The New Monadology

● Some General Considerations

● The Subtlety of Holism and its Relation to the Individual

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

● Speculations upon the ‘Interior View’ of Holism

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

  

Prolegomenon:  The Psyche, the Secular and the Sacred

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

Neutral Monism –A Proposed Novel Holism/Pluralism Inequality

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

                      

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

K. Popper, quoting J Popper-Lynkeus.

 

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

 

Neutral Monism within a Graded Series of Four Ontologies

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

               

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

                                                

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Incarnation:  the Spiritual/Material Polarization.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Two Views of the Double ψ/μ Emanational Couplings

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Time-Elapsed” Images of Two Contrasting Ontologies

 

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

   

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

 

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

 

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

 

                Animated Renditions

 

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

 

            The s