is either one or the other. That is to say, the deprivations always exist positively to the observer. This observational reality validates the positive existence of all such essences, since all essences are a product of conscious experience. (This point will be expanded upon later in the next chapter.) Moreover, these dualities can only be understood in reference to each other, wherein one is known in terms of what the other is not. For example, darkness can only be defined as “where there is no light”, and vice versa. For compossibles to coexist, they must necessarily exclude each other from space, such that there can be light in one place, dark in another, but there can be no place that is both light and dark. (Such discussion on compossibles and duality will be invoked again in the next chapter).
Such constraints are not limited to dualities, however. One may observe, for instance, that a mystical creature, such as a fire-breathing dragon, is forbidden from existing since the conditions necessary to allow for a giant reptilian creature with fire breathing capability would contradict various scientific laws that govern biology, ecology, chemistry, and physics. A being which once existed may also be forbidden to exist now, as the compossibles which constituted its former conditions have since passed. This is the case for extinct forms of life, such as dinosaurs, which could not exist today in the presence of reduced oxygen and a limited food supply. Praxius believes that our universe can be seen as a “realm of compossibles”, and that there could be other realms of compossibles. Such would amount to a metaphysically sound multiverse theory, but with one caveat which would surely disappoint science fiction fans: The nature of that compossible realm is that it is complete as it is, such that those compossibles have crowded out all other beings for space within that realm. You could not travel to that realm, as you are thereby excluded from it by its very nature.
>>Ch.2 Part A – Segment IV, Subsegment C: “Total Existence”
In addition to Total Possibility, we might also reimagine Total Universality as the domain of “Total Existence” which informs us as to whether the principles under the domain of Total Possibility have been conditioned and actualized. Total Existence could then be bipartitioned into the two subdomains of “Existential Existence” and “Non-Existence” in the same way that Total Possibility divides into Total Compossibility and Total Impossibility.
With this in mind, we can evaluate a quote from Praxius wherein he explains how the realization of principles in the domain of Existence occurs through the Transpositive Degree: “Principial Existence, or the existence of the ‘All’…precedes the dichotomic domains of ‘Existential Existence’ and ‘Non-Existence’. The former domain is the one in which principles find their realization through being transposed from ‘Essence’ into ‘Substance’, and the latter is the domain of ‘unrealization’, and both are accessed through the ‘Transpositive Degree’ through which principles undergo their interchanging into the reflections of themselves in either degree.” (We will return to this quote in the coverage of a debate in Part E of the next chapter.)
(In this quote, we can see a clear example of the term “Essence” being used to refer to “principles”—in this case the domain of principles. You will also notice that “Substance” appears to stand pro for materiality—that is, conditioned manifestations.)
Though let me be clear that the term “existence” can have varied meanings: When Thomas Aquinas uses the term, it is synonymous with the substrate of Reality, or what we would typically refer to as “Essence”, hence why he refers to God as “Subsistent Existence”. Contrastly, the term might take on the opposite meaning, referring to “Substance” or materiality and the domain of condition manifestation. In a third sense, the term might simply inform us as to whether a possible being has been actualized or “conditioned into existence”, regardless of whether said being is a principle or a conditioned manifestation. Praxius himself is seen clearing up such a possibly for confusion in his essay, The Hourglass Analogy: “In this clarification we must take special care to note that when we say ‘Existence’ here, we are not referring to the ‘Subsistent Act of true Existence’ by which God is understood according to Traditional philosophy, or outlined by Aquinas’s Cosmological Argument; what we refer to here is strictly the temporal domain, which is understood in the contemporary zeitgeist as the highest degree of existence.”
Chapter 2, Part B: Formulating an Ontology with QM
While the Thomistic approach explored in the first chapter is more focused on axioms and propositions with logical proofs, QM is a bit more transcendental in approach, and as such may not be as immediately compelling to the irreligious mind. Nonetheless, Praxius demonstrates a sound ontological argument using the QM model in his essay, The Verticality of God’s Plan Let us examine. First, a paragraph from that essay:
“As we have said elsewhere, ‘existence is provided derivatively by that which is more fundamental to that which is less fundamental. Existence is derived through an ontological sequence of principles that begins with a most universal, most quintessential, and most fundamental member, and concludes in an indefinite number of non-universal and less fundamental beings. In other words, existence is preordained from the top down, through a sequence that originates with that which is most fundamental - which is also the most universal and the most quintessential, also called the Monad—and relativizes into any given being.’ Here, we are required to examine more closely.”
In other words, every being (principle or manifestation) is “derivative”, stemming from the First Derivation or Total Universality, and each being beneath Total Universality always owes its being to a principle which is more universal and essential or fundamental than itself, culminating at the top in that which is Eternal, Quintessential, and Totally Universal: God. Thus, all is “flowing down” or emanating from God, becoming less universal and less essential or less fundamental—more relative—in the process.
Let us keep going, however:
“Every principle possesses the property of being, which is provided to it by an external and ontologically-sequentially prior source. This source itself in turn also has a more fundamental and more universal source, by which it is ontologically preceded, by which it is provided its property of being. This, on a larger scale, must be understood as part of a sequence of principles that originally begins with a most fundamental member, or a source of existence that does not itself have a source, because it is itself the source of all existence. This is what we have elsewhere called the Monad. Directly derivative from the Monad, all things exist in an essential state of Pure Being, prior to sequential integration, actualization, transposition, and so on. In other words, in the degree of Pure Being, which we have elsewhere called the First Derivation, all things have a qualitative and potential character which becomes actualized upon necessitation by condition; through this continuing process of derivation, or by the continued actualization of potentials, conditions of relativity begin to appear, and a principle takes on a contingent form, either by imposition from above, or from spontaneous action from below.”
In other words, all beings derive from that which is “Pure Being” or the “source of all existence”. These beings then, through a sequence of actualization, start to take on their own distinct identities, becoming unique and relative principles, and eventually are transposed to produce conditioned manifestations. You may also notice that Praxius, like Aquinas, employs the term “contingent”, and uses it here to imply that each being is contingent upon those above it that condition it. All of this espousing serves to reaffirm what we have learned in the first two chapters of this essay.
Chapter 3: The Two Ones
The purpose of this chapter is to delve deep into varying abstractions and myths of the Monad as held by an array of religious and philosophical traditions and to explore the concept of “emptiness”, especially in Dharmic system which I believe does the best job at conveying such ideals. My hope is that irreligious atheists reading this will find the monadic approach to be a viable description of Reality, since it is a simplifying and unifying “theory of everything” so to speak. I also intend to use “emptiness” as a bridge between how religious monists and irreligious atheists interpret “nothingness”.
Chapter 3, Part A: The Two Ones, An Introduction
At the end of the first chapter, I mentioned that Aquinas alludes to the Monad. I also mentioned that at that point we would only refer to God as Existence rather than Subsistent Existence. (Although we saw in Chapter 2 that God surpasses this.) But why? Because what Aquinas is alluding to implies a “Subsistent Act of Existence”. This has a quite profound indication, one which I suspect he was only vaguely aware of: “…that there is the unmoved mover in the highest degree of Reality, and that this unmoved mover derives its existence from a more fundamental act of existence a degree removed.” Thus, we need to divide the phrase into two components:
Firstly, the phrase “Subsistent Act”, is a way of reifying how we come to understand the means by which pure Existence or Being “arises” at the level of relation or empiricism. While God as Existence or Total Universality is the First Principle and most fundamental degree to which we can trace all local motion and conditioning back to, and is also that which drives ontological motion, such a description of God as the fundament of our empirical reality are simply that: empirical. To limit God’s nature to the domain of the empirical is to offer a serious disservice to the Absolute. Thus, we must make an attempt to understand that there is, as Praxius asserts, a “‘Subsistent Act’ of Existence that itself is ‘producing God’ as we know him because at the degree of this act God is truly One ‘before’ anything whatsoever. At the degree of that which is produced we now have God in relation to Creation. It’s still the most universal principle, but now we are viewing it from a point of relation.” The “Subsistent Act” would then, in “preceding” Existence or Total Universality—have to be something beyond either existence or nonexistence. Praxius calls this “Total Unicity” (or “The One” in contrast to “All”), and unlike Total Universality, it is not regarded as a principle, but something beyond principality. Neoplatonists call it the Monad, which is the generic term used in perennial thought. Whereas Total Universality might be thought of as the First Principle in a processional sequence, wherein lower principles precede conditioned manifestations, higher principles precede lower principles, and Total Universality precedes all; Total Unicity is not truly “ceded” at all. It does not “precede” or “succeed” anything. This is because where Total Universality is the “Source” from which all other principles emanate or succeed, Total Unicity is the “Context” for all such precessions and successions. It is a profound “emptiness” or “void”, in all sense of the imagination: it is beyond any principle, content, attribute, trait, or accident. It is thus “unqualified”—the only truly independent reality, not bound by any qualifying traits.
With this in mind, we might note that when speaking of Total Unicity or the Monad, that we are speaking of the Absolute in contrast to the relative. Because at the point of Total Unicity, there is no longer the possibility of human relation, observation, or empirical demonstration. It is beyond all such things, preceding them; it is simply Absolute. However, despite Total Unicity not being regarded as a principle, we might still say that Total Universality is an emanation of it. Thus, we say the relative is an emanation of the Absolute.
However, though Total Unicity may be “unqualified” and therefore cannot be directly understood or described since it evades understanding and description by its very nature, we can intuit it indirectly. For instance, we could say that Total Unicity is “boundless” since there is nothing “beyond it”, and therefore it is “beyondness” itself. We could also say that it is “infinity” itself, since it is omnipotent and without boundary or restraint. Or as shown in a previous paragraph, we can call it “emptiness” or “void” since it contains no qualifiable contents. We can also say that while Total Universality or principial reality generally may be called “Quintessential Reality”, that Total Unicity is “Ultimate Reality”, because it is as far back as we can get. It would be the Ultimate Essence of Quintessence, so to speak. It is also the only “independent reality”, because it is contingent upon nothing greater than itself. Furthermore, it is more suiting of the term “Eternality” than Total Universality is. This is because the universe or “All Things”, as the actualization of Total Universality, will not endure forever, but will expire after many eons. It is only “eternal” in the sense that nothing can last longer than it. The most generous calculation that we are provided for this comes from a classical interpretation of Hindu cosmology, holds that the life-span of the universe, a “Life of Brahman”, is approximately 311 trillion years. Hindu cosmologists tell us that at the end of the universe’s life, all of Reality, both principial and symbolic or material (including Total Universality), will return back to the singularity that is the Absolute or Total Unicity, and thus only Total Unicity is truly eternal, in that it endures forever without beginning and without end.
(For a deeper understanding of the relationship between Total Universality and Total Unicity, think of it like this: Total Universality, or better, the Universal Principle, (as we earlier established) is not an aggregate of all universals; it is the singular distinguishing principle or essence embodied by the universe and All Things—the “Quintessential Universe Principle”, if you will, since it is the most quintessential abstraction of the entire universe and every single being within it. Total Unicity or the Absolute or Monad, however, is even deeper: It is not the Source or First Archetype of All Things, but instead is the very Context for this Source and All Things. It is ‘ultimate’ because the bill does not stop at a “First Archetype” or “First Principle” which lives vicariously through its symbols, manifestations, or actualizations. Instead, it goes further, on to the very potential for archetypes or principles and their respective manifestations to exist in the first place. If Total Universality is a sprawling tree which branches out, a portrait picture which contains depictions of people, or a stained-glass mirror composed of many shards; then Total Unicity is the space around the tree, the frame around the picture, or the uniform notion of “glass” rather than “mirror”. It is the “adjudicator” or “appropriator” which takes hold of the universe and its contents. It is the uniform notion not of “universe” or “universality”, but simply of “unicity” and “Reality” with a capital R. These ideas will be explored more later.)
My use of the descriptors “emptiness” and “voidness” come from the Buddhists, who use these terms to refer to their conception of the Absolute, which is called “Sunyata” (also spelt “Shunya”). “Emptiness” is just how “Sunyata” is typically translated into English. (Just as a note, Buddhists do also have an equivalent to “Total Universality” or “Quintessential Reality”, called “Svabhāva”, but it is spoken of in a way that that seeks to demerit its value by demonstrating that it is ultimately “empty” since it is signicated upon the emptiness that is Sunyata or the Ultimate Reality) Hindus call it Nirguna Brahman, meaning “God without attributes” and contrast it with God at the relative level who they refer to as Saguna Brahman, meaning “God with attributes”. Neoplatonists make a similar distinction, as Praxius explains, and “argue for the existence of two ‘The Ones’, the superior one being God in its Monad aspect and God in its Universal aspect.” Praxius, as mentioned, contrasts Total Unicity and Total Universality. More general terms used by perennialists are the “Absolute-Absolute” and the “Relative-Absolute”, whose meanings fit in line with our use of the terms “Absolute” and “relative” throughout this essay. Praxius explains: “The Relative-Absolute is the Absolute as it is seen from the point of view of the Relative; Creator as seen from the position of Creation. The Absolute-Absolute is the Absolute seen from the position of the Absolute, which includes and incorporates the Relative.”
The distinction between the Absolute and relative can also be described in terms of a “masculine” and “feminine” element, wherein God is seen as the Creator (masculine) and Generator (feminine). The “Creative aspect is the metaphysical aspect, which gives form to formless Essential Substance (Prakriti), [while the] Generative aspect creates that Essential Substance itself which remains formless until it is given form by the [masculine] element.” (Now notice here the distinction between the terms "essence” and “substance”. “Essence”, as we will recall, is the Aristotelian counterpart to the QM “principle”. Likewise, “substance” is synonymous with “conditioned manifestations”.) The relationship here is one of giving and receiving, of commanding and responding, of activity and passivity/permissibility/potency, hence why they are deemed “masculine” and “feminine” respectively. (The true enlightenment is that the masculine and feminine principles manifest at every level of Reality, and thus as we see, they can be abstracted all the way back to God.) The Sanskrit word “Prakriti” ( प्रकृति ) that was used here parenthetically can be described as “the original or natural form or condition of anything, [or the] original or primary substance” or more succinctly as “the prime material energy of which all matter is composed”.
Because Praxius invoked the term “Prakriti”, we should contrast this with Purusha, which would equate to the “Creator” role that Praxius describes, in the same way that Prakriti is ascribed to the “Generator” role. In the early Vedas, Purusha serves the role as the Absolute. He is the Ultimate Reality, Eternity, transcendental Self, or pure Consciousness. In Samkhya philosophy, Purusha unites with Prakriti to form the Essential Substance.
Purusha as the unconditioned “Transcendental Self” precedes any notion of provisional reality, while Prakriti includes all the conditioned aspects of mind and matter. The Transcendental Self, unconditioned, unformed, and without quality, must condition the Essential Substance. To put it back in Thomistic-perennial terms, it is the “Subsistent Act” of existence “producing” God at the relative level.
(The role of the “Transcendental Self” or “Paramatma” as the Ultimate Reality will be explored later in this essay.)
There is also a less-explicit distinction used by the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity, which distinguishes between the Essence (ousia) and Energies (energeia) of God. The Essence is “all that subsists by itself and which has not its being in another” while the Energy is the “activities as actualized in the world”. The Essence is attributed to the invisible Holy Spirit and the Energy to God’s incarnate person, Jesus Christ. Some also compare the distinction to the sun, where the Essence is the unreachable and unviewable source in the sky, while the Energies are the rays which illuminate and warm the world. The sun analogy reminds me of a C.S Lewis quote: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” While the Absolute cannot be seen or understood (as it is beyond all principles, contents, attributes, traits, and qualities), the relative can only be rendered and therefore known by its relation to the Absolute. Fascinatingly, the Essence/Energies distinction was formulated by Gregory Palamas as a defense of the Athonite monastic practice of Hesychasm (Hesychasmos), a state of contemplative and meditative prayer that focuses on “stillness” (hēsychia). Orthodox scholar Kallistos Ware defines it as “the practice of inner prayer, aiming at union with God on a level beyond images, concepts and language.” This conception of the Absolute as “God on a level beyond images” which can only be psychosomatically accessed in a state of “stillness” is highly similar to practices by Hindu and Buddhist monks, who engage with mental states like Turiya, Moksha, or Nirvana in attempt to achieve “consciousness without content”. In the case of Buddhists, what they are contemplating on is Sunyata, which can be translated as “stillness”. More on this in the following section.
Chapter 3, Part B: A Third Approach: Atheism & the Necessity of Sunyata or an Equivalent
“It isn’t that Atheists don't believe in some sort of underlying unity in the universe, it is that they believe matter—particularly ‘natural matter’ is the underlying unity, or at the very least that matter precedes idea/form/consciousness.” – My acquaintance, “Sectionalism” (
)With the concept of the Absolute more properly established, this part of the third chapter will attempt to employ a third argument, for those who did not find the Thomistic or QM approaches convincing. Those who did not find those convincing may hold a different “flavor” of atheism than that of most atheists. This part will respond to and deal with a greater diversity of positions.
The Buddhist interpretation of Ultimate Reality as Sunyata (a morphological equivalent to Total Unicity) is perhaps the most palatable to irreligious atheists, since Buddhism itself is a monadic atheistic religion. “How can a religion be atheistic? How can one be monadic and atheistic?” In truth, many (though not all) atheists are technically monists.
When speaking of irreligious or “secular” atheists, most would identify as materialists, believing in a concept of a whole matter-energy as the unifying force of the universe. Some atheists may also unconsciously uphold an ontology of their own, believing that this matter-energy came from “nothingness” or “oblivion”, such that what we may call “Creation” was inevitably, necessarily, or deterministically born out of the blind potential of nothingness, and thus that nothingness is the source of ontological motion. In this way, materialism can be counted as a position of monism—a sense that there is an underlying unicity to the universe (in this case, believing that a whole “matter-energy” is the unifying agent) which is reducible to an unqualified nothingness, and in this respect it is not too dissimilar from the conclusions of various religious traditions. However, not all atheists fit into this category of materialist monism, hence the necessity for us to invoke Sunyata. Some atheists may instead adhere to physicalism, which is non-monadic in that it rejects the notion that there is any underlying unity or “unicity” to the universe. Additionally, there are also the “auxiliary” positions of annihilationism, eliminativism, and accidentalism. Let us investigate:
Physicalism, as opposed to believing in “matter” as a whole, perceives all individual particles and things as their own “particulars”—individual units which are unique from each other rather than sharing in a whole matter-energy principle. It thus rejects any notion of the universe as possessing an underlying unity. However, most modern atheists no longer adhere to this position, as quantum field theory tells us that particles are not “objects” in the old atomist or pre-Einsteinian sense, but rather are “disturbances”, “fluctuations”, “waves”, or “energy bands” in particle fields. For example, an electron would be a disturbance in the electric field. Interestingly, each particle field is not truly distinct or “particular” either, but rather is merely a portion, instantiation, or derivation of the overall unified space-time continuum. This unification is what enables particles to exist in more than one field at a time and to interact with particles of different fields. For instance, a photon is a combination of a disturbance in the electric and magnetic fields, but can also extend its presence to miscellaneous fields such as the muon field, and can thus interact with other kinds of particles (like muons). What is interesting about this understanding is that if we are to compare it to monist thought, we get the sense that the space-time continuum is akin to Total Universality. Consider: Total Universality contains inferior principles, which themselves contain substances or conditioned manifestations that are conditioned by (or embody) multiple principle. In the same way, the supreme space-time continuum contains inferior particle fields, which contains particles that are supported by (or embody) multiple fields. We could even rephrase an evaluation of particle physics in terms of metaphysics: A photon is conditioned by the “electromagnetic principle” (electromagnetic field), which itself is conditioned by the electric and magnetic principles (electric and magnetic fields), and these are conditioned by the space-time principle (space-time continuum). However, if we were to move an additional step backward, we could ask what it is that something like space-time is signicated on. That is, what are the ultimate contents of it? And where does it come from? We likewise run into this problem when dealing with elementary particles: If large composite particles are reducible to elementary point particles, then what are these elementary particles reducible to? We would have to concede that there is something beyond description that is their ultimate reality.
But to get back on topic: Physicalism and the view of all things as particulars, is a viewpoint in the West that died with the Renaissance era and the rise of Neoplatonism and the popularization of the concept of universals (essential or principial characteristics embodied by things). Typically, a view of things as bare particulars is abandoned once one is asked the question of the Problem of Universals and then presented with a system that offers an explanation.
Moving on to annihilationism and eliminativism: Annihilationism is the belief that material conditions cease to be at a proposed scenario for the death of the universe, such as the “Big Crunch” or “false vacuum decay”. It can also refer to the belief that when you die that your consciousness is annihilated into oblivion (ironically, this implies a return of “you” to your “creator”). This is typically maintained by both materialists and physicalists who subscribe to eliminativism, which holds that universals and consciousness are both reducible to bare matter—nothing more than the results of mundane particles shaping things or interacting in the brain. This is a reversal of the spiritually monadic position. To reiterate and summarize: Where spiritual monists typically hold that “Essence precedes Substance”, which is to say that principles condition manifestations; the eliminativists hold that “Substance precedes Essence”, which is to say that qualities are illusions of matter. Moreover, where some spiritually monadic traditions, especially the Dharmic traditions, view Awareness as the Ultimate Reality, such that Awareness is said to be the default axiom of existence, and Consciousness is said to be the content and function of matter; eliminativism views consciousness as but an illusion of matter—just another quality that only exists in a particularized sense, reducible to bare matter. (We will discuss this notion of “Awareness as the Ultimate Reality” more in Part E.)
However, if one is insistent on a view of universals (and consciousness) as an illusion (eliminativism), then they are not far off from the monadic view: that provisional reality is only afforded condition on Truth. This is the definition of an illusion, after all. An illusion or a mirage is that which exists conditionally because of an underlying Reality that affords it this disposition and conditions it. This illusion is called “Maya” in the Dharmic faiths, and it will be discussed more later in this essay. That things are illusions only afforded Truth on condition, itself lends to an ontology: What is the source of that Truth? If one sees a mirage of a ship levitating over the horizon, what is that mirage based upon if not a real ship in contrast to the illusory ship? Additionally, if universals as illusions are a product of their particulars, is this not to affirm the Aristotelian position of essences contained within the things they are manifest in? And if we are to remove the universals of things from their things, what remains? If one takes the “legness” which conditions a table to have legs and stand, if one strips the woodiness of its composition, if one deprives the rectangular frame of its shape, what remains that we can call a table? (Things are the sum of their qualities—that is, they are “composites”, after all.) However, if we were to go further and remove those principles which condition even the “quintessential table”, removing even the essences of “tableness”, “furnitureness”, and so on, until we have worked our way back to Total Possibility and Total Existence—and then removed those too, what remains if not nothingness or emptiness—the cessation of all qualities?
(We will address secular materialism, physicalism, and eliminativism more in Part E of this chapter with a different approach that hones in on a kind of mental idealism as the prescription.)
Thus, ontological nothingness or emptiness as the only unconditioned reality which is not conditioned on some preceding Truth, is the only logical conclusion one can arrive at. Nothingness is the only constant; it is the oneness from which all emerges and to which all returns; it is their Context. If we think in terms of motion, such as “rising and falling”, wherein potencies arise into actions and decay back into potencies, then we realize potency is merely a “dormant” state waiting to be acted upon. In physics we are told that matter and energy merely translate between each other (local motion) but never actually does the total amount of matter and energy together change. Even at a quantum level, fluctuations of “virtual particles” never cease in a vacuum; particle fields are defined by constant rising and decaying of such virtual particles, as they rapidly enter and exit existence. And on a macro level, we witness things apparently entering and exiting existence perpetually, whether that be living organisms, geological formations, celestial bodies, or manmade objects, and yet where one thing ceases, another begins.
We can think of Sunyata as like a bottomless ocean. It is a pure, uniform, boundless infinity, full of waves which rise and fall. These waves constantly manifest and decay, crashing into each other, stirring into whirlpools and ruckuses, without beginning and without end. Or perhaps, it in a way can also be likened to the space-time continuum, in which many particle fields emanate out and experience quantum fluctuations—virtual particles or bands of energy that spontaneously emerge from and decay back into the quiet cessation.
I use the phrase “rising and falling” because this is precisely the same phraseology that Buddhists use to describe Sunyata in English. That is, it is a place where there is no rising or falling. This ties back to the discussion on compossibles at the end of the previous chapter: Sunyata can be thought of as the point where there are no compossibles excluding each other from space, where there are no principles coming together to exclude others from interacting to condition and compose other beings, where there are no conditioned beings entering and existing existence, and where there are no manifestations rising and decaying. Instead, Sunyata is the context for all for all such potentials and activities of all such things; it is beyond and superior to either possibility or impossibility, and beyond or superior to existence or non-existence. It is the constant which prevails in spite of all these. As the unconditioned cessation, it is the point out of which all arises and which all things will decay back into. Sunyata is where things do not obstruct, just as matter and energy did not obstruct space from each other before time began. When things form, they obstruct one another, yet Sunyata represents the permissible state where all matter may perform its functions without obstruction. From whence then are things permitted to occupy and function? It is in the all-permitting, all-possible vacuum of Sunyata that all possibilities and all existences may come and go without obstruction. Sunyata will not crowd them out, but houses them.
As the Buddhanet website explains in their article, Sunyata (Emptiness) in the Mahayana Context: “However, from a Buddhist perspective, the nature of the ‘great void’ implies something which does not obstruct other things, in which all matters perform their own functions. Materials are form, which by their nature, imply obstruction. The special characteristic of the ‘great void’ is non-obstruction. The ‘great void’ therefore, does not serve as an obstacle to them. Since the ‘great void’ exhibits no obstructive tendencies, it serves as the foundation for matter to function. In other words, if there was no ‘great void’ nor characteristic of non-obstruction, it would be impossible for the material world to exist and function.”
The lesson here is that no thing, act, potency, or any local state, is permanent. All things are provisional or temporal; only Sunyata is eternal. That is to say, because all things can and will fail to exist, what else can we say is the home of all possibilities and existences if not the emptiness which will remain in their absence? Even Possibility and Existence must appeal a proprio, and Sunyata is that freedom from the constraints of Possibility and Existence, and is what houses them.
And given this understanding that Sunyata is the Source of all possibilities and existences, the storehouse of all principial qualities or essences, and the place which all things both emerge from and return to—it is this recognition of Sunyata as a place of emergence, rising, birthing, and housing, which lends us to the understanding that Sunyata is not a nihilistic “nothingness”, but a “positive nothingness”. It is not a void, but something which is “overflowing” with an infinite abundance: “Sunyata does not imply the ‘great void’. Instead, it is the foundation of all phenomena (form and mind). It is the true nature of all phenomena, and it is the basic principle of all existence. In other words, if the universe’s existence was not empty nor impermanent, then all resulting phenomena could not have arisen due to the co-existence of various causes and there would be no rising nor falling. The nature of sunyata is of positive significance!” As we see, Sunyata is not “falling”, but is beyond the duality of “rising and falling”: “Calmness and extinction are the opposite of rising and falling. They are another way to express that there is no rising and falling. Rising and falling are the common characteristics of worldly existence. All phenomena are always in the cycle of rising and falling. However, most people concentrate on living (rising). They think that the universe and life are the reality of a continuous existence.”
Additionally, it is omnipotent, as it is that which all creative potencies are birthed out of. Yet it is also alive and acting, for it is the source from which all potencies can transform into acts (ontological motion), hence it is equated to the “Subsistent Act”. This paradoxical understanding of Sunyata or the Absolute as paradoxically both in a state of unlimited pure potential and subsistent act speaks to its “non-dual” status: It is not either potent or active; it is beyond the dichotomy of these two and is the context for both. It is simply the One out of which the very notion of “two” arises, hence why it is called the “Monad”.
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What separates Buddhists and other Nastika traditions from the irreligious atheism found in the West is the cosmological importance that Sunyata holds. As dreary as a great “emptiness” sounds, this is only a reification—a way of phrasing conducive to human understanding. In fact, one might think of Sunyata as something positive, as it is the source of Existence itself, the state from which all arises! Sunyata is not a state of nonexistence, but is something beyond it, as even nonexistent specimens can be described since specimens are defined and qualified by principles, and yet Sunyata is beyond all description as it is beyond all principality and thus unqualifiable. It is the only unconditioned Reality. All other “realities” (principles and manifestations; things; phenomena) are said to be “conditioned originations” afforded their status on condition of the unconditioned Ultimate Truth. Such a relation between conditioned and unconditionality is similar to that of the relationship between causes and the Uncaused Causality. Reaching back to Aquinas, we recall, “That causality can be necessitated as the contingent being upon non-contingent being”. If contingency is a state of causal dependence regarding conditioned things, then the three “C-words” (contingency, causality, and conditionality) are all inextricably linked. (The Buddhist doctrine of “dependent origination”, similar to Aquinas, emphasizes the dependence of the conditioned upon the unconditioned (i.e., “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist”). An acquaintance of mine who has taught me a great deal, but who wishes to remain anonymous, explains: “It is mere designation depending on something…Since nothing has arisen without depending on something, there is nothing that is not empty.”)
However, it should be noted that Sunyata, as the Buddhist conception of Absolute, goes a step further than Aquinas’ idea of an “Uncaused Cause”. For Buddhists, the Absolute or Sunyata is “acausal” entirely, and this is because it is the Context out of which all causalities (all potentials and acts)—or what they call or “Samsara”— “rises” and “falls” from. Here, we can define the differences as follows: “Uncaused” describes that which has no prior cause but still acts as a cause itself; while “acausal” describes that which is “cause-less” or devoid of cause entirely, neither being caused nor causing. While the idea of an “Uncaused Cause” suggests a definite beginning, acausality is both beginningless and endless entirely. I find it most skillful to approach the “two Ones” as follows: The “inferior One” or Total Universality is the Uncaused Cause because it is the “Source” of all motion or the “First Mover” which begins moving all other causes, while the “superior One” or Total Unicity is acausal and serves as the Context for this to all occur in.
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Concerning accidentalism: Accidentalism is the belief that the universe arose haphazardly or randomly, as if by accident. However, let us consider that nothingness cannot be discriminating: It is nothingness; it can be neither discriminating nor not! How might one assert then that nothingness spontaneously chooses to “vomit out” the universe on a one-time whim? Even in nature, spontaneity is inherently orderly. Consider this: In quantum particle fields, though particles may “blip” in and out of existence, the net total mass and energy in the universe must remain constant over time. We never see new mass or energy be permanently introduced into the grand equation—yet somehow accidentalists are convinced that it already happened once. Yet they lack any capacity to demonstrate that this disorderly, spontaneous, and permanent arising and addition of new matter into the equation is possible. They simply believe that it happened once and once only, and they believe this without evidence, but instead on a matter of faith! And what is their defense of this? They claim plausible deniability: “Well you cannot disprove that events can arise haphazardly!” Is this not what they criticize the religious for in claiming that the only defense religious people have is saying that God cannot be disproven? Accidentalism is clearly a position of hypocrisy, then, above all else.
Rejecting accidentalism, however, does not mean endorsing the idea that the universe was explicitly or extrinsically “willed” to be. An Uncaused Cause or Self-Subsistent Act is simply one which is “always in action”, so to speak, and thus the effect of this cause or act is intrinsic or “automatic”. “We could say that Maya [the provisional universe] is the potency of the Divine and that creation is without any will or design to it, such that it sort of spills out of God like vomit or some kind of breathing, it is automatic and ‘unconscious’, like an activity of a divine being, etc.,” says my good friend, who shall be introduced later. “God is simply doing His thing,” so to speak.
Concerning annihilationism: Every attestable tradition acknowledges a continuation of consciousness after death, such that something like reincarnation can be assented to because death is only a potency. Oblivion or nonexistence is just an opportunity for said potency to arise into an act once more, driven by the engine of ontological motion.
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The only barrier which separates how the “atheistic” Nastika branch of the Dharmic traditions interacts with the Absolute from how the “Astika” branches do, is the simple refusal by Buddhists to reify Sunyata as “God” in the way that Hindus do Nirguna Brahman (or Purusha prior to the Indianization of Vedic religion). However, the two are actually only morphologically distinct. The Buddhist frustration with reification is that of a revulsion to what they perceive as an egoic notion. The Buddhanet website explains:
“The Indian concept of the supreme spirit implies someone who rules. The spirit is the ruler who is independent of is self-dependent and all causes. In other words, the spirit is the one who is free from all primary and secondary causes (for physical and mental aspects). The spirit is the one who has the soul of his own body and mind. This is the ego or supreme spirit that the theologists cling to. From their view point, the only way to avoid physical and mental decay is to be self-determined and self-sovereign. In this way, the supreme being can stay permanent in the cycle of reincarnation, and return to the absolute reality by liberating himself from life and death.”[1]
So why reify the nothingness as a “supreme spirit” then? Because Buddhism is a purely esoteric devotion. They are seeking Enlightenment, the total abolition of the “false self” and its “attachment” or “misidentification” with the world. Any and all reification is thus perceived as an obstacle to this goal, since it identifies with what they view as a provisional and therefore illusory reality. Reification and a personal “God”, however, is necessary to anybody who is not seeking this path; those who live in the world must know its author, so to speak. However, I understand that telling irreligious atheists to adopt an exoteric faith can make them rather tense, and it is a rush into things when the first step is to at least bring them across the aisle to a point of accepting the idea of a transcendental worldview. Thus, I will not attempt to push an exoteric faith on anybody in this essay. The essay’s overarching goal is to simple help atheists “find God in the void”. The difference between monadic spirituality and irreligious atheism is razor-thin, and I only wish to reach across the aisle and bring you over an inch.
[1] https://www.buddhanet.net/cbp2_f6.htm
Chapter 3, Part C: Mystification & The Meaning of Water
“There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond.” - Rigveda 10.129 1a
The relationship between what the Neoplatonists call the two Ones is shrouded in mystification in most natural religions, all of which feature a familiar element with which to convey this mystification: water. In such myths, water takes on the role of the generative/feminine/universal aspect of God, as it is an unformed substance which only takes shape when forced to and which may take the shape of anything. Further, water is “reflexive” in that it can only be self-referential in the way it takes form, always remaining true to itself. In this sense, God is “self-reflexive” in that He, like water, upon “taking shape” is the “storehouse” of all the describable features and qualities of our provisional universe.
Let us now engage in a thought experiment and construct our own water-based analogy: Imagine one scoops a cup of water out of a lake and declares a “new water” separate from the great lake, but when spilled back out into the source the distinction dissipates. One would not say the lake is composed of individual cups of water. Nor would one say that the water which spills out into the adjoining rivers and streams is at any specific point tangibly separate from the water of the lacustrine source. Truly, there is no individuation of beings or things or substances; all being finds its share in pure Being, from which it is inseparable. In sooth, there is no dyad of Being and being, only Being. Hence why Hindu cosmology tells of a great Causal Ocean beneath the “Lokas” of Reality, known as the Karanodaka or Garbhodaka Ocean, where Vishnu (God) is said to lay down and create the material world. At the “bottom” of Reality, at the most fundamental degree (or greatest point of abstraction), we see the “masculine Creator” or the “Subsistent Act of Existence” “producing” the “feminine Generator” who is all content.
My anonymous teacher broadly explains the utility of water in creation narratives:
“Before there was anything there was the potential for there to be something. And anything that we can compare to something like ‘potential’, even though there is nothing actual or incarnate that really embodies it, is something permissive. Land is given permission by the ocean or by water, objects and locality in general are given permission by space itself. So any kind of creation myth worth anything usually describes the archaic or original reality as something vacuous or otherwise something that can change shape or form. Water or liquids take the shape of whatever they’re contained in or whatever they’re limited by, as well.”
More specifically, he goes on to provide an overview of the types of water-based creation myths we see across Indo-European religions:
“They all describe the world’s complexity emerging from some kind of basic, homogenous existence. Usually associated with water. We see in the Vedas, the cosmic waters, Vishnu sleeps upon them. We see Thales’ philosophy of Water being Ultimate Reality, and I think this is just because water or liquids in general are reflexive, and fluid. Which is what spirit or consciousness would be like, as a physical metaphor. We see in the Slavic myths, the first or primordial God is on an ocean, and it is the unwholesome or devilish entity that brings sand up from the cosmic ocean and motivates this God to fashion the cosmos out of it.”
Besides these canons, we can also turn to say the Egyptian myth for an excellent example, where we see the primordial ocean, known as Nun, acting as a source of unformed chaos out of which the supreme deity Ra or Atum rises to begin taming the chaos and dividing it into the first duality: the divine couple Shu and Tefnut. (We can think of this as the Monad self-dividing and emanating into the first Dyad, but this idea will be discussed later, in Part F of this chapter.) The Abrahamic Genesis allegory is also a notable example, but we will save this one for related discussions in Chapter 4.
Even Lao Tzu’s concept of the Tao (another reification of the Absolute or Monad) is compared to water. (Although Taoism and Neo-Confucianism (which will also be mentioned here) are more abstract than they are actually mythical.) Like other monadic traditions and philosophies, the Tao’s status is that of an ineffable Reality that cannot be truly defined by words; it is “the source of all being, in which life and death are the same”. Yet it can be known and experienced by its principles, much in the same light as the principles of QM or the Energies of God in Orthodox Christianity. Its “ineffable” nature is even likened to the formless “void” or “emptiness” that is Sunyata in Buddhism. In fact, in China both Buddhists and Taoists use the word “Wu” to describe this. (Adjacently, Neo-Confucianists use the terms “Wuji” to describe the Absolute “without limit”, and Taiji to describe the Universal “greatest extent” as “a cosmological state of the universe and its affairs on all levels” including that of conditioned manifestations or “concrete things”.) Yet despite being far removed the tradition of water-based metaphors found in Indo-European and Abrahamic spheres, the Tao is mythopoetically likened to none other than water— “undifferentiated, endlessly self-replenishing, soft and quiet but immensely powerful”.
Not all ancient mystifications relied on water, however. The Ginnungagap of Nordic myth, translated as “yawning/gaping void”, reifies the raw nature of emptiness/nothingness. The Greek Chaos ( χάος ) is highly similar in both concept and etymology, and is unsurprisingly linked to “water” by Pherecydes of Syros, on the basis that water is “something formless than can be differentiated”. Christianity actually borrows the Greek term to describe its own void in the Genesis narrative. (Etymologically, both Ginnungagap and Chaos are derived from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰeh₂n-.) Perhaps the most dead-on approach by any ancient philosophy outside of religious traditions, however, is that of the Greek philosopher Anaximander. He describes “Arche” as the “First Principle” (equivalent to Total Universality) and as the eternal and infinite Ultimate Reality which perpetually gives rise to all matter before said matter is destroyed and returned to the boundless state known as “Aperion”. This means Aperion is the emptiness or void equivalent to Total Unicity or Sunyata. While Anaximander did borrow from the mythical language of Greek religious tradition to describe his theory, it remains abstract overall.
The fact that we find such concepts as the “two Ones” and myths which convey this idea through similar imagery, speaks greatly to the perennialist stance that a common quintessential truth has been derived and maintained across a wide array of traditions. Most of the traditions mentioned (Norse, Greek, Slavic, Vedic etc.) are Indo-European (with the exception of our Egyptian and Chinese examples) and are thus cognates, yet we also see examples such as Christianity (a Semitic religion) employ the same ideas (even prior to its Hellenization).
At this point, we can create a table that will allow us to keep track of all the names ascribed to the “two Ones”:
Absolute-Absolute & Relative-Absolute (Praxism)
Essence & Substance (Praxism)
Total Unicity & Total Universality, or One & All (Praxism, Quintessential Metaphysics)
Monad & the Universal (Neoplatonism)
Ultimate Reality & relative/empirical/subjective reality (perennialism, generic)
Nirguna Brahman & Saguna Brahman (Hindu/Vedic)
Purusha & Prakriti (early Vedic)
Sunyata/Wu & Svabhāva (Buddhism)
Tao & ??? (Taoism)
Wuji & Taiji (Neo-Confucianism)
Subsistent Act & Existence/Being (Thomistic theology, Catholicism)
Essences & Energies (Palamite theology, Eastern Orthodoxy)
Nun & Ra/Atum (Slavic)
Ginnungagap/Chaos/*ǵʰeh₂n- & ??? (Norse, Greek, PIE)
Arche & Aperion (Anaximander’s philosophy)
Regardless of which pair of terms we choose to reify God with, we are ultimately speaking to the same ideas. My anonymous teacher summarizes it as such: “Empirical reality is an emanation or manifestation of the one Reality, which is Awareness or Consciousness that lacks content in its true ‘form’ or dormant state.” We will explore his usage of the terms “Awareness” and “Consciousness” in the following section.
Chapter 3, Part D: Brahman, Consciousness, & Reconciling the Two Ones as One
What one must ultimately realize, however, is that there is not truly “two Ones” so to speak. There is only God/Absolute. Thus, the focus of this section is a move from duality to non-duality or monism. One might think of God as a tree, wherein the trunk is Total Universality and the roots and branches are the various emanations and delineating principles that sprawl out from God and “condition” the leaves to manifest, and yet, unmistakably the whole tree is God. The whole tree, especially the trunk, is Total Universality. But true enlightenment is that God is the beyond the tree, as Total Unicity. He is the boundless infinity that contains the tree, is responsible for the tree, and permits the tree, and yet the tree was born and shall decay back into the boundless infinity that is beyond it. This is what monism teaches: that Ultimate Reality is just God. God is both the Context of His creation (the space around the tree), the Source (the trunk), and the contents (the branches and leaves). It is not “God and Creation”; Creator and Created are One together. All of Reality is reducible to just The One.
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As a gesture to irreligious atheists, let us consider a physics analogy to elucidate non-duality: A particle is a tricky thing to predict the location of. In free space, a wave function represents the probability of where you might find a particle. The wave function is a three-dimensional volume and evolves with time, and in various parts of that wave function you will have a greater or lesser chance of finding a particle, depending on the height of the wave at a particular point in space and time. When you attempt to measure a slice of the wave function to see if the particle is inside that portion of it, there is a percent chance you will find the particle based on how much of the total volume of the wave function that the slice you are measuring represents. For instance, if the slice I am measuring constitutes 35% of the total volume of the wave function, then there is a 35% the particle is in that slice, and a 65% it is not. After measuring, whichever part of the wave function did not have the particle in it collapses, and then the wave function continues to evolve through time based on how it was affected by that particular collapse. Really, you are also dealing with a wave function associated with the particle’s momentum, which is mass x velocity. If you increase the range of uncertainty of one of the two wave functions, the range of the other will decrease and vice versa. When scaled up to the macroscale, large mass particles tend to move over large spaces at fast velocities, and the range of uncertainty for the particle’s position is extremely low. Thus, nearly the entire position wave function will fall within the measurement range, making it almost certain that we will detect the particle. This is why macro-level classical physics is simple and deterministic. Yet, it is not absolutely certain.[1] In fact, the only wave function which is certain to contain the particle is one which is the size of the entire universe, meaning it would represent the waveform of the universe itself.
As my acquaintance Clark explains: “All that there is, are possibilities becoming actualities and then decaying back into possibilities [ontological motion]. It’s one thing. Nothingness and everything are the same thing.”
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Moving back now to the domain of religion, it is my opinion that the Hindus offer the best narratological understanding of the two Ones, since Brahman’s two statuses as Nirguna Brahman and Saguna Brahman are expounded upon through both myth and abstraction, or what one might better refer to as “formalistic theology” and “principial theology”, respectively (these terms will be expounded more later). Praxius describes Saguna Brahman as “the highest most absolute, most quintessential, and most incorporative reality, the necessary reality on which all things are contingent, the Supreme Reality.” Here, “incorporative reality” is an excellent phrase, as it invokes an understanding of unified Being—that there is no individuation of being, but rather that all Being is inseparable. In a similar manner, my anonymous teacher describes Saguna Brahman as “the storehouse of all divine qualities and is the sole context for all creative potencies.” The phrase “sole context for all creative potencies” is also an excellent phrase, as it invokes ontological motion, since God at the empirical or relative level is pure Being, Act, or Causation which “drives” all motion, compelling all potencies to rise into acts as an effect and permitting acts to fall back into potencies. Better yet, however, is his use of phrase “storehouse of divine qualities”, since God as the First Principle contains all other principles—especially those principles which we think of as “divine qualities”, or those exclusive to God and lesser “divine forces”.
Perhaps more compelling though, is a consideration of these quotes with regard to what it means to speak of God at the relative level. To recap, this means to speak of God in terms of relation. We are speaking of relativity, and therefore subjectivity. But what is subjectivity? It is an observing, witnessing, or understanding by us humans, the subjects of this universe in relation to the Absolute. But what else is this, most fundamentally, if not a description of perception and therefore consciousness itself? Thus, Saguna Brahman, or pure Being at the relative level, is pure Consciousness. Moreover, since consciousness is a state of perception, this fits with the Thomistic description of God as a state of “pure act”. The result, as we will see, is that God as pure Consciousness engages in the pure act of observation to give rise to things.
It is only from a point of Consciousness that we might identify and have identity, and thus Saguna Brahman is also Identity itself. And it is in this understanding that we also come to understand how it is that Total Universality might contain all principality, because God at the relative level is Principality itself. After all, what is a principle if not an identity or an idea ascribed from our perspective (from a point of subjectivity)? But keeping with the identification of Saguna Brahman as Consciousness itself, we can move from a translation of Saguna Brahman as “God with content” to “Consciousness with content”.
In this context, we can then also shift our translation of Nirguna Brahman from “God without content” to “Consciousness without content”. Nirguna Brahman is thus equated with “ParaBrahman”, which incorporates the Sanskrit prefix “para” meaning “higher” or “supreme”. ParaBrahman might be understood then as the Highest Reality or Ultimate Reality, “beyond” Brahman at the relative level, so to speak. Both Nirguna Brahman and ParaBrahman thus “refer to the same Reality, a shapeless, formless, quality-lacking Absolute. It is not an object or a locality; it is essentially a substance-ontology description of Eternity,” as Praxius put it.
However, my anonymous teacher is typically very precise with language, and likes to draw yet another distinction: that between “consciousness” and “awareness”. He explains: “Consciousness is the reference of what awareness is aware of, such as [the] world, body and provisional mind. Awareness is the potential to perceive; consciousness is that perception. Hence, ‘pure consciousness’ [or] ‘pure perception’, which is undefiled by content, is Ultimate Reality.” This distinction will come into play in the following section.
[1] Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics) – by udiprod on YouTube
Chapter 3, Part E: Arguments & Objections for Awareness as the Final Nature of Ultimate Reality; Differentiating Awareness from Consciousness
Following from the end of Part D: So, what is the implication of my anonymous teacher’s distinction between “consciousness” and “awareness” in regard to the ultimate nature of God? If awareness is mere the potential to perceive, whereas consciousness is the actual reference for that awareness, then we might perhaps say that Nirguna Brahman is Awareness and Saguna Brahman is Consciousness. This is such that Nirguna Brahman is the undefiled, unqualified Absolute—which is the point of raw cosmic Awareness; while Saguna Brahman is all that content and which Awareness can be Conscious and perceiving of—that which qualifies Awareness. When we recall that Nirguna Brahman and Saguna Brahman are but analogs for the terms “Total Unicity” and “Total Universality”, then we elucidate that all of consciously perceived reality is birthed out of the pure potential of the unconditioned and Divine Mind. This aligns well with our understanding that “principles” or “universals” might also be called “essences”—and what is an essence if not the “suchness” that comes from having a conscious and perceptual experience of something? My anonymous teacher asserts, “…the manner in which we typically discuss ‘awareness’ implies awareness of, or conditions of which awareness is conscious of. [Yet], ‘The pure potential of unconditioned mind’ is probably as close as we can get to describing Ultimate Reality.” The implications of the view are vast: Awareness is the default axiom for existence, Consciousness is the content and function of all matter, Divine Consciousness is exhaustive of Reality, and Ultimate Reality is just pure unconditioned Awareness. This is to the extent that we might say all the discernable contents of Reality are just a result of a “fractured” Awareness, and that all “physical matter itself is condensed consciousness.” This position is known as “monadic cosmoconsciousness” or “idealist monism”, however, it is not without controversy in the monism community. The alternative position is that of “neutral monism”, which asserts that Ultimate Reality is neither of Mind nor Matter, but some acataleptic third substrate which precedes both Essence and Substance. This is the position taken by Praxius. (As mentioned in Part B of this chapter, materialism is technically a third form of monism, known as “materialist monism”, and is considered monadic in that it adheres to the idea of a unifying “matter-energy” as the substrate of all things, such that this matter-energy can be regarded as its own “Universal Principle”.) Though my anonymous teacher and I disagree with him, we respect his position. Below, I present some outtakes from a debate between the three of us on this, where we see that Praxius’ primary objection is that by equating God with Awareness, we are restricting His nature to a single quality within the bounds of human understanding. Praxius:
“To make such a claim that the Absolute Reality is anything other than the abstractions by which it is definable - anything besides Absolute, Quintessential, Universal, Eternal, etc., while even such words themselves are only descriptive of a given aspect of this Reality itself - however, is to lower the Absolute to the plane of whatever it is on which basis you’re defining it. It is incorrect to say, exclusively so, that the Absolute Reality is raw or pure awareness, because it is more Absolute than even pure awareness. This is not to say that the Absolute Reality is not incorporative of pure awareness, but to exclusivize the Absolute Reality on any basis besides its own is to lower it to a more contingent level. The Absolute Reality possesses pure consciousness or pure awareness, in a transpository degree, but it itself is greater than absolute awareness. It is in fact impossible to say that the Absolute Reality is anything, other than the Absolute Reality, because to say that something is something is to exclusivize it to the term to which you’re connecting it by way of the word ‘is’.” And: “…to say that the Ultimate Reality is awareness is to attribute a particularized conclusion to that which is totally ineffable - that to which no conclusive statement can be attributed. This is not to say that the Ultimate Reality does not possess the rawest form of awareness, but to reduce the infinite to a single principle is, again, a reduction. The argument can even be made that this awareness requires ‘that which is aware’, which would be a logically superior principle to this awareness, meaning that awareness is not the Ultimate Reality.”
These seem like reasonable objections, but my anonymous teacher counters that Awareness is a state of potential for consciousness—an emptiness which is not truly definable but instead acataleptic, and that Awareness is presumed before we even speak of anything else since we are already aware of these things. Pulling a large paragraph of his from a debate between myself, him, and Praxius:
“I feel as if contentions surrounding the words ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’ are being had here. Consciousness or awareness is ‘reified’ in the sense that we treat it as an abstract object, but the literality of these words are experiential. In referring to consciousness we typically consider a conditioned reality, that which consciousness is conscious of. Such as consciousness of a body, or consciousness of mental states, any and all phenomena is the conditioning factors. However, if we split hairs and introduce a notion of awareness, which is the raw potential to perceive, and propose this to be ultimate reality, it becomes a lot less confusing. By saying ‘consciousness is exhaustive of reality’ usually translates into the notion that the world itself is ‘my’ consciousness, such as solipsism, or otherwise that a particular or conditioned consciousness is ultimate reality. Even by qualifying it as ‘cosmic’ consciousness still gives us problems because it’s implying reality is the aggregate or accumulation of particular consciousnesses or mentalities, and this would also be missing the mark. Awareness as seen as the potential for consciousness, that is, the preceding context for mentality or mind of any kind, is clarifying. Such that we may call this reality ‘emptiness’, or otherwise an indeterminate proclivity for creative or imaginative processes. This awareness couldn’t be qualified in that it has existence or is otherwise ‘real’, because it is unconditioned completely. ‘Awareness’ like all other names are convenient labels we use to ‘capture’ or otherwise relegate what is, into schematics of thinking and thus ontologies. What is real is the Ontic, or ‘Arche’. I would think it would be skillful to define it as the ‘Potential of the unconditioned mind’, or as ‘Pure awareness, Meta-Awareness’, and so on, but this doesn’t really do it justice either. Awareness or meta-awareness in this sense would be the default axiom of all existence because it’s necessarily assumed before there is thought, speech, volition. By speaking we are invoking inquiry or investigation into its contents, the problems arise when we begin to reify its content as that reality itself, such as saying an idea itself is ultimate reality, or that truth is namable or explanatory in the fashion of which metaphysicians and philosophers desire it to be. For a reality to be external to the potential to perceive would require an entirely new or novel epistemic medium, as any actual world, potential worlds, or localities of any kind all find their contextualization in awareness. Such that we may consider that dreams and waking mundane consciousness share a unitive feature of not having a locality that is exact, only approximate, as its reference point is awareness or awarenesses of which define or speak about such world. Concepts are container metaphors, such that we may ‘Think in and outside of a box’, and thus what is real is not conceptual or an ‘idea’. Reality is not notional; it is visceral and boundless. Intellect fails wherein intuition and direct integration can illuminate or resolve confusion regarding reality. Awareness isn’t a conclusion; it’s a bedrock or cornerstone in which the final attainment or realization is signified by. Such that by abiding in awareness and mindfulness, we are propelled beyond the limits of phenomena both physically and abstractly.”
(We can also contextualize this debate in terms of Quintessential Metaphysics, where Praxius argues that Awareness is not equated with the Absolute, but that it is perhaps somewhere in-between the levels of Total Unicity and Existence. In such a scenario, this Awareness, being a quality of the Absolute, would serve as the cosmic Transpositive Degree by transposes all principles into manifestations. (Keep this in mind for when I discuss the double-slit experiment later in this part of the chapter.) Conversely, I would argue that what he is describing is a “meta-consciousness”—some lesser derivation of Awareness than that which is equal to the Absolute. I have also argued the case that Awareness is capable of a self-subsistent transposition, transposing itself to actualize principles into manifested acts.
Praxius explains: “…existence is defined on the basis of post-transpositive actualization. To become actualized, a principle becomes transposed into the mode of actualization itself, which would be subordinated to the Transpositive Degree of pure consciousness.” And: “…we see a transpositive degree of Reality that is prior to the degree of Subordinated or ‘Existential’ Existence, through which principles ‘travel’ to find their realization in the domain of Existence. This, again, is how Awareness (the Transpositive Degree) precedes Existence (the domain of realization).”)
The full debate was much more extensive than this (and is only the first of three debates held between the three of us); I simply extracted what I felt to be the most relevant portions. (The full three debates can be found in my published transcript: Monadic Cosmoconsciousness vs Neutral Monism.)
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Following the discussion at the top of this section, I mentioned the terms “essence” and “suchness”. Connecting these terms is the Latin term “qualia”, which answers “What is it like?”, and it is the word from which we derive the English word “quality”. When we understand that “qualia” is also a Latin term for “consciousness”, we see the genius in the link between such terms: Consciousness is “what-is-it-like-ness” or “such-as-ness”. Moreover, “quality” is an experience housed within the mind.
Consider: Every quality of a thing or act which we can conjure up to describe it, is a product of a conscious experience of that thing—a reference of perception. Whether it is color, texture, shape, size, taste, strength, age—every attempt to describe something is an attempt to qualify it. As my anonymous teacher explains: “Color is a form of consciousness, yet there is no color-ness of which makes any color what it is. Instead of a multitude of essences there is only the Ultimate Essence which provides the illusion or perception of inhering content. Spirit could never be a property of particulars; the inverse is true.” A physicalist or materialist might object to this by asserting that it is actually that color as it is experienced consciously is based upon a particular phenomenon, such that in order to have the suchness of green, you must first look upon a source that is emanating light within a certain frequency range. Yet, to have the suchness of greenness in the first place, there must be a consciousness that can perceive and experience it. Without color receptors, who could say what color is? Without eyes, who could say what appearance or visibility is? For there to be quality, there must be qualia. Moreover, this frequency of light, even if unobserved, is still a reference for perception, and this is precisely how we define consciousness: as the reference of actual perception (whereas Awareness is the potential for that perception).
The lesson here is that when we are trying to determine the essential qualities of a thing, what we are really doing is labeling, identifying, categorizing, characterizing, dividing, separating, and/or “stratifying” consciousness or “qualia”, which is to qualify a multiplicity of essences, “suchnesses”, or perceptions in conscious experience.
Understanding simultaneously that there is ultimately only the one “Ultimate Essence”, but also that there is an infinitude of stratified qualia or qualified essences that can be discerned (including the Universal Principle), this leads to a seemingly paradoxical conclusion: that both metaphysics and nominalism have weight to them. That is, one could argue from the nominalist position that all inferior essences such as “redness” or “greenness” are “just names” and therefore that they are ultimately “empty”, since we can dissolve them into the superior category of “colorness” where the distinction between the two (redness and greenness) evaporates. Likewise, we can dissolve “colorness” and all other essences (there are infinitely many) into the most superior and universal parent principle—Total Universality—where the distinctions between all the inferior principles become nil. But we can go a step further than even this and dissolve Total Universality too, dissolving it into Total Unicity or the Ultimate Essence, where there is no longer even the notion of quality, but just emptiness. In this way, there is, ultimately speaking, only the empty and unqualified Ultimate Essence, which is to say that Ultimate Reality is just The One. At the same time, however, one could take the metaphysician’s stance and argue against the nominalist by asserting that though it is true that all essences are signicated upon the Ultimate Essence or are grounded in its emptiness, that these essences can nonetheless be discerned and still prevail within the microcosm, possessing obvious and persistent presences which are timeless, essential, and universal to some degree.
Another point to make here is that because Awareness is the potential for perception or consciousness, and is therefore “beyond” consciousness or qualia, Awareness is all that can remain when we dissolve all essences including the final parent principle of Total Universality, since essences are really just stratifications of qualia or conscious perception. That is to say, when all essences or stratifications of qualia, consciousness, or perception are dissolved, including the essence of the universe (universeness) itself, there is nothing left in terms of conscious perception, and thus remains only the potential for perception which is Awareness.
And an additional point which might be made: If Total Universality can be viewed summatively, as the summation of all universals or as their “parent container”, with a universal representation in all things (e.g., it is “totally universal”); and if we know that all universals or principles or essences are “stratified qualia” (which is to say that they are instantiations of conscious perception); then Total Universality might be thought of as the summation or totality of consciousness or qualia—a singular Consciousness undivided. Moreover, because Total Universality is the very first quality that can be distinguished as it emerges from the unqualified Absolute, we can think of Total Universality as the “first Consciousness”.
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This we might link back to our discussion on the two Ones, where the Absolute Essence (Purusha, masculine Creator, etc.) forms and shapes the Universal Energy or Substance (Prakriti, feminine Generator, etc.). It is the One (pure Awareness) birthing and conditioning qualia in the first place so that it might then be aware of something—to have some content to perceive. Then, beings which are conscious, such as humans or animals, are “pockets” of this Awareness which are “caged” by causes and conditions of the qualified world. That is, our perception is “defiled” by conscious content; it is not pure and unconditioned as the mind of the Absolute is. That being said, from the Ultimate Essence, there are an infinitude of illusory essences which spill out of it, which conscious beings (such as humans and animals) are both a product of and made aware of. At the end of the day, there is only Awareness witnessing its own contextualization for each instantiation of consciousness.
This insight particularly arms us to deal with the accusations of the secular materialists, physicalists, and eliminativists in a way which we could not do in Part B of this chapter. To pass the mic to my teacher:
“Physicalists and materialists have yet to really answer to consciousness other than to cement it as a product of conscious contents. Evidence is evidential because it is seen or otherwise empirically present. Supposing awareness as ultimate reality is redundant because there isn’t a reality or any considerable context wherein awareness isn’t assumed. Awareness is the default axiom of all existence because it is assumed necessarily in all cases. If there is some reality beyond it, it would require an entirely new epistemic framework to know it, and knowledge in and of itself could only have reference or locality in regards to a knower or perceiver. Reality or even knowledge when considered as separate from consciousness would be dull, dislocated, and inaccessible. Such that we may fathom an idea of a reality independent of awareness, yet this reality is conceived of with already existing mental contents, it appears in the mind hypothetically. Let’s go back to the Berkeleyan hypothesis of a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it. It’s not that a tree falling in a forest would make a sound with no one around to hear it, it’s that in the absence of an observer there is no tree and no forest. When we ask this question, we are naturally supposing recollection and memory within the conscious mind, and thus the average man would say: ‘Of course it makes a sound’.”
Any attempt to “imagine”, “envision”, or “conceptualize” a world outside the mind is ironic, as even the implications of these actions—these terms—are already invoking a mindful approach, an attempt to capture an essence into a visual or idealistic box. As my teacher says, contents of Awareness are presumed the second we begin to even think or speak. We can go even further than this though: By even presuming possibilities of what might be without the mind, we have already spoken as beings possessing minds with an awareness. Again, to describe the world is to qualify it. To experience the world is to indulge in its qualities. Qualia (conscious experience) is inescapable.
The reason then that we conclude that Awareness is the Ultimate Reality is precisely because any attempt to order and format a world outside the bounds of qualia is, again “dull, dislocated, and inaccessible” (as my teacher puts it) in that it has to contend with “epistemic poverties”. Here, the phrase “epistemic poverties” indicates a lacking of access to certain knowledge. That is, both neutral monists, as well as the particularists and materialists, cannot demonstrate access to a world as existing beyond or outside the mind. Really though, theories in themselves, whether scientific, philosophical, or pertaining to some other subject, run into the problem of dealing with an “unending amount of information and further insights” and desperately attempting to “amend contradictions invoked by impressing mental contents onto reality”. The reality of the situation is that the unending stream of information we encounter in all our studying, theorizing, and contemplating, is a product of the illusion of multiplicity which flows out of the monadic Ultimate. Likewise, contradictions in knowledge or thinking (as in paradoxes or dialetheias) represent a constraint of duality itself, such that things are only referenced against one another. But we know that duality is only an illusion, an emanation which comes after the One Monad—a “One” which the very notion of “two” implicitly presumes. Any attempt to “exhaustively pin down what is ultimately real” cannot come up with anything “other than referring to it as spirit, God, essence, consciousness, ethereality, so on and so forth,” as my teacher concludes. Therefore, “We call it ‘Ultimate’ Reality because we can’t get any further.”
This is why the Absolute is described as ineffable or acataleptic: It is beyond the reach of epistemology. And being beyond any reference of perception, it is beyond qualia, and thus cannot be qualified. It is that which the particularists and materialists desperately desire to reach, yet we find that because Awareness is the default presumption behind any thinking, that pure Awareness is the only possible candidate for such an ineffable or acataleptic point. It is Ultimate, again, “because we can’t get any further”. My anonymous teacher offers some musings on perception and non-perception in regard to the Ultimate:
“A perception of non-perception can be understood as the cognition or consciousness that what is perceived is not what is. Such that we may invoke Hume’s bundle theory, or otherwise any kind of idealistic theory of truth which posits reality at two levels: Things as they are perceived and then things as they are. A non-perception of perception is the absence of perception entirely and implies a lack of experience or apprehension therein. The former is an idea of enlightenment or non-duality, a “unitive” or perplexing experience, but is still not what we are really looking for. The latter is the abiding reality of content-lacking potential, yet this non-perception or ‘Jhana’, is not lasting. Thus even it is not the Ultimate Reality. However, if we were to continue to try and whittle away at it like a wood statue or memorial, we could liken ultimate reality to the phenomenological state, the ‘suchness’ of that non-perception, just without condition or proclivity to actualize into further conditionality or obfuscation. Hence the accomplished spiritual being has gone ‘such’. Not as such, or to such, but ‘such’ without condition.”
However, contrary to the physicalists and materialists, who often cling to an eliminativism which states that consciousness is only an illusion of matter, some skeptics might adopt a position which is a direct inversion to monadic cosmoconsciousness, known as panpsychism. Whereas monadic cosmoconsciousness holds that Matter is particular of Consciousness or Spirit, panpsychism holds that consciousness is a trait present as an inherit feature in all matter. Both monadic cosmoconsciousness and panpsychism thus view conscious beings in the same light: That we are condensations of a greater consciousness. However, there are two flaws with the panpsychist approach: Firstly, by holding that consciousness is inherently present as a feature of all matter, it runs into the problem of qualia. That is, what is the reference for all other qualities of matter if consciousness is reducible to a quality of matter which is equal and parallel to all other qualities? This leads to its second flaw: that, like physicalists and materialists, panpsychists still lack the ability to demonstrate access to a qualified world of matter which is outside the mind. Monadic cosmoconsciousness avoids this issue by asserting that Consciousness is exhaustive of Reality, such that it contains all of Reality. It is thus my conclusion that monadic cosmoconsciousness is the only self-consistent and full-proof position.
We could also take on panpsychism scientifically and expose a third problem which arises from the notion that consciousness is particular of matter and not vice versa: If every atom in the human body is replaced over seven years, consciousness cannot be particular of anything in the body. This is corroborated in the fact that science cannot demonstrate any locality for consciousness, to say “where it is” in the brain. They might assert that a certain region of the brain, such as the cerebrum, is where perceptions are consciously processed, but this says nothing on the physical locality of consciousness. If it is in the cells, then how does it persist when the atoms of those cells have been exchanged? If it is implicit to the network of quantum entanglement established between ions in the brain, then how does consciousness persist when the brain is “rewired” such that the network changes? Moreover, if it is implicit to quantum entanglement, is this an admission that consciousness cannot be reduced to matter or substance? One Quora user well-versed in Dharmic philosophy offers an eloquent observation on the locality problem: “If there were no permanent substratum, memory would not be possible, and we could not have the identity of personality throughout the span of a life-time. The cellular structure of the body is completely renewed every few years, therefore there must be something which remains the same and is apart from that which is changing, in the same way that a thread strung through rose-petals remains the same, even though the petals wilt and fall away.” The whole list of his brief, but dense and insightful, arguments can be found here, and I encourage you all to read it. Some of them will relate to our parenthetical rebuttal of solipsism later in Part F of this chapter.
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To somewhat change topics, let us recall the distinctions between awareness and consciousness to compare how awareness and consciousness apply to a rock, a plant, and animals of varying intelligence. This will help us get a better grasp on the distinction in a practical sense:
A rock is “aware” in the sense that it owes its existence to the Supreme Awareness of Ultimate Reality. We might say that a rock possesses some “proto-consciousness”, in that the matter physically present within the rock could afford it a “developed consciousness”, if said matter were arranged differently, such as how matter is arranged in a human or animal’s nervous tissue. That is to say, the rock has some capacity for consciousness, but it lacks the causes and conditions that would afford it such. Yet, it is still “aware” in that it is condensed of the Divine Mind. However, one might object by asking, “What is the rock aware of?” To answer: Awareness can be aware without having “meta-awareness” (awareness of awareness, the realization that one is aware of being aware). After all, consciousness is the act of perception, while Awareness is just the potential for perception.
Meanwhile, a plant has sensory networks that afford it the ability to detect light, sound, water, and physical surfaces—all of which inform the plant of features in its environment—qualities—to which it responds. This ability to process and respond to stimuli, and the very ability to demonstrate “Will”, “agency”, or “volition” tells us that the plant is conscious to some degree—at least more so than a rock, for that matter. The plant may be “blind, deaf, and dumb” to us, but a blind, deaf, and dumb human is still just as conscious as any other human. Just because we do not have “the suchness of ‘what it is like’ to be a plant” does not disqualify the plant from having consciousness. Plants may lack the ability for a more refined “ego-consciousness” like that possessed by humans and a select few animals who can formulate a concept of “self” or “me-ness” (as we will discuss in the next paragraph), but plants “[would be] capable of it if the conditions were afforded.”
Really, plants, most animals, and other forms of life, are merely “caught in causality”, so to speak. For them, any realization of “self”, like that experienced by humans and certain higher mammals who can objectify themselves, is not possible. Instead, these more primitive lifeforms are simply witnesses strung along by the causes and conditions of the world and respond to these more or less instinctually. (For animals, this is perhaps most sincerely true when we consider animals like sea sponges, which do not even have a nervous system.) Meanwhile, animals who can pass a “mirror test”, demonstrating the capability for recognizing their own image in a mirror and therefore formulating a concept of self (this includes humans, greater apes, elephants, dolphins, and some birds)—have an attestable “ego-consciousness” or “self-consciousness” in that they identify with a sense of “I” or “me” that is “…constructed around consciousness content, such as a body, tastes and dislikes, opinions, ideologies, so on and so forth,” as my anonymous teacher explains.
Another way we may phrase this is in the terminology of Aristotle, who discriminates between the intrinsic and the extrinsic: That which is intrinsic exists in the absence of “deliberation, intention, or intelligence”, while that which is extrinsic possesses all of these traits. So, plants, animals lacking refined nervous systems, and other such lifeforms, possess only an intrinsic Will, while higher animals such as primates, elephants, dolphins, and humans, possess an extrinsic Will. This is something that I discuss more in my essay, The Teleology of Evolution. However, one point I will make here separate from that essay (since this point will have relevance only to this essay), is that if we are to hold that consciousness is the content and function of all matter, such that all of existence is condensed consciousness, then we must concede that there is no divide between “alive” and “inert”, and neither is there anything which lacks the most basic features of a consciousness—even if merely an intrinsic consciousness. This is such that even “A rock or even basic features of nature like wind may have attributes of behavior like intent, or seemingly have some ‘aboutness’ to them,” which could be characterized as an intrinsic Will, “but it would be highly unlikely that the wind itself has authentic volition or otherwise a sense of me-ness in respect to other aspects of mundane nature.” That is to say, we see features of consciousness, such as volition and intent everywhere in nature, even in mundane physical events and autonomous processes, like the blowing of the wind, which is directional, “motivated” (in that it comes from somewhere and is compelled by other forces), and leads to further conditions, yet this wind has no developed consciousness and certainly not an ego-consciousness.
To make a vital connection to Awareness, let us go back to the most recent quote from my anonymous teacher and see what else he has to say right after. I will provide the full quote: “Ego consciousness is a consciousness of self. Such as a knowing of ‘me-ness’ as opposed to ‘they-ness’. Ego is the false self which is constructed around conscious content, such as a body, tastes and dislikes, opinions, ideologies, so on and so forth. This reality is ultimately unreal or otherwise afforded a provisional existence. What is real is the witness of these contents. The Atman is not that which is seen, including ideas in the mind’s eye. It is the seeing itself. It is not heard; it is the hearing.” Here, “Atman” refers to the awareness of individual beings which is the potential for their conscious perception. That is to say, what all these entities—from the rock to the human—have in common, is a point of “witness” awareness. That is, the ultimate truth to their collective being, which unites them, is Awareness. That is, our ultimate and common nature is Awareness, not the individuated and qualified contents of consciousness.
Now, what about an artificial intelligence, or a computer generally, you make ask? Is it also conscious? My anonymous teacher explains: “A computer, for example, may have the fundamental identity of being condensed consciousness, but it is disembodied intellect.” A computer, including one hosting an artificial intelligence, at best has a proto-consciousness like a rock. It simply lacks the causes and conditions—the arrangement of matter—that would afford it a more refined conscious. It is not capable of experiencing the “suchness” of any stimulus, sensation, emotion, pain, pleasure, or experience. It has no experiential reference whatsoever. Therefore, it fundamentally lacks the inference of “qualia”. Recalling that “qualia” and “consciousness” are etymologically linked, we conclude that without qualia, there is no room for a developed consciousness. Additionally, an AI’s volitional capacity is intrinsic at best, since it cannot deliberate beyond the bounds of its code.
Regarding my point on AI lacking qualia, my anonymous teacher explains: “If I were to ask you to describe what a banana tastes like, you would give it some description, such as ‘it is sweet and mushy’, yet many fruits and even root vegetables also have these features. It is only until we have an experience directly of a banana, that we have the ‘what it is likeness’, the actual reality of banana-ness. This example can be extrapolated for all hypothetical examples of conditioned things, even humanity itself, as our lives and experiences are the ‘what is like’ of a human form.” An AI may be able to tell you all about a banana, but it can never have the suchness of a banana—the banana-ness—or the suchness of anything in the real world for that matter. In a similar sense, a person, like an AI, could read whole novels about bananas, look at pictures of bananas, watch chefs cook with bananas, and hear other people describe their color, taste, and feel. Yet, that person will never truly “get it” until they have encountered a banana personally. For artificial intelligence, this is true for all of Reality. That is, artificial intelligence has never experienced living itself and thus lacks the suchness for everything.
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Now briefly, to relate our mention of Consciousness as the content and function of all matter, I want you to think back to the quantum physics analogy from Part D of this chapter. Go back and reread it if you need to, then come back and read this paragraph:
Consider Schrödinger’s cat, measuring quantum states in bits in a quantum computer (cubits), predicting the position of an electron in an atom’s probability cloud, or trying to capture where a particle is inside its wave function. In all these examples, we have some ambiguous state said to be in “superposition”. Determining that state is then only made possible by observation. When the particle is measured inside a probability cloud or a waveform, that wave collapses and we have a definitive position for the particle. If waves and probability clouds are potencies and definable particles are acts, insofar as a wave or a probability cloud is a host of potentialities where a particle could arise as a steady act, then it is the act of witness consciousness which is the source of ontological motion, translating that state from potency to act. (The famous double-slit experiment proves this, where the presence of an observer changed the interference patterns of electrons fired through slits.) To reiterate earlier, “The only wave function which is certain to contain the particle is one which is the size of the entire universe, meaning it would represent the waveform of the universe itself.” The only reason the universe is in a state of act, rather than just being a potential for a universe to arise, is because there is an Awareness there to observe it. Awareness is potential, while consciousness is the active perception. The unobserved Reality is but a formless Essence, but the observed reality is a substantial Substance.
This realization of course is certainly trouble for the eliminativist, who is convinced that consciousness is an illusion of matter, for he could not be consistent to hold said eliminativism if he recognizes—as many modern physicists do—the role that witness consciousness (observation) plays in collapsing potent quantum states (superpositions and waveforms) into acts!
Chapter 3, Part F: Provisionality, Maya, the Lotus Pond, & Divine Self-Actualization
Combining our discussions on the function of water in myth, the relationship between the masculine Creator and feminine Generator, and God as Awareness, let us divulge into a great myth that surmises the three themes: the Lotus Pond. In Hindu cosmology, Vishnu is said to sleep on a great lotus abode atop the primordial ocean of pure Consciousness (Garbhodaka). The lotus symbolizes Cosmic Law (the principial organization of Reality, known in the Dharmic system as “Dharma” or “Ṛta”, or generically referred to as “Metaphysical Law”). A lotus also grows out from the Vishnu’s naval, atop whom sits Brahman. Brahman receives instruction from Vishnu to generate the universe, and (as my acquaintance Clark explain) “…when Brahman opens his eyes, all of the unformed chaotic forces of reality are born”. In the resulting universe that emerges, there is an Indra who rules over creation. “The life of the Indra is eternal, [yet] it is a lesser infinity contained within a single blink of the eternal Brahman, who [Saguna] is only a small fraction of the infinite mind of Supreme Divinity. The cosmic Yogi says to the Indra, ‘You are in the position of the King, you are in the position of the king of the gods. You are the manifestation of the mystery of Brahma in the field of time. This is a high privilege, appreciate it, honor it, and deal with life as though you were what you really are.’” (This comes from a video called “Joseph Campbell – The Story of Indra” on YouTube, posted by user AndyKwontastic. I have watched it myself, but I like Clark’s breakdown of it.)
For some context, in Hindu myth, Vishnu, Brahman, and Shiva compose a triune God, and represent creation, perpetuation, and destruction, respectively. In the tale of the lotus pond, Vishnu assumes the role of the masculine Creator aspect of God and is also functionally equivalent here to Nirguna Brahman. Out of Vishnu then emerges (or emanates) [Saguna] Brahman and the Cosmic Law. Brahman, here, might be thought of as the personification of the primordial ocean, which itself is a reification of unformed Essential Substance or Prakriti. And it is when Brahman opens His eyes that He births the universe and shapes the cosmic forces. Vishnu, here, is thus the Absolute, beyond existence and nonexistence—the Subsistent Act that gives rise to Existence, Brahman. Brahman’s role then is to assume the role of the feminine Generator aspect of God, who creates the primordial universe and imparts order upon it, shaping its chaotic nature into something refined and phenomenal.
What is interesting, however, is that Vishnu is also said to be laying asleep, dreaming of the universe. Yet, Brahman opens His eyes to birth the universe. How can both be true? Indeed, there are many symbolic contradictions in the story. Here, it is to be noted that the acts of dreaming and of opening one’s eyes are both acts associated with varying states of consciousness. Moreover, they are opposites of each other: Vishnu is dreaming while Brahman is waking up. It is the divide between Consciousness without content and Consciousness with content—Nirguna Brahman and Saguna Brahman, the latter being an emanation inferior to the former (and thus [Saguna] Brahman is said by some to be a demiurge in relation to Vishnu, though this is controversial). There is also a name for Vishnu’s dream: “Maya”, and Vishnu’s consort, Lakshmi, is associated with Maya. Maya is a word roughly translated as “illusion”. But why is it an illusion? And what does Indra have to do with all this?
Maya is functionally equivalent with Prakriti, which means that [Saguna] Brahman or the Generator is Himself the illusion. Now, let us keep in mind that all of empirical reality is utterly inseparable from pure Being. God, as Total Universality, is the first principle that contains and conditions every lower principle and by extension every manifested thing. He is Existence, and thus every existing thing and every quality of those things is Him. But how can all of existence be an illusion? Let us define an illusion: An illusion is a convention that “is afforded reality or truth on condition”, as my anonymous teacher explains. In other words, is a phenomenon without any real substantiality to it, like a mirage, and only exists because something else affords it its apparent truth on a condition. What affords provisional reality such a condition is God. God (as Consciousness) is said to be the content and function of all Reality, after all. We can think of Reality then as a projection of Consciousness. Consciousness is its context, function, and source. We might even say that Maya is God, since He is both the function and source of the illusion and the content of the illusion. We could also reword this to say that God is both the principles that condition the illusion of the universe and the illusory things conditioned within it. As such, when irreligious atheists and theists debate whether God is real, they are debating the wrong question. God is the only realness; subjectivity is illusory. There is nought but God. God is Ultimate Reality.
Taking all this together, consider Praxius’ summative abstract interpretation of the Lotus Pond myth:
“The seeming contradiction between provisional reality as both the Dream of Vishnu and the product of Awareness is a symbolic contradiction. The significance of the symbolism of the Dream of Vishnu is to illustrate the fluidity of corporeality as opposed to the solidity of principality, whereas the significance of the symbolism of Brahmanic Awareness is to illustrate the creative power of Brahman. One's (Brahman’s) focus is upon provisional reality, and the other's (Vishnu’s) is upon the Quintessential Reality. It is possible for both to be true at the same time in this regard, because what we are to conclude is that: principial realities are Absolute with a capital A, whereas all other realities are relative with a lowercase r; and from this conclusion we may draw similar conclusions about the nature of Vishnu as opposed to Brahman, the latter being the creator, the former being the perpetuator. Just as Brahman creates, the Dream of Vishnu perpetuates.”
(Note that by “principle realties”, he is referring to the “pure forms”, “archetypes”, or “quintessential principles” of composite beings (such as the most quintessential tree or quintessential sphere that all varieties/corruptions of trees or spheres are derived from), which was discussed earlier in the chapter on quintessential metaphysics. They are “Absolute” “in the sense that [they] exist under the domain of Total Possibility”. Meanwhile, “relative realties” are that “which possess[es] a temporal property”, meaning they are conditioned by the principle of time itself.)
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We can see that Maya as an illusion helps to distinguish between the Absolute and relative. From the point of relation or subjectivity, provisional reality is real, but at the source, there is only God. This is much like an actual dream that you experience, wherein the whole constructed reality of your dream (its rules, its story, its manifestations, etc.)—is only afforded any sense of realness or truth on the condition that you are its source. Your mind, your consciousness, gives rise to the specific characteristics of the dream (much like the Supreme Awareness does to the specific characteristics of Reality), occupies it with beings, and is presently aware of all elements regardless of whether you participate in the dream as an actor or are simply witness to its totality (sometimes both). Your mind is thus the total content and function of the dream, the existence which everything within it is inseparable from and contingent upon. Much the same, God is both witness to the total Maya and participates in the dream as every actor. Thus, in the ultimate sense, you are God, though this can be a dangerous thing to say, as it can lead one to think they are literally God in the quantitative sense (i.e., that they are equal to God in magnitude, when really it is just that the ultimate nature of oneself is God, just as is true for all things). As my anonymous teacher explains: “Think of the traditional statement, ‘I am Brahman’. From a Western perspective or understanding this means literally: ‘I am God’. It is only until you actually investigate Sanskrit terminology that we will come to understand the nuance of this statement, in that the Ultimate Self of a being is synonymous in quality to the Ultimate Reality.”
Your life is but one manifestation conditioned by a myriad of principles delineating from Total Universality—a tiny infinitesimal spec in the sea of infinity, which itself is only a lesser infinity that emanates from Total Unicity. And your consciousness is only a single “instantiation” or “incarnation” of the Supreme Mind. The illusion is not yours, as in, it does not belong to “you”. “You” did not create your body or establish your place in life, nor the ignorance or misidentification that convinces you that this illusory Maya is the Ultimate Reality. It is not solipsism; this is God’s dream, not “yours”. You are part of the illusion, an actor in the dream that Awareness perceives the dream from, and yet you are not the only point from which Awareness perceives the dream: All of provisional reality—every person, every animal, and even “inert” matter is condensed of the Divine Mind. In this way, “self” or “ego” is ultimately an illusion. In truth, there is only one true Self, which the Dharmics call “Paramatma”, meaning “Supreme Self” or “Cosmic Oversoul”, and it is God at the relative level, and thus equivalent to Saguna Brahman. But at the Absolute level, there is only “anatman” or “non-self”, meaning that Nirguna Brahman or ParaBrahman is “barren of ego”.
(Speaking of solipsism: For any who wish to see solipsism formally refuted, my anonymous teacher does just that: “Solipsism fails to remove the condition of possessiveness and thus is false view. Solipsism in epistemological and metaphysical considerations results in: ‘The content of my mind is the content of the world, or rather, the contents of the world are the contents of my consciousness.’ If we remove the quality of ‘my’ or the conceit in that, then it would be far closer to the truth. Awareness has access to [the] ‘I’, not the inverse, as Awareness isn’t an appropriating factor. It’s not that ‘we’ or ‘I’ has access to Awareness; Awareness is the ‘accessor’ or that which is reaching. Remember when we talked about the phenomenological impossibility of considering someone else’s awareness such that, ‘being in another’s shoes’ was said to be a metaphysical impossibility? Think of it like that: the Absolute does have access to all of the shoes; the conditioned awareness does not.”
What he is getting at here is that the Divine Mind comes first. Solipsism is the notion that only your self-consciousness is real, but the conceit in this hinges on these ideas of “self” of “consciousness”. However, we can “peel back” these two layers. By recognizing that consciousness is only the contents of perception, we can get back to the original Awareness which is the “appropriator” of this perception. What we mean here is that Awareness is “behind the eyes”, so to speak. That is, it is that which “takes hold of” the witness’ perception and contextualizes it in the first place, acting as the potential for that perception to take place. Moreover, by recognizing that “self” is conditioned by this consciousness and identification with other conscious contents such as the world, we can erase “self” and again get back to the unconditioned and egoless Awareness.)
You might be wondering, however: How is it that your own consciousness stems from God, yet you are confined to identify with a false self and are ignorant and deprived of the omniscience or pure Awareness of God? Let us recall that all matter, including that which constitutes your brain and body, is condensed consciousness. That is, the matter that constitutes your form is condensed consciousness, and this condensed consciousness is qualified since we can speak of its qualities or traits. (Recall that we derive “quality” from “qualia”.) In this respect, your brain and body are also conditioned. Put together, we can see that your brain and body are causes and conditions which curate and qualify the Divine Awareness into qualified consciousness— “defiling” it with this content, conditioning, and qualification.
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But where does the importance of the Indra in the Lotus Pond narrative come in? We will get to that, do not worry. But first, let us discuss what Clark describes as God’s “self-actualization” in relation to his breakdown of the Lotus Pond story and the tale of the Indra: If God is the Monad, and all that there is, is Him, such that there is only one Self (Paramatma), then it is understandable that the Monad as a “disembodied” Awareness with nothing greater or beyond to emerge out into, can only “turn inwards” and self-reflect, self-reference, and self-divide in order to spring forth any illusion of content. This will be elaborated on shortly. But for now, we must see that the Monad has nothing exterior to work with, since it is boundless and beyondless. Therefore, it must take action “into its own hands” and self-actualize its own unlimited potential into acts. That is, in viewing God as “Subsistent Act” or “pure act”, we come to the conclusion that it is through the Monad’s self-actualizing behavior that It gives rise to all acts through its unlimited pure potential, hence why we say that God is both “omnipotent” and “self-actualizing”. The universe might then be seen as the actualization of the Monad, or as the “becoming” of pure Being. This is ontological motion as we know it: the transformation of potentials into acts. It is a description of Purusha shaping Prakriti.
To explain now what I mean by “self-reflection”: We might think of God as like a refractive jewel, such as a diamond. The light within this diamond can only refract betwixt its own features in order to produce the illusion of multiplicity, and it is in this that all multiplicities are born. But why does this self-reflection even occur? Polemically, we can draw back to the analogy of Awareness as the host of a dream and say that “an imaginative essence’s nature is to imagine or create”—or to put it more ontological terms, we might say that the object of Existence is to exist, of Causation to cause, of Creation to create, and so forth. But even the latter three only apply to God at the empirical level, while God at the Absolute level remains unconditioned and beyond proper description. The most honest conclusion we are really left with is an unsatisfactory “God is just doing His thing”. It is an automatic process; the light within the diamond does not choose whether it will be refracted—it simply is. Reality more or less springs from God just as the infinitude of rays within a diamond do.
But what do I mean by “multiplicities”? The multiplicities are all the features of Reality—every principle and manifestation which emanates from God. Most principal among these multiplicities, of course, are dualities. (Neoplatonists will sometimes say that the “Dyad” is the first emanation of the Monad.) Our reality is filled with dualisms: light and dark, cold and hot, life and death, up and down, potency and action, cause and effect, chaos and order, formlessness and form, good and evil, wisdom and ignorance—one could go on forever. We might try to imagine a purely monadic universe, where there is only light, only action, only order, and where nothing can fail to exist, but quickly we begin to realize that the only reason any of these principles or manifestations can be discussed is because they have a point of contrast in the first place. That is, as mentioned earlier, dualisms such as “light and dark” or “cold and hot” can only be understood in reference to each other, each only present where the other is deprived. This elucidates the importance of the “self-reflective” and “self-referential” behavior of the Monad: It is by the Monad internally self-reflecting and self-referencing that such self-referential pairs such as “light and dark” or “cold and hot” can be established and come about. Really, there would be no way to have a proper universe without this! A non-dual reality would just be Total Unicity itself. After all, even existence and nonexistence are in a state of duality with each other! How could one imagine a universe where there is no such thing as existence or nonexistence? The question is itself sounds oxymoronic!
From the Dyad then comes triads, such as “beginning, middle, and end” (personified as Vishnu, Brahman, and Shiva), as well as all other multiplicities: including actualized multiplicities like the number of humans on Earth or stars in space; potential multiplicities such as the number of unique chess matches that may be played; spectrums like color or strength; even infinities, such as the variety of unique individual trees that could manifest across all of time. Yet even these infinities are lesser infinities contained by the Infinite. Truly, nothing is beyond God or without Him, but is within Him. All of existence is just an illusory series of reflections contained within the one jewel, afforded truth on the condition of the jewel itself.
To construct a similar analogy, we might imagine that God fashions a room with a mirror on each side, stands in the middle, and gazes into the infinite columns of reflections—each a deviation from the last, but nonetheless an icon of God. Such reflections are the multiplicity of beings and things which then arise. Buddhism actually has an analogy for this (from which my own diamond analogy is derived) called “Indra’s net”: An infinite net is cast by Indra over Mount Meru (the mythological center of Reality). It is woven somewhat like a spiderweb, and possesses at each vertex a multifaceted jewel which is reflected in all the other jewels of the vertices.
(In speaking of mirrors, my anonymous teacher has a very skillful metaphor which relates such back to monism: “I’ve made a similar one with a mirror being broken into shards, wherein a shard may become suspicious that he is a part of a greater whole, the truth is that there’s neither a mirror nor a shard, just glass.” The wisdom here is that all things are of the same substance. Ultimate Reality is unicity; it is not two or many, but One, the Monad. There is neither “this or that”, but just It. It is, as I said earlier, not “God and Creation”, but just God, such that only God is real, while all of provisional reality is only apparent or illusory, hence “Maya”—for it is afforded truth only on condition, as a mirage. In the above quote, shards in a mirror represent principles or manifested things, but they are united by the universal notion of “mirror”, which is analogous for “universe” or “Universal Principle”, such that to for the shard to be “mirror-like” is for beings to be “universe-like” and embody the Universal Principle. However, the true enlightenment is that there is not even a mirror, but just “glass”. In the same way, there is not even a universe, but just a unicity—Total Unicity. Thus, in the same way that we have moved from “mirror” to “glass”, we move from “universe” to simply “unicity” or “Reality” with a capital R. “Glass” as a substance is just an analog for the Ultimate Essence.
And this notion of “glass” is not only important for establishing a sense of formless unicity (since glass needs not conform to a “mirror”, but can take on the shape of anything), but in realizing that there ultimately are not “shards”, as Ultimate Reality or Total Unicity is “partless”. My anonymous teacher explains: “That which is infinite, if it is considered purely, wouldn’t be a unity [aggregation] of anything because that which is infinite has no proper parts. It would be part-less or whole. Thus, Ultimate Reality is not an aggregate of actuality or a totality of things, and is not a ‘thing’ remotely at all.” And: “It’s not that Atman is a part of the Ultimate Atman. Atman, Paramatman, and Brahman are all synonymous. If we are being honest, only Brahman is real. That reality is partless.” With this particular quote, we can see how the logic applies to humanity: We, Atma, are ultimately Paramatma. Referring back to an earlier quote: “…the Ultimate Self of a being is synonymous in quality to the Ultimate Reality.”
Perhaps another skillful metaphor would be an ocean: We can have an ocean in which there are many waves, eddies, and even tsunamis—all of which are deformations of the ocean itself. Here, the waves represent principles or manifestations, while the “ocean” is synonymous with “universe” and “Universal Principle”. But the true enlightenment, once again, is that there is no “ocean”, but just “water”. “Mirror”, “ocean”, and “universe” are all nominal. That is, they are in some sense “just names”. A mirror can be broken, an ocean can dry up, and the universe will experience some grand cosmological death in a few eons, so none of them can be taken as the ultimate, independent, and enduring reality, since each of their respective principles can fail to actualize and condition them: Even the Universal Principle will fail to actualize the universe and All Things when the heat death comes in a few billion years! We also notice that the substance that constitutes each of these things can be rearranged: The glass of the mirror could be repurposed into a window, the water from the ocean into many lakes, and perhaps even the space-time continuum of the universe into an alternative universe. So, what is actually the ultimate reality of these things? It is glass, water, or Unicity!)
Francis H. Cook describes Indra’s net poetically thus:
“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering ‘like’ stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.” - Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra
The renowned Noble Prize-winning physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, takes on Indra’s net in a more examinate way, elucidating the link between the apparent multiplicity in the illusory reflections of the jewels and the monism of Ultimate Reality: “The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy…has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object.”
Alternatively, we could imagine this in scientific terms: We might think of the Absolute or Total Unicity as a singularity like a black hole. Within that singularity, there is no way to discriminate any individuation or unique content of matter. It is all deprived of identity, united together as one content-less point, wholly unconditioned. Yet if that matter were to emerge and return to pre-singularity state, we would have a star with a host of discernable features which set it apart from all other stars. One might also draw an analogy to the singularity of the Big Bang. It began without content or condition, like Total Unicity, but from it emerged an existing universe filled with an abstract cosmic soup—likened to that of abstract principles. As time went on, the contents of this soup refined and became less abstract (more concrete) as its contents divided. In this division, the fundamental forces transitioned from a unified homogeneity to four distinct forces, new elements arose from the matter, and soon enough even concrete manifestations like stars and planets took form. Using this analogy with the Big Bang is perhaps skillful, as the etymology of Brahman is to “expand” or “blow up”.
Or let us refer back to my quote from Part B of Chapter 3, “If one takes the ‘legness’ which conditions a table to have legs and stand, if one strips the woodiness of its composition, if one deprives the rectangular frame of its shape, what remains that we can call a table? (Things are the sum of their qualities—that is, they are ‘composites’, after all.) However, if we were to go further and remove those principles which condition even the ‘quintessential table’, removing even the essences of ‘tableness’, ‘furnitureness’, and so on, until we have worked our way back to Total Possibility and Total Existence—and then removed those too, what remains if not nothingness or emptiness—the cessation of all qualities?” From the perspective of the Absolute or Total Unicity, there is no concrete actualized “table”. The only common hypostasis or substrate that the table shares with anything else, such as perhaps a car or a person, is that very same emptiness which is the Absolute or Sunyata. This is such that from the Ultimate perspective, there is no distinction between a table and a car and a person, for there is only the Monadic One—the One Ontic Essence. It is only when we examine the emanations of the Absolute that we can create any distinctions between all things. That is, it is only after the birth of Total Universality and All Things that we find any notion of multiplicity beyond the One. To the Absolute, all is Monadic, all is One. All distinction is dissolved. Hence, the Buddhists say that the Absolute is a state of abiding in non-distinction.
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Returning back now to the topic of “self-actualization”, we might imagine that God, as a lone observer, “deludes Himself in an infinitely divided material reality where He is set against Himself,” as Clark puts it. And to get to the Indra: Indra is but one interpretation of the broader archetype of the “Striker” or “Dragon Slayer” found across a variety of religions, and is “one who within this illusory division creates a more substantial division so as to remove his own desire, and allow [himself] to instead assert change in the larger character of the illusion.” Really then, the Indra is just a product of this illusory division, of this self-actualization. The Indra is a result of Divine Awareness deluding itself and dividing itself into the contents of the dream—all just to have something to self-actualize or self-reference against and “occupy Itself”, so to speak.
We can also apply this to Man: “The esoteric truth contained within myths of figures like Indra, Thor, Michael, Yahweh, or other deific figures slaying great demons or dragons, is that of a human being through various alchemical processes; removing himself from the comings and goings of the material world, so as to make of it what he will.”
Chapter 3, Part G: The Problems of Evil & Free Will, and God’s Plan/Design
Let us now address the famous “Problem of Evil”. At the Absolute level, God is beyond good and evil. To say the Absolute is good or just or loving is to imply some container over Him which conditions Him. Instead, at the empirical level of reality, goodness and justice and love do not restrict Him but spring forth from Him like an endless fountain, as He assumes the role of the Savior, Ruler, or Bhakti. And at the Absolute level, God is devoid of content entirely, instead preceding it. Generically, we might call the role of the Savior of Bhakti that of the “Agonist” in contrast to the “Antagonist” who is reified as Satan, Prometheus, Ahriman, Lord Mara, Kali-Purusha, etc. The Antagonist is just the personified embodiment of evil—perhaps Consciousness condensed into the “evil principle”. Yet, good and evil, being antipodes of each other as a duality, cannot exist without each other, as they must reference each other in order to be affirmed, each being what the other is not. Thus, to ask for the abolition of evil is to ask for the abolition of duality itself. It is to ask for an abolition of the conflict between opposites which duality necessarily implies. (For are light and dark not compossibles which always compete to occupy space, obstructing the other from such?) And without duality, how can we imagine a universe? Provisional reality is only rendered possible by the self-referential and self-reflective action of the Monad, after all. Even, even existence resides in a state of duality with nonexistence, such that we might say that to abolish duality absolutely implies a return to the unconditioned cessation of the Monad, or Sunyata—the place where there is no duality and no obstruction.
But then, some critics might contend, if the principle of evil—the potential for evil beings and evil acts to arise, and which conditions them—cannot be abolished without erasing duality itself, could God instead simply thwart all evil beings and acts which arise as manifestations of the evil principle? In theory, sure, but this invokes a serious problem: God is the engine of ontological motion which converts potencies into acts. Asking God to prevent potencies (the potential for evil) to not evolve into acts (actual evil beings or events) is to ask God to cease in His automatic processes. It is like telling a heart to cease pumping blood! Sure, it can be done, but it is a request to interrupt a critical process.
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The Problem of Evil, however, can be solved not just by examining duality, but in taking on a hierarchical view. Praxius explains:
“The Traditionalist authors make it a point to articulate that when the question is relegated to the level of morality there is already a failing somewhere in metaphysical doctrine. With a strong metaphysical doctrine, the question of morality doesn't exist, because the question of propriety supersedes it; that which is properly in accordance with its broader metaphysical design is ‘good’, and that which is not is ‘bad’. Good forces are those which bring one closer to such an accordance, and Evil forces are those which seek to disintegrate that relationship. In other words, Good is Absolute, Evil is relative. …dichotomies of this sort are hierarchical. Any qualitative dichotomy is hierarchical; the hierarchicality of a symbolic dichotomy depends on what it is to which those symbols are applied, but Good and Evil are not symbols in their own right. God prefers Good to Evil because Good means God’s design is fulfilled.”
Praxius also has an essay, which I again highly recommend you read, called The Verticality of God’s Plan, where he goes into much greater depth on this issue. But to summarize, we must begin by looking “down the chain” of principles which begins with Total Universality (God) and ends with physical manifestations. We can think of manifestations as the “symbols” of the multitude of principles or “archetypes” which they are conditioned by, and likewise we can think of all principles or archetypes as themselves symbols of the many higher principles or archetypes which they are each conditioned by. Because we begin with the First Principle or First Archetype (God), the lower we descend on the chain, the more conditioning there is for each “being” (either a principle or manifestation, in this context). This is where Praxius invokes the terms “verticality” and “horizontality”, or the vertical and horizontal axes. The vertical axis represents what I call the “chain” that begins with Total Universality and conditions its way “down” to manifestations, while the horizontal axes represent each “link” in that chain—or perhaps “steps” in a ladder. Though perhaps the best analogy one could imagine would be a pyramid, where we begin with Total Universality as the tip, and then descend to find that each lower “layer” actually widens, as we will see.
At each step or layer, we can see a collective of principles interacting together, side by side, to condition other beings a step beneath them. For instance, if we look “vertically” at what conditions a cross, we might examine how the woodiness of a wooden cross is itself conditioned by treeness, and that treeness by plantness, and so on. Horizontally, though, we might examine how elements like woodiness, brownness, and shortness come together to give us a cross that is wooden, brown, and short. Notice, however, that this wooden, brown, and short cross—now composed of multiple principles—is a far cry from the amorphous and ambiguous “quintessential cross principle” that it is a symbol of. The conditioned or composite cross that we have produced is thus much more “relative” than its abstract quintessential parent principle or archetype. With this in mind, let us examine in outtake from Praxius’ Verticality essay:
“Thus, each derivation from the most Absolute principle, or the Monad, establishes another degree of Reality, in which there is at least one more relative or contingent characteristic than the previous one. For example, the degree of the First Derivation, or the degree of the infinite, contains All Things as an essential universality, and the only actualization is that this infinitude exists, meaning that in the degree of the First Derivation from the Monad, all things are contingent upon the Monad. Once other potentials are actualized, however, the product of that actualization is a new composite that is contingent upon its own actualization to exist, and therefore that principle is now contingent upon the potential that is the product of the actualization of the Monad, and this proceeds in a sequential fashion. If ‘beings’ are understood in this case as a thing which retains the property of being outside of manifestation, by simply being a potential or a possibility, or having an essential character, or as the result of an actualization of a potential, this means that the more contingent that a being is, the more relative properties it has when compared to its essential properties, or ‘what it is truly made to do’. These relative properties may skew the being one way or another outside the realm of its essential nature, and delineate it from its proper praxis.”
What Praxius is conveying here is the idea that all beings derive from Total Universality. As the perfect oneness of Total Universality transitions into manyness, we transition from having just one conditioning principle at the top of the chain to increasingly many. The consequence is that the identities of beings become increasingly more “relative” or further from the oneness of Total Universality. The quality of the First Principle thus becomes “less recognizable” or “more obscured” in beings as we descend further down the chain. With more conditioning factors, a being also becomes more “composite” since it is now composed of many principles working together. At the same time, as we take each step down the pyramid, the steps or layers become wider since they are occupied by more principles. As a result, the lower down we go, the more lower principles or “relative properties” there are conditioning a being than there are higher principles or “essential properties”, hence why the being becomes more relative and less essential—and hence also why the being becomes more “composite”, since it is now composed of many more principles or properties, most of which are now relative properties. All of this works to hinder or “skew” a being’s ability to accurately portray any of the principles which it is manifest of. This is why Praxius says, “…that the more contingent that a being is, the more relative properties it has when compared to its essential properties, or ‘what it is truly made to do’. These relative properties may skew the being one way or another outside the realm of its essential nature, and delineate it from its proper praxis.” By “outside the realm of its essential nature”, Praxius means to say that the being is no longer conforming to its archetypal quintessential principle, such as a human who fails to live up to the ideal expectations of the “quintessential human principle” or “humanely archetype”. Thus, that human is no longer doing “what [they are] truly made to do”.
So, what does all this have to do with evil? The idea is that when beings are more accurately portraying or “fulfilling” their archetypes all the way up the chain back to the First Archetype (God), then these beings have “fulfilled” “God’s Design” and thus are considered to be “good” or as in a state of “proper praxis” or “archetypal fulfillment”. This “goodness” really refers to “ontologically proper praxis” or “archetypal fulfillment”, which is, again, the faithful alignment of all beings with their superior principles or archetypes, leading back up to the First Principle or First Archetype (God). However, if they remain “skewed”, then they are “evil” or “defiant” in some sense—which is “improper praxis” or “archetypal unfulfillment”. This is why Praxius says that good is objective while evil is subjective, because goodness pertains to the vertical function of “God’s Design”, whereas evil is a relative skewing that occurs horizontally. Praxius sums it best: “The fulfillment of God’s Plan itself is when all things have achieved ontological propriety through the realization of their respective archetypes.” (It should be noted that it is also possible for a being to be “neutral”, neither fulfilling its archetypes nor defiantly un-fulfilling them. An example of this would be a human who is neither charitable nor sinful but instead chooses to live a neutral existence. They have not satisfied the preordination of their humanely archetype, but they have also not defied it necessarily either. They are living in a way that is morally or Karmically neutral.)
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Another way in which good and evil might be evaluated is with respect to the element of “self”. “Self” is the idea of “ego-consciousness”, or that which we subjectively identify with. However, this is ultimately an illusion, since our body, mind, thoughts, and attachments—all the contents of consciousness—are all provisional. What is actually real is the underlying Awareness, the potential for perception which is what “ajduicates” or “appropriates” our actual perception. That is, Awareness “takes hold” of the witness, so to speak, or is “behind the eyes”. This focal point of Awareness which is the pretext for our consciousness is called “Atman” (plural: “Atma”) in the Dharmic traditions. My anonymous teacher has a good way of explaining it: “Ego consciousness is a consciousness of self, such as a knowing of ‘me-ness’ as opposed to ‘they-ness’. Ego is the false self of which is constructed around conscious content. Such as a body, tastes and dislikes, opinions, ideologies, so on and so forth. This reality is ultimately unreal or otherwise afforded a provisional existence. What is real is the witness of these contents. The Atman is not that which is seen, including ideas in the mind’s eye; it is the seeing itself. It is not heard; it is the hearing.” Every “self”, being only our consciousness and not the underlying Awareness, is therefore only a “part” of the much greater “Supreme Self” or “Cosmic Oversoul” called “Paramatma”, which can be equated with the “Consciousness with a capital C” that is the Universal Principle. Now, it is important to note that “Atman” can technically be translated into English as “self” or “soul”; and “Paramatma” as “Supreme Self”; but this misses the nuance of the root term “Atman”. Nonetheless, we might still say that every self is a part of the greater Supreme Self. Though really, we should not say that any Atman is a “part” of Paramatma, since Paramatma is “partless”. My anonymous teacher explains: “That which is infinite, if it is considered purely, wouldn’t be a unity [aggregation] of anything because that which is infinite has no proper parts. It would be part-less or whole. Thus, Ultimate Reality is not an aggregate of actuality or a totality of things, and is not a ‘thing’ remotely at all.” And: “It’s not that Atman is a part of the Ultimate Atman. Atman, Paramatman, and Brahman are all synonymous. If we are being honest, only Brahman is real. That reality is partless.” Nonetheless, it is in this way that we can begin to see how at the root of moral evil is egoism, or the conceit of “self”. The Supreme Paramatma or Cosmic Oversoul is just one “Supreme Self” which all other “selves” or “Atma” partake in (using the root term transliterally here). Though, again, this idea of a “Supreme Self” is only pointing toward what we call Total Universality. The Ultimate Reality, Total Unicity, is “non-self” or “anatman”, such that Nirguna Brahman is said to be “barren of ego”. The conclusion here is that selfishness aims at that which is illusory and seeks to make the illusory and ignorant the center of focus, while that which is selfless is concerned with that pure unadulterated Awareness that is Ultimate Reality. The former makes self equal to God in focus, while the latter acknowledges the primacy of God. Thus, we might equate moral goodness with selflessness and moral evil with selfishness.
This also means that the “Antagonist” is just the most extreme example of essential skewing from God. As my anonymous teacher explains: “…[God’s] infinite all-pervading nature or reality—any opposition to the Godhead is still itself God, just in a degenerate form. Such that even Satan himself is not a separate substance, but a deluded creation or feature of the Divine.”
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Sometimes, the topics of free will and determinism also get brought into the discussion in regards to the Problem of Evil. However, we can see that with the verticality and horizontality distinction, it is actually possible for both free will and determinism to be true. Vertically, Reality is deterministic, where principles are organized and descend or emanate in a preordained fashion; while horizontally, principles are afforded a certain degree of “wiggle room” that allows them to act freely and individually—and this is especially true for us humans: The lower one is on the ladder, the greater wiggle room there is since the “steps become wider” (the number of principles at each step going down increases), and we know that the lowest step (where conditioned manifestations are found) is the widest step. As Praxius explains in his essay: “As for the humanistic principle in particular, the question of God's Plan relates to the idea of predestination, and the question fate and choice. We have answered this, however, by suggesting that what is predetermined, as opposed to individual actions, is the qualitative aspect.”
(However, it is important to note that free will has its limits. Only the boundless, infinite, omnipotent Absolute is truly free in that it contains all possibilities and creative potencies; it is so free that it is what gives miraculous birth to the entire universe. In fact, the free will of the Absolute is of an entirely different kind: While the free will that characterizes beings is accorded by the aforementioned “wiggle room” and “skewing” which allows them to act in a way which is not perfectly faithful to the portrayal their archetypes or which is outside their essential nature, the free will that the Absolute possesses is entirely boundless in that it is not conditioned by anything and owes nothing to a superior archetype. It has no “essential nature” to appeal to because it is the Essence. Meanwhile, the free will that we conditioned beings experienced is still constrained by all the causes and conditions of the world. Among these causes and conditions are our egoic misidentifications and attachments, our biases, desires, inclinations, behavioral patterns, genetics, corporeal dispositions (how our bodies are configured), and the circumstances of our environment. Even existing in the domain of Substance is itself a limitation and a misidentification, as we are deceived into thinking this conditioned world is the Ultimate Reality.)
So, in summary: “Good” is “proper praxis” and is a measurement of how close beings resemble the First Archetype (God), while “evil” is a perversion which occurs “horizontally” due to a multiplicity of conditioning factors being able to obscure beings from fulfilling the proper praxis of their archetypes. The idea is that the farther things emanate or “fall out” (emanate) from God, the more “relative” they become, and the easier it becomes for them to skew.
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So, what is the “purpose” to all this then? Is it “Lila” (“Divine Play” in Sanskrit) as the Hindus would say? Why design a reality where evil and degeneration can come about? Is it so that God may play in some narrative? Praxius provides the answer in the form of what he calls “God’s Plan”. This idea of “God’s Plan” relates to the previously discussed concept of how all principles and manifestations “fall out” or emanate from God. This succession of principles, neatly organized and divided into degrees which condition each other in specific fashion, is known as the “preordination” of All Things, and is what we mean by “God’s Design”. It is also synonymous with the terms “Metaphysical Law” or “ontology”, and is the internal “structure” of Reality. “God’s Plan”, on the other hand, refers to the “predestination” of All Things. The idea behind “God’s Plan” is that there is a “default mode of Being”, which is the original layout of God’s Design, and that this Design is self-correcting, such that it will revert back to its default state if its components are ever distorted or skewed out of alignment. When realignment occurs, we say that God’s Plan has been fulfilled. Thus, abidance with the default state of God’s Design is considered to be “ontological propriety” and is “ontologically proper praxis”.
For auxiliary support in understanding the terms “God’s Plan” and “God’s Design”, consider the following quote from the Verticality of God’s Plan:
“Indeed, often God’s Plan is thought to refer to a temporally linear series of events over which we have little effect, or, in other words, to a purely temporal predestination and positive fatalism. In this context, God’s Plan is often spoken of positively, not simply in its affirmation, but as a comfort to those upon whom some misfortune or another has fallen, and therefore its insinuation of a ‘positive end’, so to speak, has the same effect on those of a religious persuasion as nihilism does on the atheist. Our understanding of this conception is quite different. In the common understanding, the word ‘plan’ can be defined as ‘the will and intention to carry out a particular action or series of actions’, and in this regard the word carries a temporal connotation; for us, the word ‘plan’ equates to the word ‘design’, which refers to requirements to be satisfied and/or conditions to be met, and in this regard the word carries an atemporal or principled definition.”
Noticeably, the Absolute is excluded from this talk on Metaphysical Law and predestination, however. This is because the Absolute is “empty”; it is merely the Context for this metaphysical preordination and predestination to occur in, rather than the Source for it. Principial reality and the preordination or telos prescribed to it, is ultimately signified upon Total Universality, but cannot be signified upon the Absolute since it is, again, “empty”.
Chapter 4: Dispelling the Misconceptions of Atheists & Shudras
Now that the monadic position has been thoroughly expounded and defended, this chapter will work to dispel common misconceptions held by irreligious atheists on the beliefs and interpretations of religions, so as to further support the viability of accepting a religious outlook.
Chapter 4, Part A: Formalistic vs Principial Theology
For one, they might often respond to perennialism or even religiosity in general by stating, “There are thousands of gods, with each tradition bearing its own distinct cosmogony that would surely exclude the others! Surely one cannot believe them all!” But only the mundane think that Zeus lives upon a mountain and drinks good wine as a man. This I will expand upon in three manners:
1.) Firstly, the dichotomy between formalistic theology and principal theology must be discussed. As Praxius explains:
“The former has to do with cosmogony and the particular interpretation of principles into divine names, the latter has to do with the fundamental and universal principles which are undergoing that interpretation into formalistic theology. So, formalistic theology relates to the tradition itself, it is the adaptation of universal theological principles to time and place, culture, language, and so forth, and from this process of interpretation and adaptation results an understanding of Reality which is conclusive in terms: a cosmogony is created, a mythology is established, and temporal events become much more significant to understanding this strain of theology. Here we also get into the lower faculties of the humanistic principle, for example sensationalism, emotionalism, and so forth. Every tradition has one of these types of theologies, and the fundaments of them are a fusion of cosmogony and metaphysic.
For the Ancient Egyptians, as an example which I use because it’s no longer a living tradition, their theological understanding may well be ontologically correct, but the characterization of ontological principles into contingent beings related to their interpretation is a mediation that is unique and applicable only to their culture. For them, the Gods arose out of the Primordial Waters, and from the Greater Gods came Lesser Gods which each respectively characterized a certain element of Reality according to its hierarchical position with regards to fundamentality. This is Ancient Egyptian theology, much different, we might say, from Christian theology, which involves Jesus Christ, the Trinity, and so forth.
For principial theology or universalist theology, this is what is being interpreted. Each of the exemplified formalistic theologies are vastly different in structure, and yet both are ontologically correct, because they tap into and interpret properly a truly ineffable and more fundamental type of theology, and it is this type of theology which is the subject of proper Philosophy, and this type is fundamentally monist, by virtue that it deals not in terms of gods or divine names, but in terms of abstraction such as ‘The Absolute’, ‘The Universal’ and so on, of which there can only be one, even if one may interpret two Divine Powers under the umbrella of this Total Absolute Universality (as in the case of Zoroastrianism, a tradition with a dualist theology and a monist metaphysic).”
Essentially, embedded within each naturally arising religious tradition is an adaptation of Quintessential Truth and the principles, relationships, and phenomena that shape provisional existence, into a narratological format that conforms to the culture and heritage of a particular people, achieved by incorporating that culture’s symbolism and by appropriating their familiar objects. This is what is known as formalistic theology, and in this way it mystifies Quintessential Truth, transfusing abstract realities and communicating philosophical underpinnings into a mythopoetization: The emanation of Reality is depicted as a tale of Divine Creation or Bifurcation, the ontological degrees of Reality are charted into an astrological cosmology, ontological principles become reified exclusively as gods, humanly archetypes become celebrated as individual heroes who are said to have truly lived and died, and the various banes of existence are transmogrified into monsters to be slain.
As we can see, the principal effect of formalistic theology is a weaving together of history and philosophy, atop which a fictional element is transposed, to create a compelling allegory that is both implicit in its communication of Quintessential Truth, while providing an explicit or “formalistic” base to establish a degree of familiarity with the mundanely observed material world. Principial theology, by contrast, approaches Truth and Reality directly and as it is—a fact perhaps best demonstrated in the Western traditions, in which metaphysics is treated as a punitive science, with the tools of cataphatic deduction and mathematical axioms being employed to affirm or negate certain facts about Reality, often with the end goal being to genealogically trace Reality’s processions back to their Source, as well as to unveil the essential properties, degrees, and inner workings of Reality that constitute a “mechanistic” structure to its ontology.
In sum, formalistic theology seeks to mystify, and principial theology seeks to abstractify.
Whether one approaches their faith formalistically or principially, however, is a separate matter. Religions typically account for followers possessing innate proclivities, “gifts”, or limitations that may dispense them toward one mode of devotion or understanding over another. Christians may be familiar with Romans 12:4-8:
“For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith; Or ministry, let us wait on our ministering: or he that teacheth, on teaching; Or he that exhorteth, on exhortation: he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness.”
Similarly, Hindu, having a rich principial theological tradition, seems to exercise a rather direct and specific self-awareness over the natural inclinations and intellectual capacities of its members. As Praxius explains:
“For the Artisan or Common caste (Shudras), it is quite impossible to comprehend such concepts as we speak of here. Shudras require a kind of mediator to truly participate in the Highest Reality, and that’s okay, if their traditional lineage allows them to do so through a deity type figure, which is really only the personification of a certain ontologically divine principle anyways, then so be it, as long as they become truly actualized. This is why there are multiple paths to spirituality (yogas) for different types of orientations: Karma Yoga (the path of direct Action), Jnana Yoga (the path of Contemplation), Raja Yoga (the path of Discipline), Bhakti Yoga (the path of Devotion). The path of Devotion is most easily accessed and applied, and the others are for those who are disposed to such an orientation: Priests for Contemplation, truly Regal individuals such as Christ for the path of Action, Aristocrats for the path of Discipline, etc.”
The Jnana Yoga could be taken as a designated route in Hindu for those both capable and interested in pursuing the contemplation of proper philosophy. Its equivalent in the Christian tradition would be the Saints who sought to “Hellenize” Christianity’s formalistic tradition via reconciliation with Aristotelian thought, the result yielding such defining architectures of dogma as the Summa Theologica and placing such minds as Augustus and Thomas Aquinas as focal points in Western philosophical discourse.
While the secularist may still find it tempting to lambast against the “common caste” for their lack of ability to fully comprehend and contemplate beyond the bounds of mysticism, it is folly to liken this lacking in knowledgeable ability (nescience) to true ignorance (unwillingness to learn). What the path of Bhakti Yoga and its equivalents offers is not a substitution for Truth, but a surrogate. To put it plainly, if you asked an ancient Greek, Celt, Illyrian, Iranian, Vedic, Semite, or Egyptian what religion he believed in, he would not understand the question. To him, his myths were a symbolic representation of Truth, whether or not he actually acknowledged the reality of this matter. The word “myth” itself does not even actually imply “falsehood” in its etymological heritage. The Greek μῦθος (mûthos), from which we derive “myth” in English, carries the meaning of “word/fact/purpose”, and is itself cognate with Proto-Slavic *myslь, meaning “idea/thought”, both of which descend from Proto-Indo-European *mewHdʰ, meaning “to complain or care about something”. The dichotomy between myth and Truth then, at least linguistically speaking, is merely the dichotomy between formalistic and principial theology. So, to the ancient pagan, his conviction simply was Truth—but Truth understood via mystification rather than abstraction.
Thus, to approach the gods with fantastical tales, to depict them formed like men who quarrel and take delight in the pleasures of life, who suffer and subsist as the whole lot of the Earth—it is cultural relegation, a symbolization of abstract Truth rendered into allegory. This leads into my second point:
Chapter 4, Part B: The Error in the Reification of Spiritual Entities & The Heterodoxy of True Superstition
2.) That spiritual actors, especially gods/devas, must not be regarded as materialized agents. Any materialization of a god/deva, in which they assume form (a physical body) on the lowest order of Reality, is typically conditional to fulfilling some particular goal. Praxius explains:
“…some are the temporal embodiments of principles of the highest domains, while others are simply beings with a higher spiritual inclination and can only ‘manifest’ in times of ‘spiritual daylight’ (Satya Yuga, Golden Age, etc.). Many traditions speak of ‘invisible ones’ that currently still roam the earth or are in hiding some place in the mountains or underground awaiting the next Golden Age.”
a.) The first clause in this quote is only understood through principial theology, and in my opinion best so when approached with Quintessential Metaphysics. My anonymous teacher explains: “The Aryans as well as all prehistorical people had a mythopoetic view or understanding such that if we were to say there was no Apollo or Zeus was to say there was no sun or lightning.” This is not to say that Apollo is literally equated with the sun or that Zeus is literally equated with lightning. Consider, for instance, that thunderstorms are an obvious brevity. They are very provisional, manifesting at a moment’s notice and fleeting within hours. Each cloud, each crack of thunder, each bolt of lightning, each storm as a whole—in form, locality, and temporality—is a unique manifestation unlike the rest, and there is an infinite variety that can manifest. Despite the provisional nature of these storms, Zeus does not evaporate with the clouds at the end of the storm. He is not said to be reborn at each onset of inclement weather. Instead, it is Zeus, or any other personification of a thunder god for that matter (all of which are equally valid), which acts as the principles that conditions these storms to exist. He might be thought of as their “author”, but it is not as if he is a free agent who willfully summons and ushers away the storms at the wave of his hand. Rather, he is the most base conditioning factor which naturally and perpetually give rise to the storms—perhaps the “quintessential storm principle” or “storm archetype”, and is merely one out of an infinite number of vessels through which the force of the Absolute “pours” into the provisional world. That is to say, there are infinite principles emanating from the Absolute which condition all of provisional reality, and each may be reified as a god/deva in its own right. (Though, certain traditions may view this reification as a “misidentification”, and in the case of Abrahamic faiths it is outright heretical.)
Whether the gods truly bear personhood or are simply reifications which serve as a mental tool of mediation for the “common caste” who cannot comprehend the abstracted Absolute, is unknowable. Zoroastrianism, interestingly enough, seems to hold a view of the gods (yazatas) akin to the QM view of the gods as principles, wherein each god is seen as a “hypostasis” (as the Greeks would put it) of an aspect of Creation. Should one take the monist view that God is the storehouse of all principles, we might take this to mean that every god is but an Atman in the greater Paramatma, just as humans and animals are. This brings us to an interesting quote from Vishnu (God) in chapter 9, verse 23 of the Bhagavata Gita: “O son of Kunti, even those devotees who faithfully worship other gods also worship Me.” The meaning of this verse is up for debate. One could interpret this as Vishnu saying that all other gods/devas do not actually possess any personhood, or they do possess personhood but are Atma in the same way we are, being only false selves within Paramatma. Some modern Indo-European pagan perennialists might phrase it as saying that the gods/devas represent the infinite personalities of (in this case) Vishnu/Bhakti/Saguna Brahman. In a similar light, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus tells us that “There is only one Supreme Wisdom. It wills and wills not to be called Zeus.” Then again, whether even the Absolute ought to be reified as the personal “God” is also up for debate, according to the Buddhists. I merely describe the abstraction itself, without regard for its “correct” identity.
Even conceptions of a Trinity, such as those found in Christianity and Hindu, compare. My anonymous teacher puts it simply: “His [God’s] Essence can be three separate and instantiated divisions and also, a holistic Spirit at the same time.” Any gods or divine personalities that can be expressed, like essences, are ultimately one with the Monad. Thus is the enlightenment of monism: That Reality is reducible to just the one Ultimate Essence—the one God—and that any notion of inferior gods or multiplicity of essences is purely provisional and contingent, or even nominal in some sense. Every notion of a god or essence simply leads back to the One, as Vishnu’s above quote would imply. Such a comparison can also be likened, once again, to quantum field theory, wherein we might imagine how it is that one super-field (the space-time continuum) can simultaneously exist as many separate particle fields but also as one unified universal continuum.
“But why have you said that Zeus does not willfully deliver the storms? Why then would anybody worship him?”, you may ask. Truthfully, no divine acts are actually “willful” or “desired”. At an Absolute level, there is no duality between Creator and Creation; all being is inseparable from pure Being. Thus, Creation is simply “doing its thing” so to speak. When one prays to Zeus, Zeus does not beckon their call, nor does he “desire” their worship. The object of prayer is merely to impetrate the unwilful “Will” of the Divine. Worship, then, is simply the rational prerogative of us contingent beings who usher “That Which Has Always Been” to be. It is to align ourselves with the operations of Eternity—or what Praxius calls “God’s Plan”.
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However, this view I present of the Divine as unwilful and possibly impersonal, is by no means without controversy. As a perennialist, it is my mission to be as inclusive of all traditions and views as possible. Therefore, I present to you a critique of this view as held by a friend of mine who calls himself “Sectionalism” (
). He speaks rather casually here, so I will expand upon his words after this quote:“I think what the Platonists argue is that there are two different varieties of ‘gods’—those who change (Daemons) and those who don’t change (Henads). The big deities tend to be Henads, with some exceptions, while Daemons are attributed to ever-changing elements of nature. For example, an animistic spirit of a mountain is a Daemon. As for the person-ness of the gods, I think several classical philosophers do explain why the gods are not just ‘metaphors’ but that the principles of reality must necessarily have an intellectual agent similar to the grander Intellect…
I believe that what Vishnu is referencing is the Kathenotheistic nature of the Hindu gods... In the Vedas, hymns grant omnipotent traits to multiple deities based on whichever deity said hymn is dedicated to. The idea among the Platonists, I think, is that each Henad (as opposed to Daemons, who are still worthy of worship but are just lesser in nature) represent their own self-contained Hypostasis. While here on earth it may seem like certain gods share attributes, it is more the other way around, that certain things in the world we live in are simply a quality of the substances emanating from these two self-contained and completely distinct deities. I think they are described as modes of the One, and so by worshipping them you are worshipping the One…
Another fine Platonic argument for the existence of intellectual gods is simply ‘argument from prior knowledge’—basically using the Platonic idea that we are familiar with the world of the forms deep within our consciousness, and in life only rediscover them through recognition of their instances. By this logic, you could say that our intuitive deifying of things is evidence of intellectual gods. It seems like a non-insignificant amount of Greeks (and other ancients) sort of just took it for granted that the world was run by eternal intellectual entities, like to them it was just so obvious that they were waiting for evidence of the contrary to ever believe otherwise.”
In the first paragraph of this quote, Sectionalism is expressing a view that there are those gods which would be synonymous in quality to the more consistent principles of Reality, and those which are associated with more provisional qualities of Reality. The former would be designated as “Henads”, and the latter as “Daemons”. (One should not confuse this term with the derived term “demons”, which are malicious and transient beings lacking association with a defined principle.) The likes of a storm god, such as Zeus, Jupiter, or Tyr, would be a “Henad”, as storms are seemingly “universal, essential, and timeless” in quality, being able to manifest anywhere on Earth, under varying circumstances, and at any time. Even if all the conditioning factors (in this case, atmospheric/meteorological conditions) that would enable actualziation of the “storm principle” were removed, such that there would be no manifested storms currently in existence, these conditioning factors could still change at a later time, allowing storms to return at a future date. Here we not only see a clear example of why a principle is “universal, essential, and timeless”, but likewise why a god synonymous with this principle would be considered “unchanging”. Now, let us conversely think of a much more conditioned principle—one which could hardly be called “universal, essential, and timeless”, given that it would be a very relative and specific principle…Think for instance of a “quintessential Mount Everest principle”: Such a principle is quite limited in terms of its ability to manifest, since there is only one “Mount Everest”, and the range of forms that this principle can take would be limited to instantiations of this one mountain as the mountain’s composition and size change over time. This principle is very contingent, has a very limited presence (as opposed to a more universal one), requires very specific conditions to manifest (is hardly essential), and has a very limited window of time in which it can manifest (it is more temporal than it is timeless). The god associated with such a principle would thus be considered “changing”, and is what the Greeks called “Daemons”.
In Sectionalism’s second paragraph, Sectionalism mentions that gods might be viewed as existing of their own self-contained “Hypostasis”, similar to what I previously mentioned with reference to Zoroastrianism. If we consider that Total Unicity or the Ultimate Essence is the ultimate Hypostasis of Reality, then each lesser essence or principle would be a lesser hypostasis within the Supreme Hypostasis. Moreover, he invokes the idea that gods do not share attributes, but rather that the material world is manifested out of qualities from the gods. This perfectly lines up with the Quintessential Metaphysics model: If gods are principles, then they are the very qualities which our world is composed of. That is, in QM terms, they are the principles which condition our world. Sectionalism merely presents a differing vocabulary to phrase such thoughts in.
Finally, Sectionalism invokes a very interesting concept: That the “world of deep forms” (or “perfect forms”)—Plato’s version of “principles”, “essences”, or “archetypes”—owe their being to pure Consciousness or Intellect. Plato would call it the “Logos”, but we have called it by the Dharmic terms “Awareness” and “Brahman”. To Plato, all of Reality precipitates out of pure Consciousness, pure Intellect, or pure Logos, such that each individual god or principle would be its own precipitation of Consciousness with a capital C, akin to each of us being an Atman within Paramatma.
In the early Vedic tradition, this notion is expressed with Ishvara (God). But before we can discuss that… Plato, the Neoplatonists, the Gnostics, and even the Hindus, like to create a divide between the “two Ones”, asserting that since the Absolute is (as the Dharmics would say) “unqualified”, such that the likes of Nirguna Brahman is “barren of ego”. The Universal, however, the Hindus call “Bhakti”, meaning “ruler”, and this represents the personhood of God—the universe’s king, savior, and fashioner. The Platonic and Gnostic camps think similarly, creating a distinction between an ineffable God and a world-fashioning Demiurge. In truth, however, we find in the earliest traditions the notion that there is not “two Ones”, but as we discussed Chapter 3 Part D, only One, ultimately speaking. To the ancient Vedics, this was Ishvara, who was both the universe’s dreamer and its Intellect—a complete and perfect Godhead:
“Ishvara is that which is ‘free from avidyā (ignorance), free from ahaṃkṛti (ego-sense), free from bandhana (bondage)’, a Self that is ‘pure, enlightened, liberated’…”
“When the universe is not manifest, Shankara (8th century BC Vedic scholar) conceives of Ishvara as abiding in a state of dreamless sleep. The universe’s manifestation occurs when Ishvara is in a dreaming state, wherein Ishvara is visualizing the universe owing to its memory of previous creations. Just as the state of dreaming is dependent on memory (not separate from the mind), the universe does not have an existence separate from Ishvara. Ishvara’s knowledge is thus a necessary condition for the existence of the universe.” – (Compiled from three works: Living liberation in Shankara and classical Advaita, in Living Liberation in Hindu Thought by Lance Nelson, Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion by John Koller, Śaṅkara)
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b.) To expand upon the manifestations of the gods in times of “spiritual daylight”, take for instance the Dashavatara (“ten incarnations”) doctrine in Hindu. Each of Vishnu’s ten assumed forms is a symbol for one of the ten phases of Saguna Brahman throughout time, culminating with the arrival of Kalki who ends the Kali Yuga (equivalent to the Greek Age of Iron), presumably restarting the cycle at such a point. The Dashavatara doctrine, however, belongs to a volume of Vedic literature known as the Puranas, which is itself a subgenre of Smriti (“what was remembered”), which largely deals with recorded legends and myths. Unlike the Shruti (“what was heard”), which are authoritative texts that deal directly with the conveyance of truth and acquisition of wisdom, the nature of Smriti is formalistic/mythological. Thus, we return to point “a” above. The nature of the gods is best understood in abstract terms. Manifestations during spiritual daylight are not to be taken as literal occurrences of a divine being stepping foot on Earth at a particular time, but rather represent broad transformative events. In fact (quoting Sectionalism), “the idea that myths are these historical events which happened on the ‘timeline’ is more of an Abrahamic thing. It’s kind of a cliche to say this at this point, but to the Greeks the myth ‘was happening’ all the time.”
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c.) “Wanderers” or “invisible ones”, on the other hand are a bit stranger. These descriptions represent a type of true superstition that is rare among intellectual worshippers. In Norse myth we see, for instance, that Odin, despite being the Father/King of the Gods or the Absolute and Ultimate Reality, relegates himself to the disguise of a beggar in the Völsunga saga. Though one could argue this is still nothing more than a myth, even if its function is hard to decipher.
A more bizarre and explicit superstition would be that surrounding Epimenides of Crete and his supposed “metamorphosis” into Zeus, for which the Cretans are infamously denounced as “liars” since his metamorphosis would render Zeus a mortal man who died of old age. Two samples detailing this are below:
“The miraculous 57-year sleep and reawakening of the shaman-sage Epimenides of Crete (c. 7th/6th centuries BCE) led to his recognition as a ‘new Zeus’.
An unorthodox and not particularly widespread belief existed among ancient Cretans that Zeus did not have immortal origins but was instead a long-haired, youthful prince, renowned in life, who died on the island, evidenced by the existence of a tomb bearing the same name. He was thought to be reborn annually, and Epimenides' emergence from a cave sacred to the god, covered in tattoos "of things secret or related to the mysteries" was seen as such an instance. He was endowed with the gift of prophecy and expertise in ritual activity, aiding Athens in dispelling a plague and reforming funerary practices, among other exploits. Death finally came in his 150th year, but some of his countrymen say he lived to be nearly 300.”
“The case of Epimenides, sometimes seen as one of the Seven Sages, appears to be unique. A late source (Maximus Tyrius Dissertations 10.1) relates a detail not mentioned in either of the longer accounts on Epimenides (Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch): the Cretan sage and seer fell into a deep, deathlike sleep that lasted a number of years inside a cave, where he had a dream. During this dream, he underwent instruction by the gods he met and talked with, of whom two are mentioned by name, Aletheia and Dike. Epimenides’ sleeping experience produces a metamorphosis. The mortal Epimenides appears not to have simply attained the status of a hero, as does Hesiod in Oinoe, but to have become Zeus himself; hence his title (new) Koures.”[1]
[1] https://archive.chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5102.4-the-cretan-contexts
The fact that other Greeks denounced the Cretans as liars for this outlandish adaptation of Zeus, which is totally detached from proper philosophy, shows that such superstitions ought not to be taken as definitive of what a religion actually teaches, especially in regards to how we can understand a figure like Zeus from somebody who engages in proper philosophy like Heraclitus.
However, Sectionalism would once again contest my conclusion here: “The ‘wanderer’ is probably not literally a manifestation of the god on earth, but men clearly are creatively possessed by divine energy all the time. The poet, the shaman, the frenzied dancer… And in a sort of opposite way a man can have such a profound degree of excellence and consequence that his soul (which is immortal and existed before he ever walked the earth) ought to be retroactively deemed a god. And by soul, I don't necessarily mean his conscious experience, but the essence of his character in the world. Like, the soul of Alexander the Great is certainly worth as much consideration as the soul of some hurricane or wind. So, I would not relegate belief in any of this stuff to the simple-minded.”
Chapter 4, Part C: Religious Traditions as Cognates without Confliction
3.) Thirdly, the various religious traditions of the world may only appear contradictory at a superficial examination, but when examined at a principial theological and an anthropological level, are revealed to share the same perennial truths. Most notably, the Indo-European traditions, constituting perhaps the most prominent spectrum of traditions on Earth in the pre-Christian Eurasian sphere, are in fact all cognates of each other just as the languages of their respective cultures are. The most obvious indication of this can be seen in tracing the names of prominent gods in related traditions who served similar mythological roles or were associated with similar aspects of Reality. For instance, the Greek Zeus, Latin Jupiter, Oscan Dípatír, Lithuanian Diēvas, Latvian Dievs, Proto-Slavic *Deiwos, High German Ziu, English Tiw, Norse Týr, Irish Dagda, Sanskrit Dyáuş Pitŕ, Hittite Šīuš, and Albanian Zojz, all claim etymological descendance from the Proto-Indo-European god *Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr (literally “sky father”).
Lithuanian philosopher Algis Uždavinys discusses this phenomenon in one of his books, the Translatability Of Divine Names In Ancient Civilizations:
“The question why so many distinct forms of spirituality and intellectual life may be named and understood as ‘philosophy’, should perhaps be answered by involving the so-called ‘principle of translatability’, discussed by Jan Assman in respect to the Egyptian and Near Eastern religions. The conviction that God or the gods are universal led to the semantic dimension that makes names translatable. This means that every nation has essentially the same gods. Therefore, the basic structure of the spiritual path leading to first principles everywhere must be analogous, though different in style and details.”
Similar themes also arise in these religions, such as reincarnation, where in Greek tradition, the cult of Orphism prescribes reincarnation for the “uninitiated” and “Henosis” (liberation) for the initiated, similar to the Vedic concepts of Samsara (rebirth) for those following the four yogas and Moksha (liberation) for those who achieve Enlightenment. Reincarnation itself fits into a broader concept known as Cyclical Time, depicted often as a wheel which divides time into the four metallic ages of Greek myth or the four yugas of Vedic myth. Curiously, if we go by the timespans provided by the one of the most authoritative books in Hindu, the Manu Samhita (I. 68-71) and the calculations derived by astrologer Sri Yukteswar (The Holy Science, p. 11, 1894), we arrive at a chatur-yuga (a cycle of the four yugas) length of approximately 26,000 years, about equal to a full orbital precession of the sun around our galactic center, which corresponds to Vedic symbolism regarding cosmic light and shadows associated with the yugas. Some astrologists would go even further in declaring that a chatur-yuga aligns with the details of the Mesoamerican Sun Stone. Though the specifics may be a stretch, and it is certainly not my goal to convince you of them, the key takeaway is that the base principle of Cyclical Time is the defining feature shared between these distant cultures. In this case, we are not just dealing with cognate cultures, but cultures separated by an entire ocean (though one could argue for a common ancestor between the Indo-Europeans and Native Americans in the “Ancient North Eurasian” archaeological culture 24,000 years ago—but this is tenuous).
Another recurrent theme present in both the Indo-European traditions and external traditions is the “Striker” (Perkʷūnos in Proto-Indo-European), a weather god who triumphs over a water serpent, restoring order to the world. In Hindu, Indra strikes down with lightning bolts the aquatic dragon Vritra who blocks the Rigvedic rivers. Upon the creature’s death, the waters are released and prosperity emerges. In Greek tradition, Acrisius must evade the wrath of the vengeful serpentine Erinyes by setting his sister and her child—the weather god Perseus—into a chest to drift upon a stormy sea, which leads Poseidon to call upon Zeus to end the storms so that the child may be rescued. Perhaps best known in the minds of Westerners, however, is the tale of the Abrahamic God, Yahweh, exalting his victory over the fierce multi-headed monster, Leviathan—a beast he in fact created before slaying at a later time. This tale itself is either derived from or cognate with the Ugaritic Canaanite tales of Hadad and Ba’al’s triumphs over Lotan. Yet it is far removed from the Indo-European sphere (though one could debate the possibility cross-contact and influence).
Each of these myths has its own deeper meaning pertaining to a function of existence. In Indra’s case, a Quora user familiar with the hermeneutics explains: “Vritra has the etymology ‘vrit’ (‘to exist’) and ‘ra’ (‘one who possesses’) = one who possesses existence. In the Rigveda (10.129.4), existence is understood as a mind that has desire. A mind that is free from desire is said to be [beyond existence]. In this context, Vritra represents desire in the mind. Indra slaying Vritra and ‘releasing the waters’ signifies the process of returning the mind to its [beyond existent] state (cessation of desire).” One may liken this to the Buddha’s discovery of Sunyata (emptiness), which freed him from ego and by extension attachment and “unsatisfactoriness”; or to Hindu’s emptiness of the mind (Consciousness without content), accessed through a state of Turiya, in which there is only an awareness of the emptiness of spacelessness and timelessness, where Atman is one with Paramatma. In other words, Indra is casting away the illusion of the false self and provisional world, returning to a natural state of emptiness in mind and essence.
Returning to Canaanite/Abrahamic religion, it is curious to note that there appears to be two creation narratives. Yahweh’s triumph over the Leviathan is not just a classic Striker tale; it is a creation myth within itself: Lotan in the earlier Canaanite mythologies is a personification of the dangers of the sea known as “Yam” (Yahweh’s earlier identification), and Lotan’s defeat by the Striker results in the creation of dry land, a clear antonym to the formlessness embodied by water. My anonymous teacher explains:
“Before there was anything there was the potential for there to be something. And anything that we can compare to something like ‘potential’, even though there is nothing actual or incarnate that really embodies it, is something permissive. Land is given permission by the ocean or by water, objects and locality in general are given permission by space itself. So, any kind of creation myth worth anything usually describes the archaic or original reality as something vacuous or otherwise something that can change shape or form. Water or liquids take the shape of whatever they’re contained in or whatever they’re limited by, as well. Basically, the universe or created reality could be said to be the ordering or facilitation of disordered primordial material or substance.”
We might think of Genesis as a more “matured” extrapolation of the creation tale then, where the creation narrative has “outgrown” the need for a personified monster to embody chaos, allowing God to interact with the waters more directly, “dividing” them from a formless chaotic world in order to bring about a formed and orderly Reality. Furthermore, if Yahweh was once the chaos of the seas themselves, as Yam, then one might even go as far as to say that Yahweh the Creator is shaping the Essential Substance of Yam the Generator.
End Note
I hope I have been successful in satisfying the four goals that this essay set out to accomplish. Thank you for reading.
Here is first comment. I only read the first half so far.
>Specifically, perennialism is the position that most natural religions have mystified what is in fact the same quintessential truths regarding the metaphysical structure and organization of Reality. It is not the position of “all religions are true”, but rather, it is the position that most religions speak to the same abstract truths which are obfuscated in myths that must be demystified.
My main problem with Perennialism (which I talked about in my response to Praxius over Pagans) is that a lot of the Traditionalist/Perennialism crowd like to pick and choose what thinkers to pick up as evidence of the widespread Perennial Tradition, and throw those with other ideas out as “decadent” or something-something. I think they’re right but in a bit of a redundant way. All religions require an Idealistic element because almost all religions with set beliefs (as opposed to purely ritualistic religions) are supernatural. Monism, ehhhhh… It’s really hard to say, because a lot of ancient religions either just weren’t really caught up in the “original cause” or were, but didn’t leave records on it.
But I’ll admit, I’ve become a little bit more sympathetic to the notion of a Perennial Tradition in the past few months. I originally used to consider myself a Perennialist, but I stopped. Maybe at the end of this I’ll return.
>“…This incongruency in logic is enough to likewise dismiss the notion of pantheism, which equates God with the universe, despite the fact that the universe is clearly conditioned by principles and laws greater than its scope, such as temporality or mathematics. The only ontologically justifiable position is one which is monadic, emanationist, and panentheistic, asserting that Ultimate Reality is a Oneness, that all faucets of reality are contained with that Oneness, and that this Oneness both contains and is beyond the scope of the universe itself”
Ehh… If you consider non-physical things as “reals” then Pantheism also includes all of that stuff — mathematical principles, objects, temporality, etc etc. What you are describing as “Pantheism” is more like Physicalist Monism, like what the Stoics were up to. I’m pretty sure Spinoza (who people seem to think of when they think Pantheism) actually did believe in non-physical things as reals, he wasn’t a Physicalist Monist.
My issue with Panentheism is that it seems pretty much redundant and serves mostly to reconcile certain Abrahamic dogmatic notions of God with the Monistic notions of the Greks and others. How could God be *more* than the sum of his parts? If this “transcendent” element exists, and comes from God, then surely it is also a “real” in the world.
>The first article of this three-fold synthesis holds “that what exists as an effect necessarily presupposes a cause.” Superficially, this is a replicable and perennial fact of reality: that things as they are, once were not, and thus were caused to be. It is demonstrably observable to the point of gross obviosity.
I ultimately agree with the “uncaused cause” argument stuff, but I’ve always found it a bit unrigorous. Intuitively, it is definitely true, I think the problem is semantic. “cause” is probably not the correct term — I heard a more refined attempt at this argument without using “causiness” years ago from a fellow Monist, but I forgot the jist of it. You sort of go over this in the paragraph or two after this about how timelessly existent objects or events still necessarily have a “cause”.
>Additionally, it is worth noting that we perennialists take things a step further, arguing that because God is Existence or Being itself, that He is inseparable from the reality He creates; all being is Being. This idea will be explored more throughout the essay.
TRVTHNVKE.
Uhh yeah, I have no comment on anything in particular in 2, because I was already pretty familiar with these concepts from Platonic stuff, but one time in a computer science course my teacher was talking about classes and objects and I told her its like Platonic forms and physical manifestations. And then every woman in the class started screeching at me and ripping their skin off and eventually I had to use instant transmission to bug out of there before they could attack me
Ehh yeah, expect more comments tomorrow because I don’t feel like reading the whole thing tonight. But I am liking it so far, and also some of the sections I haven’t read yet look right up my alley.
I never really got around to chapter 4, but I have nothing going on tonight so I guess I'll polish this puppy off.
>Whether the gods truly bear personhood or are simply reifications which serve as a mental tool of mediation for the “common caste” who cannot comprehend the abstracted Absolute, is unknowable...Some modern Indo-European pagan perennialists might phrase it as saying that the gods/devas represent the infinite personalities of (in this case) Vishnu/Bhakti/Saguna Brahman.
Yes, I think what the Platonists argue is that there are two different varieties of "gods" -- those who change (Daemons) and those who don't change (Henads). The big deities tend to be Henads, with some exceptions, while Daemons are attributed to ever-changing elements of nature. For example, an animistic spirit of a mountain is a Daemon. As for the person-ness of the gods, I think several classical philosophers do explain why the gods are not just "metaphors" but that the principles of reality must necessarily have an intellectual agent similar to the grander intellect. Unfortunately, I'm not very well versed in this line of argument yet, I'm still learning about it.
I believe that what Vishnu is referencing is the Kathenotheistic nature of the Hindu gods... In the Vedas, hymns grant omnipotent traits to multiple deities based on whichever deity said hymn is dedicated to. The idea among the Platonists, I think, is that each Henad (as opposed to Daemons, who are still worthy of worship but are just lesser in nature) represent their own self-contained Hypostasis. While here on earth it may seem like certain gods share attributes, it is more the other way around, that certain things in the world we live in are simply a quality of the substances emanating from these two self-contained and completely distinct deities. I think they are described as modes of the One, and so by worshipping them you are worshipping the One. I'm not super sure if I am ready to accept the notion of the Henads yet, it is a very late Platonic idea that I don't fully understand, and very late Platonism is very lofty and complicated that it's sort of hard to follow from a modern perspective unless you have a long time experience with it.
Another fine Platonic argument for the existence of intellectual gods is simply "argument from prior knowledge" -- basically using the Platonic idea that we are familiar with the world of the forms deep within our consciousness, and in life only rediscover them through recognition of their instances. By this logic, you could say that our intuitive deifying of things is evidence of intellectual gods. It seems like a non-insignificant amount of Greeks (and other ancients) sort of just took it for granted that the world was run by eternal intellectual entities, like to them it was just so obvious that they were waiting for evidence of the contrary to ever believe otherwise.
>Manifestations during spiritual daylight are not to be taken as literal occurrences of a divine being stepping foot on Earth at a particular time, but rather represent broad transformative events.
Yes, the idea that myths are these historical events which happened on the "timeline" is more of an Abrahamic thing. It's kind of a cliche to say this at this point, but to the Greeks the myth "was happening" all the time.
On the topic of "wanderers", I don't think that they are anti-intellectual at all. The "wanderer" is probably not literally a manifestation of the god on earth, but men clearly are creatively possessed by divine energy all the time. The poet, the shaman, the frenzied dancer. The Fuhrer...*cough* *cough* and in a sort of opposite way a man can have such a profound degree of excellence and consequence that his soul (which is immortal and existed before he ever walked the earth) ought to be retroactively deemed a god. And by soul, I don't necessarily mean his conscious experience, but the essence of his character in the world. Like, the soul of Alexander the Great is certainly worth as much consideration as the soul of some hurricane or wind. So I would not relegate belief in any of this stuff to the simple-minded.
As far as the ages go (yuga cycle, Hesiodic ages, etc) I think they are more of an allegory for the sinusoidal nature of order and disorder rather than a literal way to interpret history. Order invites disorder, and disorder destroys itself leaving order to spring back out of the waters.
>Vritra has the etymology ‘vrit’ (‘to exist’) and ‘ra’ (‘one who possesses’) = one who possesses existence. In the Rigveda (10.129.4), existence is understood as a mind that has desire. A mind that is free from desire is said to be [beyond existence]. In this context, Vritra represents desire in the mind. Indra slaying Vritra and ‘releasing the waters’ signifies the process of returning the mind to its [beyond existent] state (cessation of desire).”
Hmm, I find this contrived. The "to possess" element probably refers to Vritra's hording of water and cattle, the latter of which is a trait of the serpent in Indo-European myth at large. He is a hoarding dragon, he is a wasteful dragon who causes drought. Indra's slaying of Vritra allows for the correct ordering of the world through the freeing of the waters and the return of cattle to those who will properly sacrifice them, it is a classic Chaoskampf myth.
>Any kind of creation myth worth anything usually describes the archaic or original reality as something vacuous or otherwise something that can change shape or form. Water or liquids take the shape of whatever they’re contained in or whatever they’re limited by, as well. Basically, the universe or created reality could be said to be the ordering or facilitation or disordered primordial material or substance
Exactly what I was talking about with the Vritra stuff. And yes, I would argue that Yahweh in genesis is simply shaping the essential substance, he is a Demiurge. Not that there's anything wrong with that... I talk about this in my post on Abrahamism, that the decision to interpret genesis as "creation ex nihilo" is one of the primary differentiating traits of Abrahamic religion