“Pantheism essentially involves two assertions: that everything that exists constitutes a unity and that this all-inclusive unity is divine.” – Alasdair MacIntyre, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Pantheism” 1971

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.” — Baruch Spinoza

There are two main reasons that I, an avowed pantheist according to Alasdair MacIntyre, have come to disavow Pantheism™️ as it is commonly misunderstood today:

1) the feeble manner in which it tries to deal with universal Mind

2) its severe allergy to teleology, and concurrently, a lack of intellectual footing to consider divine will or any of its temporal manifestations 

On the first point, I would argue that I am still in lockstep with the metaphysical foundation of Spinozan pantheism. Yes, Spinoza was a monist, but like the ancient Taoists and Neoplatonists long before his time, he was a dual aspect monist. The unitary substance that we call either Nature or God (depending mostly upon our comfort level with the latter it seems) manifests as inseparable dual aspects he called thought and extension — mind and matter. Where there is matter, there is mind. 

We can have reasonable disagreements about the finer implications — whether rocks think and trees emote and fun stuff like that — but it’s really a non-starter to miss the fact that panpsychism and/or cosmopsychism dovetail perfectly with pantheism, and only ignorance of the principles of the former could render it incompatible with the panhylist school of thought that dominates current pantheist discussion.

It pains me that #2 puts me contrary to Spinoza, who remains my favorite disturber of the peace. He was for me perhaps the most influential liberating voice behind the idea that we can have high-level conversations about God without any reference to established or revealed religion. With Spinoza’s metaphysical concept of God combined with the Highest Common Factor of Huxley’s mystic take on Perennialism, I found my Road to Damascus moment, without a human figure to idolize and put in the way. 

But we all have idols to kill, I suppose, and Baruch was becoming mine. It’s a little mind-blowing to think that Spinoza didn’t live to see forty-five. Combine his 44 years with Jesus’ 33 and we’re still just shy of the Republican nominee for president this year. (It is impolite, they say, to inquire of a lady’s age, and I shan’t volunteer the information. Suffice it to say, I am in between Spinoza and Emperor Cheeto.) 

One must wonder how several more years of God-intoxicated contemplation might have shaped the views of the blessed philosopher. The lazy temptation to trap a person’s ideas inside the box of what they (or their biographers) managed to commit to paper in a too-short lifetime is a large part of what makes an idol of their legacy. So let us refuse to do this injustice to the boundless potential of his ideas, while at the same time giving the man the proper burial that all mortals deserve.

Frankly, I don’t see what is so hard or controversial about observing that the telos or purpose of the universe is to grow purpose like a garden grows crops. We won’t find the purpose by digging into the ground, but nothing at all could grow without that ground. It should also be clear that the crops are not separate from the ground — they are extensions of it in a very real sense — and so the garden is not two things, ground and crops, fused into one. It is one thing that is all of a piece.  

If there are beings with their own subjective perception of telos — and from that, a sense of direction and purpose to their individual lives — then the universe, by extension, is creating those purposes. And if we recognize that the physical universe/Universal Mind is doing that, no pantheist of any stripe should take issue with the next logical step that recognizes God is creating them, even if one must enclose that controversial term in quotation marks. The divine unity is the prime doer (as opposed to “mover”) and prime author of the teloi that we, its bountiful crops, experience as our own.

A purpose-growing ground must be able to extend itself into self-aware beings that can feel, move volitionally, and imagine/think independently, and those beings must have problems to overcome. The universal problem we all have as these beings is a timeless divine nature experiencing itself as a temporally-confined and mortal organism. We are, as Rumi eloquently stated, not a drop in the ocean — we are the Ocean in a drop. And so we, who are both divine and mortal, lead ourselves on a journey to the home where we already are. That’s it. Anything else we add is a specific flavor of or variation on the general teleological theme of Our Journey Home.

But alas, go anywhere near a gathering of pantheists with the idea of a willful prime agency at the base of our existence and everyone starts sneezing and telling you to go find another place to talk about your sky daddy. It does bother me that they can point to Spinoza as evidence that I am at best a misguided panentheist — bothered I am, but not daunted, for I learned this simply means I am not a Pantheist™️. 

But I am still a pantheist. To explain why, let’s shift our attention to an even more direct model of non-dual logic than the garden.

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– 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

On to Part Two