Walt Whitman was the poet. "Song of Myself" is the poem. Leaves of Grass is the book. And that multi-dimensional monster to the right is a mathematical model of the Lie Group E8. It's a visual representation of the dawning Unified Field Theory which is whipping Gravity onto the bus of Particle Physics. Actually - it's a mathematical conception of Reality. Lie Groups are constructed from an 8 Dimensional number system called Octonions. Your garden variety Real number is One Dimensional. Complex Numbers are composed of both Real & Imaginary Number Systems so they are 2D. Keep thinking to push the envelope to 8D Number Systems. Octonion Number Theory nicely explains the Neutrino's weird left-handedness or Quantum Spin. It also can do calculations in 10 Dimensions so the String Theory Junkies have mainlined it. Those bastards can't take a dump without the comfort of 11 Dimensions. In a very real way you are here looking on the Face of God - or at least as close to the Face as we are likely to ever get. The `Beauty' of this model lies in its intrinsic Oneness. Its Unity. Spinoza would have killed to have seen this and understood it. He would have cried with joy at all the Connections.
"The World is Self-Aware Logic." Rebecca Goldstein grins. Pretty Becky remembers slogging thru the impenetrable geometric prose of Spinoza's Ethics until she had this Eureka moment: "The insight came when I grasped that the fundamental intuition underlying Spinoza's thinking was simply this: all facts have explanations. For every fact that is true, there is a reason why it is true. There simply cannot be, for Spinoza, the inexplicably given, a fact which is a fact for no other reason than that it is a fact. In other words, no inexplicable dangling threads protrude from the fabric of the world." She calls this the "Presumption of Reason," and it's the foundation of all Spinoza's thinking. "Logic itself is the World, which can be conceptualized alternatively as God or Nature. The world is self-aware logic. ... Its Awareness and its Being are one and the same." Deus Sive Natura - which glosses as "God or Nature" does not imply a choice. It means that God and Nature are 2 words for the Same thing. Even if you try and put it like this: God is Nature - it seems to separate them into 2. But Deus Sive Natura erases any distinction. That trippy Lie Group E8 image above is not God - it's an Image of God. But Nature is not an Image of God; Nature and God are words which cover the same territory. They are equivalent. Skippy googled the terms: Deus sive natura, and Pantheism for the Images which such Ontologies would generate. Artists name their works which are sources of Tags. So searching Image data bases by Ontological Tags is bound to produce a decent overview of the Group Psychology concerning the concept searched. Jung would have loved the Web & Google's Search Engines. They damn near function as a Collective Conscience. The images on this page are some of the results. But wait! Let's start this with a question: Do you know why Descartes fled France and moved to Mokum Aleph in the Netherlands? Because in the Catholic countries you could still smell the sweet & sickly smoke from Giordano Bruno's pyre in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome. If you had something to say about Reality which the Vatican might find offensive then you had better say it in a Protestant country. The 17th Century was the bloody age of the Christian Civil War & thinking outside the box was still mortally dangerous at the dawn of the Age of Reason.
Two things seem to be both contradictory and simultaneously true about Bento de Espinoza: He was a God-Drunk man; and, He was an Atheist. At least those are the clear alternatives from scholarly opinion. But if you clear your mind with a few hits of acid the two of those choices merge into a more complicated but simple concept. Spinoza was a Type of Pantheist. In fact, Bento was a Giordanisto; he was a Pantheist from the stripe of Bruno. Most of the Etics will claim that there is no evidence that Spinoza ever read Bruno. Barber Perfect knows better. He caught the "Little Jew" reading the Nolan in Den Haag when he had his fateful encounter with him in 1676 - no more than a week after the famous visit of Gottfried Leibniz which so upset the German mathematician & philosopher. To the heretic Bruno the Universe was God and God was the Universe. Divinity was present and revealed in All things. Pantheism in a nutshell. And also the worse kind of "Error" from the Vatican's perspective. For Pantheists & Spinozan's there is no God and no Thing outside of Nature. There is no Supernatural Being running things from behind the curtain. God was not Transcendent but Immanent. Not an Other but a Monad. A single, solitary being. Only One thing exists in the Universe and that is God who is the Universe itself. A truly beautiful conception - but a truly heretical one too. If everything in the Universe was god then who or what should you pray to? Or should you Pray at all? If everything is god is then nothing god? Is the Monkey god? Is the Devil god? How big is big when there is only One thing & nothing to compare it to?
Guess what? In Baruch's Universe Jesus doesn't love you anymore. In fact, he never did. Pantheism is a beautiful picture of things but it's cold & distant. There is no Personal god. There is no "relationship" with god which is any deeper than that of a carrot's or a passing comet's in the night sky. There are no Chosen People and without them there is no Covenant and no overarching cosmic laws whatsoever. God does not hunt from a treestand where he passes eternity by counting his bones. Worse, god is not a he, nor a she, nor even a good it. You do not need a Pronoun in a system which contains only One thing. Without a Personal god what good was prophecy? There were no miracles and no revelations - only Logic, and only that logic was necessary to reveal the Fabric of Reality. In cold fact - Logic was the Fabric of the Universe. The Cosmos was Self-Aware Logic and all the thing we called `god' was nothing more than the World being Aware of its own Explanation. Spinoza breathed a radical Objectivity which simply emptied the Personal out of the equation. Kenosis of the I. The Rational, he said, would always & inevitably shrink the personal. Who I am in the scheme of things "disappears altogether in the apprehension of the scheme itself." So all the gods - the 3 million omnipotentates which Etics have estimated to have been invented by the Monkeys - were nothing more than the timely delusions of their "Race, Place, et Milieu." Bruno said that "All is in All Things." Every individual thing had a bit of the whole within itself and was itself interpenetrated with Everything else. Very Hindu. Trés Zen. All that shit about a Diamond with a Billion Faces wherein each face is Reflected and is Itself Reflected. Very fucking Holographic. Bruno wrote: "The Universe is one, infinite, immobile. The absolute potential is one, the act is one, the form or soul is one, the material or body is one, the being is one, one is the maximum and the best ... It is not generated, because there is no other being it could desire or hope for, since it comprises all Being. It does not grow corrupt, because there is nothing else into which it could change, given that it is itself all things. It cannot diminish or grow, since it is infinite." Bruno thought god was the Intellect of the world. Spinoza did not believe that the world needed an Intellect since it was, by its very nature, that Intellect.
The Icon of Pantheism is a Spiral - an image which, by its motion, seems to be spinning both into itself and out of itself. The term "Pantheist" was first used in English by the Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 book: Socianianism Truly Stated, by a Pantheist. In a 1710 letter to Gottfried Leibniz, Toland wrote about the "pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other external being but the universe." But while the word is relatively new the concept is as old as Heraclitus & Anaximander. The Greek Stoics were Proto-Pantheists; Zeno was All about the All. The Roman Philosopher-Emperor Marcus Aurelius dabbled in Pan also. Pantheism slunk back into the shadows during the Christian centuries and only popped up again, fully formed, with Giordano Bruno and other Neoplatonic Hermeticists. But it was the work of Baruch Spinoza which was the major source of the revival of Pantheism. Closer to us, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Schelling, Hegel, Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau - were all Pantheists whether or not they used the term on themselves. Up here in the PostPost the Greens drift closer and closer to Pantheistic Orthodoxy; Al Gore shed Tipper but not his Faith - and that's allowed since she cannot leave the All.
Those Autistic baby-rapers at Wikipedia get all "divisional" and insist that while Pantheism is not yet a Fully-Found Faith, it's already broken into schisms so that there are now 3 "Reformed" Forms of Pantheism which only differ by the way they regard Reality as being made up of One type of Substance, or 2, and what that type of Substance is. So: 1. Your Monist physicalist or Naturalistic Pantheist [MpNP] believes that there is only One type of Substance and that its nature is Physical, i.e. Energy & Matter. Zeno, Marcus Aurelius, Ernst Haeckel, and D.H. Lawrence worshipped at this altar. Like Spinoza, if they used the term "god" at all it was used as a synonym for Nature & the Universe. 2. Your Monist Idealist Pantheist [MIP] also holds to the One Substance Only rule but this dude swears that Substance is Mental or Spiritual. For the MIP Reality consists of a single Consciousness. This is the Hindu mindset, with a dash of Buddhism & today sauced up with Deepak Chopra & New Age babble. Like Spinoza, the MIPs saw the One Substance as generally Spiritual but with a coexistent Physical Aspect. Finally, 3. the Dualist Pantheist [DP] - this Betty claims there are Two types of Substance, both physical & mental. The inherent contradictions of the DP Model drive these poor fools into the Paranormal & Spoon Mutilations. If you put all 3 types of Pantheists in the same room they will beat each other into pulp over the use of the word "God." For many, both inside and outside the Pantheistic Community, "Pantheism" is just Spiritual Atheism. So the "God Concept" has been repositioned & rebranded as the warm & fuzzy Feelings which accompany thoughts about the Universality of the sitzeachun. Sexual Synaesthesia in place of the "Minded Being" who once sat on the throne hurling thunderbolts at the Little People. Spinoza was a Radical Monist for whom "Whatever is, is in god." The Semiotics Crowd break into 2 Moieties - those who see Pantheism as "Divinising Nature," and those who see it as "Naturalizing God." I would love to tell you that the difference is just "semantic" and a play on words - but it's not. Spinoza did not worship nature; he worshipped god. He simply drew no distinction between the 2. There is nothing Holy or Sacred about Nature because there is nothing Holy or Sacred about God. Especially now that Jesus doesn't love you anymore. For Spinoza, the Love of God was the Understanding of god. One learned to understand god by studying nature. Since there Logically could be no real Mystery in Nature then there was no place for Awe or Worship.
Closer to home, the 20th Century Pox of Isms has taken a toll on Pantheistic thinking. Nazism, Communism, Materialism, Existentialism, and Post-Modernism have all eaten into the core of Pantheism. If God and the Universe are One with Reality then Winston Churchill was right. The future Prime Minister found himself at University and realized that he had never read the Bible - so he did. He sat down and read the fucker, cover to cover. When he was finished, he ran up to one of his College Mates and said: "God, isn't God a shit!" The Eco-Movement brought Pantheism back into the forefront of "Spiritual" speculation. That and the Neo-Paganism which is said to be the fastest growing "religion" on earth today. Richard Dawkins, in his majestic book The God Delusion, described the growth in Naturalistic Pantheism as "sexed-up atheism." Since the days of Spinoza, Déscartes, and Leibniz the "judgement of science by theology [has] shifted to a judgment of theology by the sciences." Naturally, the Vatican has fought back. In a Papal Encyclical of 2009 and following in a New Year's Day statement of 2010, Papa Ratzi has come out snarling against Pantheism and the 2009 Movie by James Cameron: Avatar. "Errors!" the pudgy Prussian Pontiff screams. Seeing Man's salvation connected with the Salvation of Nature was an Error. Anathema & Blasphemy. Damn near Pornography if you follow the Logic of Pantheism to its Necessary Conclusions. The New York Times commented on the film that Pantheism had been "Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now."
Don't touch that picture of the god Pan having his way with the goat until I tell you to. This is a statue which was found in the ruins of Pompeii, a city known for its Pagan Cults & Rituals. The image of a god fucking a goat is jarring to modern sensibilities. We fail to see the "religious nature" of the depicted scenario. Pan was the embodiment of Nature to certain Greek Minds. Pan means "All." Half-man, half-beast - Pan is a Composite Metaphor, an Analogy itself based on an Analogy. Now run your cursor back and forth over the picture of Pan. Quickly - do it so they blend like flicker cartoons make up a movie. Skippy has promised that there is nothing pornographic on Kenny's Site and there is not. Think what Nature is. Think what god is. Go back and forth until they blend. According to the Bible, Sex is the consequence of Man's falling out of Nature. So it is the Line, the Ligne, the Lingham which unrolls us out of that Garden and into History. We are here from the consequences of that Lineage - the fact that these things Shame us is that we now Know that we have fallen out of Nature. Nothing in the goat's world makes it ashamed. Your shock & shame at these images is a denial of your Nature. Spinoza knew that Sin was the child of Consciousness and that Consciousness was the child of Ego. Give up the "I" and Sin falls back into God where it must originate from, by Nature. "God is Endless," he said, "so God has no Ends."
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