Download One view of monism and dualism. (MO)

One view of monism and dualism. (MO)
A Précis on Immanent Transcendence
Part I
by
Steven Fortney
Monism and Dualism
Nature seems, to the naked eye, to consist of separated things. I am not the woodpile in
my back yard. I work in my garden.
Yet in spite of our perception of the world as consisting of separate things and processes,
we sense in them an underlying unity. The great thought traditions, ancient and modern, have
been witness to this. This sense of unity is both rational and aesthetic. Our minds and hearts
combine to create this impression. That is to say, the view is both personal and and transcendent,
a part of our subjectivity and beyond subjectivity. The sense of unity assumes that truth is one,
knowable and sensible, rational and aesthetic.
The technical term for this is ‘Monism.’
This point of view is opposed to ‘dualism,’ the idea that there are two realities: our
everyday life in the world and something Other that is separate from that everyday reality.
There is no evidence for that.
Our best science is monist and transcendent. Our best mythology assumes the same. Our
everyday life is but a tiny slice of the Cosmic reality. Compared to the astonishing dimensions of
the space and time of the universe disclosed by the instruments and observations of science, our
everyday life is so infinitesimal as to be very nearly nothing. Compared to the depths of
subatomic life disclosed by the physics of the standard model our everyday life is equally as
nothing. We occupy a tiny space midway between over thirty powers of ten out to the ends of the
cosmos and thirty negative powers of ten into subatomic reality.
Moreover, both the physics of Newton and of the many contributors to the standard
model attest to the unity of Being. All is interconnected. There is nothing outside the universe.
The universe is not in anything. It is impossible to determine what was before the beginning or is
outside the universe. That is like traveling north of the north pole.
Our best chemistry also attests to the unity of Being. The carbon atom in the digital
circuits with which this is written is identical to the carbon atom on the other end of the universe.
Subatomic particles are identical throughout the universe. At this level quarks (and perhaps
strings) emerge from an underlying field that is, so far, unknowable.
Our deepest biology attests to the unity of life. We share with the higher apes the same
DNA (98+%), and with the lichens (50+%). Plants and animals seem to come from the same
source. The riches of the study of the genome is just beginning. Already uncovered in relic
remnants of DNA history, together with the fossil record, is the very nearly certain truth of
evolution. This, with organic chemistry, underlies our growing feel for the interdependence and
commonality of all living things.
Moreover, the Hindus in their mythologies beginning over thirty-five hundred years ago
intuited the unities of Being (Brahman is everything that is) together with the individual
interconnection of the person with that Being (Tat Tvam Asi--Thou are that). Each of us is of the
same substance with the life, processes, and substance of the cosmos. All eastern religions, the
art and literatures that follow them in the West as well, are monist.
The Limits of Dualism and the Psychology of Religion
All dualistic ideologies are false. They contradict our hardest sciences and the deepest
intuitions of the great and lasting mythologies and art of the world. Any ideology that holds to a
dualistic point of view is, therefore, a mistake. Fundamentalist Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
are dualist. Therefore these ideologies are in error. The theologies of the conservativefundamental Levantine triad are in error. These, in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, therefore, are
false.
In the East are certain styles of response to the quest for transcendence: the style of study
and meditation, the style of action, the style of worship. In Hinduism, among other yogas, these
are named Jnana, Karma, and Bhakti yoga.
Study and contemplation (Jnana) proceeds with an endless discrimination, uncovering
the emptiness and arbitrary nature of all concepts. Action (Karma) throws its devotees into ritual
practice and meritorious works. The style of devotion (Bhakti) posits a provisional separation
between the worshipper and the object of worship in order to intensify the feelings of devotion.
Some seekers combine all three yogas into one royal (Raja) path. The style of devotion in the
East, while assuming a temporary dualism, never makes the mistake of abandoning the monism
of its nurture.
The participants of the Levantine triad, Christianity, Islam, and (to a lesser extent)
Judaism in their practice express a Bhakti or devotional faith. Their fundamental symbols are
expressed in those terms. Jesus is the only Son of God, can be taken to be a symbol of his
exceptional, though human, genius; an inerrant, sacrosanct scripture, whether Torah, Bible, or
Koran, can be taken as a symbol of the greatness and lasting influence of these texts, all the
while leaving them open to critical understanding. It’s only when the symbols are taken literally
rather than symbolically that fundamentalism rears its ugly head.
It need not be so. One can read J or Job or Mark or the Suras or Sutras as human
productions rather than the absolutely true, word for word, dictation of Yahweh, God, or Allah.
One is then freed from those constraints, and can enjoy the texts as literature from which the BMinor Mass and other great religious art emerges as the highest bhakti. Jesus obviously was not
born of a virgin, nor did Jesus and Mohammad ascend to heaven; Jesus did not bodily get up
after three days of death and decay. There is no especially Chosen People, or One True Church,
or sacrosanct Brotherhood. None of those who claim to walk and talk with Jesus, will be able to
point to that Jesus in a contemporary corporeal form. If he is any place, he dwells only in the
believer’s head and heart. Monism is the standard. Literal dualism is its aberrant. Those mystics
in the West who assert a monism are marginalized, treated as heretics, or executed. Spinoza was
ostracized. Meister Eckhart was suspected of heresy and removed from power. Giordano Bruno
and Mansour al-Hallaj were executed.
The Ethics of Monism
If one accepts the Cosmos as One, life in its unity must also be one. You differ from me
in some details. Mainly, however, we are far more alike than we are different. We share a
common humanity. We are all humans and our caring-concern for each other needs to be
reciprocal. The Golden Rule is an utterly rational process. It assumes that the universe is one;
therefore, each human being participates through a common humanity, in the unity of being.
Beginning with a monist cosmology, the ethic of the Golden Rule is but its logical outcome.
Thus, ethics is deduced from the cosmology. Given the cosmology, the Golden Rule is its
inevitable outcome. This is an entirely rational process. If true, its most radical injunction,
recognizing that to kill for religious, racial, or ethnic differences, are utterly false, is to love your
enemies.
Truth is one and knowable. There is nothing conventionally religious in any of this. A
scientist, a humanist, an agnostic would have little discomfort in conversation with the Jesus of
history, the author of Job or Ecclesiastes, the tragic dramatists of Classical Greece, the sages of
India, the Buddha, Lao Tze, or Confucius--or Black Elk for that matter. In each of their ways
they share both a unified cosmology and the ethics of the Golden Rule.
Man is deeply interconnected with the cosmos. He is a cosmos (order) within a cosmos.
The interdependence seems to be beyond serious argument. Since there is no ‘outside’, your
spirit did not come from the outside. Spirit emerges from nature. The life of the spirit is
the bouquet of the life of the flesh.
For this reason, based on what we know, it is easily possible to evoke not only a human
ethic, but also an animal ethic, a land ethic. One with this ecological sense cannot be easily
dismissed as a ‘tree hugger.’ We grow fond of our pets. Hunting is less popular. The impact of
unthinking and exploiting humans on our degrading environment is too evident to ignore.
Sometimes, for particularly gifted individuals, the aesthetic arrest over these experiences
is very intense. Their visions of cosmic unity and the unity of life are like the impulse of a great
composer, a great poet, a visionary scientist doing their work. We may, in our ordinary life, have
a limited sense about such things, such as human loving-kindness and organic farming, human
scale architecture, and the like. But a certain few, whose experiences are so rapturous, become
our saints and sages. They confront the questions of ‘Why is there something rather than
nothing?’ or ‘If human consciousness comes from nature what kind of nature is it that produces
not only consciousness, but human genius as well?’ with unusual intensity. Black Elk’s visions,
Jesus in the wilderness, the nirvanic blossoming of the Buddha beneath the Bodhi Tree, the zero
event experiences of Leopold Fischer (Agehananda Bharati), Robert Pirsig’s merging into
Quality, the Oceanic sense Arthur Koestler experienced while in prison, Norman Maclean's
mystical experiences while fly-fishing, are all powerful analogous experiences.
The Limits of Language
These, and so many like them worldwide through history, are the mystics. They all testify
to something quite exceptional that happens in the human consciousness. And yet, when pressed,
then have difficulty in expressing just what it is they have experienced. They tell stories, attempt
images of bliss and light, but then say, ‘No, that is not exactly it either.’ Those who have such
experiences (and they probably happen more often than one might think) give up explaining,
sometimes in frustration. They know but cannot express their visions.
God, Jesus, Moses, Allah, Brahma, Buddha, Great Spirit, are the many names that point
to transcendence. In themselves, they tell no truth. Moses was not given a theological treatise on
the nature of God on Sinai, that God was ineffable. He was given a set of guidelines on how to
live. The historical Jesus did not talk about the theology of the Father, but he proposed a radical
egalitarianism of the Kingdom symbolized by a banquet to which everyone, saints, sinners, and
street-people, was invited. The Buddha, refused to discuss ultimate things, his silence was called
the Noble Silence. When pressed, he held up a flower and said nothing. All he did was to
describe the path to enlightenment and founded a brotherhood which preserved his teachings.
The name of Yahweh points to a mystery that cannot be described. In the East the
enlightenment experience is what inadequate language retreats from. In the highest mystical
religion its devotees are as agnostic about what their vision discloses as the secular humanist is.
Great poetry, great art, great music leaves one in silence, even religious awe. There is no need to
talk. Those who insist on talk are the babblers. Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do
not know. All ideologies are false. Language, being uncertain, and of human making, is only a
partial vehicle. The experience of emptiness in Buddhism, like the Christian sense of Grace so
eloquently described by Luther, has but one outcome: Freedom--the liberation of the human from
the shackles of sin and the traps of ignorance.
So what do we know?
We know of the Unity of the Cosmos.
We know our profound interconnection with cosmic processes.
We know the rational basis of the Golden Rule
We know the limits of human reason. (Questioning is the piety of thinking; doubt is the
chastity of the mind.)
We know the rapture of the mystical and aesthetic arrest.
That truth is one.
That truth is knowable.
But that the deepest truths are not entirely speakable.
Varieties of Skeptical Experience
Part II
The Emergent Harmony of Science, Art, and Religion
by
Steven Fortney
Three Ways of Knowing
The themes of this essay are based on the forthcoming book, Seeking Truth, Living with
Doubt, by Associate to the Jesus Seminar, Steven Fortney, and Professor Marshall Onellion,
Physics Department, University of Wisconsin--Madison. There are many varieties of skeptical
experience, of course, but we think they can be put in three groups: literary, scientific, and
mystical. We learn that we know in three limited ways: from a close observation of nature, the
repeatable scientific experiment, and the endurance of the images of art and the inward way over
time.
Great science, art, and mystical inwardness, in their different ways, thrive on an
accurately observed cosmology. This is the very business of science. The flat earth and its
geocentrism were abandoned by Greek and Hindu thinkers eons ago. Our cosmos, disclosed by
the instruments and mathematical tools of science, is billions of years old and almost
incomprehensibly immense. This is a platitude to all but the fundamentalist.
Great art and the disciplined inwardness of the mystical way must, and do, assume the
contemporary picture of the universe as a given, or else their enterprise is irrelevant at the outset.
Canonical art can create alternative universes to make moral and human points, but this is to
consciously create a mythology. Few mistake this myth for fact. Science fiction creates these
myths promiscuously but usually within the framework of science, plausibly, sometimes
prophetically, extended. Almost any episode of the Star Trek series is understandable as a gloss
on our contemporary situation.
The mystical method, like the processes of artistic production, must presuppose the world
as we know it scientifically. Literate Christians flee the normative churches because so many of
its doctrines are not credible. Their church's exclusive claims to the truth no longer works for
them. They either drop out into secularism, explore or adopt Eastern styles of religion, or find a
progressive congregation that dispenses with Christian absolutism. Dogma is rejected.
Fundamentalism, whether Christian or Islamic, is simply not an option. No unexamined
ideology ever is. And Eastern teachers are as skeptical of unexamined creedalism as is the
scientist. The Dalai Lama has maintained many times that if any part of Buddhist philosophy is
contradicted by the findings of science, the Buddhist part must be thrown out!
The First Way: Science and Rationality
The currently understood cosmos is the foundation of science, art, and religion. Our
hardest sciences, our most sensitive art, our deepest intuitions of disciplined inwardness hold that
the cosmos is one, and that humans are inset and interconnected with all of nature and with each
other. It then follows that we must treat each other as we would want to be treated. The Golden
Rule, celebrated by all great religions is but the logical outcome of our cosmological
interconnections. If nature is one, humans share that unity.
The experiment that can be repeated assumes a rational cosmos. That thrilling and ancient
insight gave birth to all science, especially its powerful modern outcomes. A devoted scientist is
committed to a life of exploration of the world as it is. The attention of the scientist shifts from
paradigm to paradigm depending on what is currently urgent or newly discovered. Newtonian
mechanics shifts to the standard model. That physics advances to astrophysics. Darwin moves to
Mendel to Watson and Crick to the the genome map. Human anatomy spurs in studies in
physiology, and then to consciousness research. Alchemy transmutes to chemistry and that to
organic chemistry. How all these will eventually integrate is anyone's guess.
A scientist would say it is hard and exciting enough to work out the discovery and the
details of how things are as they are, that speculation on ultimate causes is pointless, or a
diversion of more properly directed energy, or, at worst, a waste of time. Let's get down to
business. As to why there is something rather than nothing, we don't know. We may even can't
know! The god hypothesis doesn't figure into this. We are agnostic on those questions.
The Second Way: Art and Intuition
John Updike once said in an interview that all he hoped for was that his books had
expressed a few honest images that would last. This is the key to how we know through art.
Enduring images function like the repeatable experiment. That the central images of The Epic of
Gilgamesh have lasted over four thousand years tells us that there is, somehow, truth in them.
Shakespeare illuminates and uplifts to this day. And as the models of science can always be
extended, modified, or superseded, so also the truth of canonical art needs reworking through the
images and concerns of each new epoch. Milton redoes Dante, and Shakespeare advances
Chaucer. The romantics, transcendentalists and moderns re-express Shakespeare. Mozart extends
Bach. Beethoven extends both. And on and on in all fields. Until finally Keats's great uncertainty
principle, Negative Capability--when a man is capable of being in uncertainties and doubts
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason--is invoked at the very center of the creative
process. At its most profound level the artist is utterly free to shape his expression as a
consequence of his embrace of life's indeterminacy. Like the scientist regarding ultimate
certainties, the artist is liberated and agnostic.
The Third Way: Inwardness: The Trinity within the Trinity
Mystics entertain mysteries. The words come from the same root. Because it is
the mystery they seek, at the very outset mystics adopt the agnostic way. At best, they use images
to point to the reality they have encountered. But in the use of such images, such as those
of light, space, time, the mystical rapture is fundamentally aesthetic. Those exemplary
psychologists of religion, the Hindus, have long insisted that the highest insight experience
available to the seeker has three attributes, accompanying it, Sat, Cit, Ananda--knowledge,
wisdom, and bliss. Here one rehearses the three avenues of understanding.
Mystics know on the mundane level the unity of life in the cosmos and its ethical
blossoming. Tat Tvam Asi. Thou art that! You are everything, declares the Chandyoga
Upanishad. Mystics, like a Shakespeare holding his masterpieces in mind simultaneously, then
expressing them in drama, have attained that same level of wisdom that all poets have. And with
rapturous, transporting visions, mystics have in his bliss affirmed the value of his perception of
all things with a warm, sensuous, even erotic inspiration. This intense bliss, though approached
in great art and continuous with it but never perfectly realized, seems to be the property of
mystics alone. The mystic’s union with the mysteries is exceptional and ecstatic.
And yet mystics, of all people, cannot tell you what has happened to them. Words like
sublime, empty, transcendent, ineffable are at the center of the sense of the truly religious human.
Just like the scientist, the mystic has no idea what the ultimate is. Just like the artist, the mystic’s
disciplined introspection uncovers the baffling transcendence of consciousness itself. The
religious human enshrines above knowledge, wisdom, and bliss a ‘don’t know', a modest sense
of the mind’s limits that embodies the three attributes of insight, and then extends, envelops and
transcends the capacity of language to express that mystery. Mystics maintain a respectful
silence about what can't be described. Thus mystics, like scientists and artists, at the most exalted
level are agnostic.
We do not distinguish radically between artists and mystics. The oceanic sense is
available even to the atheist. Alice Munro, who describes herself as an unbeliever, suggests,
through an image, her own sense of the transcendent. At the end of her book, A View from Castle
Rock, she describes seeing a big mother-of-pearl seashell that: I recognize as a
messenger...because I could hold it to my ear...and discover the tremendous pounding of my own
blood, and of the sea.
Most conventionally religious people, it is to be admitted, are troubled by the mystical
agnosticism we have described. If, however, the claims of the world's great mystics are to be
taken seriously, we can supply some simple images that may be of some help. For example, if
the religions of the world are like the many screens of colored glass in an Chinese lantern that
both conceal and reveal the light at its center. The glass in its variety filters the light. It is not the
light itself. Stained glass is man-made. The light is not. Each facet of glass then can be assessed
in rational terms. This facet is white, another red, or blue or green, or this one is nearly opaque.
That is to say, every major religion is of human making and can be adopted, criticized, altered,
avoided or rejected on rational terms. The one you feel most comfortable with is the color you
favor. Though man-made religions can be embraced or criticized, the light they conceal and
transmit must be approached with great care. Most cannot see the source of the light but can see
only its effects. Only rare and deeply disciplined intronauts experience the light directly.
All these are metaphors, clearly. Although we can know of the incredible varieties of
religious tradition, no one knows truly what the light's mystery is about. What are the
consequences of these metaphors? If all three of our seekers are agnostic, at the very least
imagine the reconciliation that is possible among them!
Three in One
The scientist will greet the artist as a friend: Very well. We agree that our ultimates are
unknowable, and then proceed to his lab, observatory, or accelerator, excited at the prospect of
new discovery. The researcher leaves ultimate questions to the speculators. He has quite enough
work to do as it is.
The artist greets the scientist as a friend and says: I truly admire your talent for higher
mathematics and rational observation, but I have to express my affection, my seeing sensuality
through the songs of art. Shelley, whose hero was Benjamin Franklin and his studies in
electricity, wrote the ecstatic poetry of The Skylark, The Cloud, The Ode to the West
Wind, knowing that art was the music and religion of the enlightenment.
And religious humanity? What of them? Can they wholeheartedly embrace the scientist
and the artist? Certainly the fundamentalist, whether Christian or Islamic, cannot. He has an
absolute truth. The fundamentalist’s glass is dark and opaque. The light behind it is barely
discernible. They live in twilight.
Progressive Religion
Those progressive religious groups, especially when they have purged themselves of
exclusive claims to the truth, will have no trouble here. Progressive Christianity, described by
Hal Taussig in his groundbreaking A New Spiritual Home, has grown up from the grass roots and
developed dramatically in the last few decades in America. These explorers understand that their
faith is one of many, not superior to the other religions of the world. This demands an intellectual
honesty in scientific and critical matters. Current models of science are embraced. Modern art is
taken seriously. The scholars of Westar and University based scholars of religion, have
deliberately left their ivory tower to teach what was heretofore hidden to inquisitive laymen who
thirst for such knowledge.
These progressive congregations often incorporate dance, music, art, poetry, and the
scriptures of world religions into their own worship. They are slowly creating the liturgies of the
future, expressing devotion and their awe at the stupendous space and time of the universe, and
the urgent need for altruistic activism in the face of desperate human need for health and security
in a world that does not easily grant such things. The reformation of the 16th century continues,
to what ultimate end no one knows.
Reformed and Reconstruction Judaism has anticipated this. Buddhism undergoes a
constant state of reform from generation to generation, country to country. Hinduism is so
expansive it simply absorbs the new. The true reformation of Islam still waits in the wings. The
strength of its orthodox and fundamentalist arms have made this large religious group a
regressive force. Until Islam experiences a reformation that yields the kind of critical selfexamination characteristic of its Christian and Jewish brothers and sisters (and that have yielded
up such groups as our own Westar Institute), moderate Islam and inclusive Sufism (a tiny and
often beleaguered fragment of Islam), is its hope, but not a very promising one in the near long
term.
United: the New Royal Way
So, the religions of the future, what Harold Bloom anticipates as a New Age of Faith, will
companion themselves easily with art and science. Its rational mysticism enthusiastically
embraces all of science to deepen its understanding of the world. It sees canonical art, like the
contents of all science, as its new scripture, pointing toward transcendent questions. It employs
art to enhance its worship, to struggle toward fresh and participatory liturgical practice. With all
groups equally devoted to what is knowable and not knowable, the metaphorical (not literal),
foundation of belief, and the awe and gratitude at the surprise of life itself, how is it not possible
for science, art, and religion to do anything but live together in an explosively creative
harmony?