“If everything is God then nothing is God.”

Yes but: 

1) This does not mean that pantheism is a kind of atheism. 

2) This is at best a nuanced truth that, at worst, is taken literally as justification for conflating the two. 

The first part is easy. The negation of something is not the same as the assertion of its ubiquity. Imagine two identical rooms; one of them is completely full of oxygen, and the other is completely empty of it. You have to spend ten minutes enclosed in one of them. Does it make a difference which one you choose?

Do you really think that moving through the world with a mindset that says “nothing is sacred” would be the same as one that says “everything is sacred?” 

With those examples in mind, consider point #2. 

Pantheism asserts that existence itself is a divine unity, and that this unity is a sacred existential ground that is as vital to all that exists as oxygen is to us. It is essentially a radical realization of the complete interdependence of self and other, such that you as a self can turn to any portion of “other,” past, present, or future, and truthfully say,” because you are/were/will be, I am.” There is not a set of things and beings for which this is true, in contrast to an excluded set for which it is untrue, no part to which you can point and say, “this here is my source and creator, and that there is not.”

The unity, which itself has no origin, underlies all and thwarts any attempt to sort out what originates in the divine from what doesn’t. Everything that exists is part of a relationship of dependent origination within Existence itself.

So, pantheism says nothing is God in isolation, to the exclusion of non-God. Everything is a timeless unity as God is said to be a timeless unity, and that’s a very different assertion than “nothing is a timeless unity/God.”  

To be a particular self that is alive within a universal “other,” and to see it all as a timeless unity, is to live in a room full of oxygen and breathe freely. To not recognize this unity…is also to live in this room. That’s the beauty of pantheism: no one is excluded from the divine unity for lack of understanding or improper belief. Personally, I find enormous value and comfort though in having the ground for omnidirectional gratitude, the ubiquity of “because you are, I am.” To recognize that even the most noxious fellow travelers like Republicans and billionaires are part of this unity means that I can bow to them in gratitude for my being, even as I work to make sure they don’t have their way with us. 

Atheism at its best is a negation of the dualistic, exclusionary God-concept, but it isn’t an assertion of anything, and doesn’t by itself give us that ground for gratitude. We have to add something to it, or develop something from it, to make it a positive assertion. If we add the principles of divine unity and dependent origination, it is now pantheism. If we do not make that next logical step in the dialectic, we’ve merely declared our dissent from the theistic thesis and gone no further. 

If the difference is still unclear, consider the famous Zen koan, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.”

In the first stage, “There is a mountain,” we use words to draw forth an awareness of “mountain.” What we see is a semantic category that contains all the elements that define “mountain,” and excludes all that define “valley.” This is symbolic of the dualistic mindset in which most of us are introduced to God, the concept of a transcendent creator exclusive of all that is created.

The second stage, “then there is no mountain,” erases that semantic category. We have “killed” our concept of this primordial being we cannot see. (Or you could just close your eyes.) In the case of the koan, this is the abnegation of the reality of all sensory input via the realization achieved in deep meditation, but we can take it symbolically as the simple antithesis of the first assertion: there is no God. 

In the final stage, “then there is,” we open our eyes, and what is real simply is, boundlessly, timelessly, beyond all semantic categories. The mountain and the valley, like the observer, are impermanent aspects of what is. The visual distinction between them remains, but no existential one, so the concept of “mountain” no longer obstructs our clear vision of what we see — a divine unity in a state of constant internal change. The divine unity originally perceived as God is now existent but diffused omnidirectionally and inclusive of all that is. 

Erasing the concept of “mountain”/“God” was a necessary step in getting to the clarity of pantheism. But there is nothing special about the relationship between atheism and pantheism — as the thought exercise of the koan shows, one can also make that jump from any theism to pantheism by validating the perception of God but dropping the dualistic presumptions of separation. Every form of theism has its adjacent form of pantheism that logically follows from this “change of mind.” The flow of this realization, from concept to no-concept to “panconcept,” is more of an epistemological progression: we have to learn what a mountain/God is before we can accept it or reject it, and for semantically-centered beings like us, the dialectic between acceptance and rejection is necessary to come to the final stage.

It’s no great intellectual feat, in other words, to recognize that “there is no mountain,” that exclusionary deities are not objectively real, and stop there — that’s only half the job of spiritual maturation. That just means you’re wise enough to walk into a restaurant and not eat the menu. Pantheism adds a nuanced understanding of the relationship between symbol and substance, so that one doesn’t fall off of an intellectual cliff while denying the mountain’s existence. 

— from “When I Woke Up: Excerpts from the Notes of Estelle Perdue After the Vince Lombardi Service Area,” featuring ideas derived from the novel UNLESS