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From Pantheism to
Procedure Monism The Evolution of the
One By Bodhangkur 1. The Basics of Pre-21st-Century Pantheism a. Definition and Origins Pantheism
(Greek pan-theos, “all is God”) identifies the
universe and God as one. It denies any ultimate distinction between Creator
and creation. God is neither a being outside the world nor an external cause
but the totality of being itself. Early
expressions include: ·
Pre-Socratics: Heraclitus’s Logos,
the self-ordering fire; the Stoics’ pneuma, the divine reason
permeating all. ·
Upaniṣadic Vedānta: the identity ātman = brahman—the self and the
ground of all being are identical. ·
Neoplatonism: Plotinus’s One, the
transcendent source from which all emanates. ·
Spinoza: Deus sive
Natura—“God, or Nature.” One substance,
infinite, self-caused; all finite things are modes of it. ·
Romantic and Idealist Pantheism:
Schelling, Hegel, Wordsworth, Emerson—God as Spirit unfolding in nature and
mind. ·
Scientific Pantheisms:
Einstein’s “cosmic religious feeling,” reverence for the rational order of
the cosmos. b. Core Tenets 1. Ontological
Monism: All things express one fundamental reality. 2. Immanence: Divinity
is wholly present in the world. 3. Continuity: Reality
is an unbroken whole; multiplicity is apparent, not real. 4. Identity
of Being and Value: Since all is divine, evil is ignorance or partial
view. 5. Ethical
Consequence: Reverence for the unity of life and submission to the
Whole. c. The Metaphysical Premise Pantheism
presupposes continuity—a seamless, infinite field of being or spirit.
Reality is a single ocean of existence, endlessly modulating but never
divided. Change is internal modulation of one eternal continuum. 2. The Historical Arc of Monism as Zeitgeist-Bound
Intuition Throughout
recorded philosophy, monism reappears in diverse guises—material, spiritual,
logical, or procedural—but always as the expression of a primordial
intuition: that the manifold must arise from a single source. a. Pre-Socratic and Greek Monism The first
Western monists (Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides) projected the
intuition of unity into their available conceptual lexicon: water,
apeiron, fire, being. Each was a totalising symbol of the One according
to the material and logical reach of their age. ·
Thales’s “all is water” reflected the early
scientific expectation that one element underlies all forms. ·
Heraclitus’s “ever-living fire” reflected a
dynamic, processual understanding of flux and order—an embryonic anticipation
of energy-based ontology. b. Upaniṣadic and
Indian Monism Indian thinkers
translated the same intuition into metaphysical language: the essence of all
beings (ātman) is identical with the
ground of the cosmos (brahman). This was less physics than psychological
monism—the realisation that the inner witness and the world-ground are
one consciousness. c. Late-Antique and Medieval Monisms Neoplatonism,
Christian mysticism, and Islamic philosophy restated the intuition through
emanationist hierarchies: all beings flow from the One, or from God’s
intellect. ·
Erigena’s Periphyseon
(9th c.) translated this into Christian cosmology: all things proceed from
and return to God, who is “nothing” beyond being and non-being. d. Early-Modern Rational Monism By the
17th century, Spinoza systematised monism under the aegis of reason:
one substance expressing itself as thought and extension. The
intuition of unity had become a geometrical theorem: the single source
rendered mathematically and logically necessary. e. Romantic and Idealist Monisms The
18th–19th centuries re-emotionalised the One: Schelling’s Nature as
self-unfolding Spirit; Hegel’s Absolute as history’s dialectical logic. These
expressed the modern expectation that unity is not static but developmental—manifesting as progress, evolution, and
self-realisation. f. Twentieth-Century Continuum Monisms Einstein,
Whitehead, and the field theorists recast the intuition in scientific idiom:
a universal field, an organismic process, a continuum of energy or
experience. Even quantum theory’s “wave function of the universe” perpetuated
the same archetype—unity through continuity. Thus across eras, monism functioned as a cultural
mirror. Its
constant intuition: “The Many come from One.” 3. Finn’s Procedure Monism a. Core Definition Finn’s Procedure
Monism (Ekatva Vedanta) recasts the perennial intuition
of the One through a post-classical lens. Reality is not a substance, field,
or consciousness, but a procedure—a universal rule set that constrains
random energy events into stable, identifiable emergents. Every
identifiable entity is one perfect execution of the Universal Procedure. b. Foundational Premises 1. Discontinuity
is fundamental. 2. Identity
is functional. 3. The
Universal Procedure (UP) is the meta-rule generating all forms; it is not
a substance but a code. 4. Each
emergent is locally sovereign and perfect. 5. Cessation
is absolute. c. Ontological Character Procedure
Monism is a quantised or serial monism—the One is not continuous being but a single procedural logic instantiated
discretely and repeatedly across the random energy field. 4. Fundamental Difference
5. Conclusion: The Metaphysical Turn from Being to
Doing All
pre-21st-century monisms—from the pre-Socratics to
Spinoza—were metaphysics of continuity, translating an enduring
intuition of unity into the language of their age. They conceived the One as what
is. Finn’s Procedure
Monism transforms that intuition into a physics of iteration. The
One is no longer a thing or field but the act that makes
things happen. Where
traditional monists proclaimed: “Everything
is one.” Finn
concludes: “Everything
runs one.” Thus, the
continuity of substance, Substance Monism, yields to (is translated into) the
discontinuity of operation, Operational Monism. The unity of being
becomes the functionality of emergence — a post-metaphysical, quantised
monism fit for the computational and quantum age. In short,
Pantheism sacralised the
whole; Procedure Monism naturalises the
rule. The old One was Being;
the new One is Procedure. |