Pantheism, Zen, and Spinoza

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I've recently been reading about the mathematician Spinoza's views on God. Spinoza essentially believed that everything in existence is part of God. He believed God is a unified organism, meaning people are all connected to each other and to everything else. The implication of this is that anything we do affects everything else, because it's all part of a bigger whole.

This sounds essentially the same as Pantheism, which states that god is everything and everything is part of God. Spinoza goes a little further by saying that everything is derived from God, and that God/the universe is constantly changing dynamically, rather than just sitting statically. But the effect is essentially the same.

The thing I find interesting is that this view actually seems to be somewhat accepted among many prominent atheists, and even anti-theists. Many in the scientific community find Spinoza's view of God appealing. Richard Dawkins even referred to Pantheism as "sexed up atheism."

The other thing I find interesting is that I feel like I saw this perspective on God and the universe before, in Soto Zen. One of the classic sayings in Zen is that people are like waves, and the universe is the ocean. This means that each wave appears to be individual, but in actuality they are just part of a larger whole. The wave as an isolated individual that lasts a limited time is an illusion. This is worth considering because I actually find it consoling on the matter of death: we may die, but everything beautiful about the world and about reality continues on after us. The matter that we are continues as matter in the universe, even if we aren't there as a conscious individual. We are one part of this greater whole. This message of interconnectedness again seems connected up with "Spinozism" and Pantheism.

To maybe get a little farther out, though, it seems like this basic message exists in some form in a lot of different religions, or at least sects. Taoists believe everything is connected by an energy ("the Tao") that makes up everything. They believe that to be effective and successful, an individual needs to be perceptive of the Tao and follow it, as it will guide them. Similarly, Quakers believe adherents need to be silent for God, and be perceptive of His truth, which will guide them - they seem to be listening to the world around them. Another seemingly related concept is the Sikh idea that God exists in some form inside of every living thing, which obviously unites people. Similarly, Sufi Muslims believe there is a piece of God in everything.

There is a modern movement called "religious naturalism". Supposedly 2% of students at Harvard Divinity School identify as religious naturalists. This means they don't believe in anything supernatural, but they have a reverence for nature that seems to stem from this concept of interconnectedness.

To further emphasize how often this concept comes up, when Bernie Sanders was asked about his religious beliefs, he said he believes that God means "we're all in this together."

This seems to indicate that there is historical precedent for the message of interconnectedness in secular belief systems like religious naturalism, Spinozism, and pantheism, and that this precedent is actually found in the world religions. Seeing God in this way, as essentially another name for the universe, also seems to render the theist/atheist distinction irrelevant.

We have a lot of strange, artificial, and rather ugly cognitive barriers in the modern west and I think a lot of it comes from a highly dual good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, etc.. that we inherited from Zoroaster, Mani, and Aristotle. We're still trying to digest that inheritance.

The challenge right now with pantheism and panentheism is that we still, as a culture, haven't figured out what to do with them and when people take a look at new agers and the woo that the 1970's/80's generation kicked up around that topic they get even more hesitant. We were pained enough by what a heavy handed church did as well as enticed by the nature of material progress and what it takes to make a successful economy (ie. Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees) that we ran full speed away from religion in many sectors. Unfortunately Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism as well as all of their evolving forms through the renaissance forward such as in alchemy and later Rosicrucianism, Speculative Freemasonry, Martinism, and all of the various magical orders and movements hoping to rebuild a modern semblance of the ancient mysteries - these collectively get lumped in under the heading 'occultism' which make them fall in something a mutually exclusive zone in our culture. To organized religion they're blasphemy because authority lies in the literal letter of scripture in the west, philosophy is an investigative and exploratory approach which only respects the authority of scripture where that respect is earned by matched observation (either objective or mystic), and modern atheism in its more polar opposite forms sees all of this - religion, mystic philosophy, etc.. generally as foolishness, superstition, or just generally something that didn't give us nuclear fission or computer chips in the last century.

Manly P Hall had some really good lectures on why Hermeticism and Neoplatonism really didn't take off in the ancient world - they were extremely erudite and took both a high level of education to participate (ie. to understand the concepts) and additionally it all took a dreadful amount of work on improving oneself - something that a lot of people despised. These days I think we might be in a different boat; ie. when nihilism is the bigger problem you'll find a lot of people who are willing to knock themselves out and put any effort in if they do find a legitimate glimmer of hope that there's something that can properly edify their existence let alone efforts (thankfully this doesn't take killing the nonbeliever in the name of God). I also see a lot of avowed atheists/materialists getting smarter these days, seeing that metadata in the human mind and culture are a major thing rather than minor, and they even seem ready to give a nod to Carl Jung and his work on the subject.

We could get to a point where pantheism or panentheism gain wider acceptance but I think that'll by and large happen more when people's 120 jubilee year measures, floating 70th week of Daniel, and plausible 12 Imam predictions have lost their grip on the end of the last millennium which could take well into the next century.

On a side note you may not get much mileage out of this thread here (ie. this forum tends to be dominated by politics - I've been trying to get a more philosophy oriented venue added or split off lately but not to much avail) but I did want to throw out one more thing on the topic.

When people talk about the Holy Spirit; whether in the bible, personal experiences of it, or to add - my own personal experiences of it, it seems to edify the idea of a macroorganism. I remember in the bible It was always referred to as if it were a sort of subconscious substrate that was imbued throughout all of creation. Similarly many of the accounts of it in the old testament were quite strange in the sense that it was almost likened more to a raw material or weather condition, like Saul rolling on the ground naked prophesying his face off in 1 Samuel on one of the occasions when he tried to chase out after David. When I've felt that sort of presence the best way I could describe it was with all of the following - very white-light, innocent, also very feminine, but also very sugary, sort of oily/syrupy, and strangely just as seductive as innocent (seems to be that way whether you've invoked its presence through sexual tantra or just plain old meditation). It would be interesting to see what neurochemicals are getting grabbed in that case - I'm sure serotonin, norepinephrine, and oxytocin play a role but how that cascade gets triggered or interfaces with the environment of the body as a form of data I'd love to know. I know if you try to read John of the Cross of Theresa of Avila sexual boundaries get crossed in unexpected ways constantly and this stuff crosses cultures from east to west and back again.

All of that I think makes a lot of sense in a pantheist/panentheistic perspective of the macro organism hypothesis but is utterly baffling if you try to approach it from the Zoroastrian/Manichean dualist perspective. The other thing - the extent to which life and really all kinds of inorganic matter as well, structures into hierarchical structures. If you think about it from the perspective that our minds inform our cells and vice a verse would you think it's possible for prophetic visions to be collections of culture fed back through what's in a person's available repertoire of symbols? There's been a lot said lately about self-organizing systems that makes me wonder if there is a stronger sort of communication of individual to group, group back to individual than just visual observation and social skills (especially when we're dealing with insects which have very specialized sight or cognitive function vs. the case with people where you can shove a lot of it off on aware self-interested behavior).