that "one" thing

i have just been reading about pre-socratic philosophers. you know, the guys BEFORE Socrates? a lot of people have a hard time believing there was thought before him. there was. a lot people have a hard time believing there was thought anywhere but in greece that long ago. eastern philosophy and religion date back to WAY before Socrates, as cool as he is, but i will save that for another post...

anyway, the pre-socratic philosophers where mostly concerned with figuring out the one thing that everything else was made of. much like physicist today look for a unifying principle, they searched for a unifying substance. was everything made out of air? earth? fire? you have to remember these where early days to science, and they discovered and theorized about some pretty wild stuff.

now Plato comes along, and he does something that earns him the title "father of western philosophy" for rather a lot of people. he synthesizes a new philosophy from the competing ideas. he basically creates a dualistic (Philosophy: The view that the world consists of or is explicable as two fundamental entities, such as mind and matter) world view. many a modern philosopher (like say T. Z. Lavine) claim that that is his greatest contribution to the world.

me, i figure it is the single greatest mistake in all of philosophy, and is the reason we have many of the difficulties we have today.

so, to explain my take, a version of Zen non-duality talk.

imagine a stick. the stick does not have two sides, it is one stick. 'but' you say, 'there is a left side and a right side!' and indeed there does appear to be. but the implication is that they are separate. it is easy to see that they are in fact not separate, but a part of the same whole. if we under take a little operation, and we cut the stick in two, and attempt to remove the right half, we find that we still have a right and left half. we just have less stick to work with.

this is the single most vexing problem in western religion and philosophy today. the attempt to see things as a duality. we view things as male vs female or us vs them, when in fact it is a matter of us AND them, male AND female. it is like a coin. you can not have the head side without the tail side, and if you try to remove one, you lose everything.

and this view has twisted a number of things for us. religion, in the west especially, primarily takes a dualistic view. god, is seen as separate, perfect, and unchanging. and since we see a duality, the opposite of god, that which is not perfect, and changing, is evil. incidentally, WE are not perfect and we change. what a sad view to have of yourself. it separates order and chaos, male and female, light and dark. it creates a false reality.

this dualistic separation alienates us. we feel separate from what is divine. we feel separate from the earth. we feel separate from each other. we feel separate from reality. and i argue that a good deal of this stems from the dualistic view point that we are raised to believe.

but, what if it is not true? what if rather than seeing all things as separate, we see them as different points of view, not separated, but connected by a relationship dependent upon that point of view. what if, by definition, the 'distance' so to speak, between each point of view is the relationship that connects the two points of view?

that sounds a little odd, i suspect, to someone not ready to look at the world in a non-dualistic way. try this...

imagine that you are not one person, but rather that you are multiple points view. after all, you are, aren't you? do you see the world the same today as you did a decade ago? two decades? how about last year? last week?

there is a saying, that the person who opens the door and the person who steps through the door way are two different people. the act of opening the door, of seeing what is on the other side, of stepping through, all these acts change us slightly, so that we are in fact subtly different people. we have changed, due to our environment.

so in a way, you are actually uncounted numbers of different people, changing your point of view slightly through out time, and that change in point of view changes you. got that? now get in in head, and hang on to that idea.

you are still you of course. because the relationship between the you that opens the door, and the you that steps through is the continuity. it is the relationship between each tiny slice of awareness that your many points of view go through, that defines who YOU are. you are not a person. YOU are the continuing relationship between multiple points of view.

now extend that. it is the relationship between the relationship bundle that i am, and the relationship bundle my wife is, that makes us a couple. it is the relationship between that relationship and the relationship bundle that makes up our daughter and the relationship bundle that makes up our son, that makes a family. and so on, and so on, and so.....

so there is in fact a single "thing" that makes up the universe. it is the interrelations between things that are themselves relations, that are in turn still more relations. it is our relativity, our "state of dependence in which the existence or significance of one entity is dependent on that of another" that defines us. there is no other state, and no other reality.

and dualism denies this. it denies the single thing that has to be true. it takes the connections between all things that is their very definition, and calls them separations.

i argue that dualism is the single greatest mistake in philosophy and theology. not the only one, but the greatest. bar none.

An introduction

I am not really a blogger.

I am not here to get my thoughts to the masses, I am not here to tell the world some truth, and I am not here to impress you with my understanding and wit.

I am not even sure how often i will post here.

This is, for me, more or less an online journal that I am brave (foolish) enough to allow everyone to read. Many a journal comes with locks and security, the thoughts are to be kept private. I prefer mine to be open to anyone. Most blogs are there to try and draw traffic, but mine is not to be advertised. It is a middle path that is against the grain.

Heretic: A person who holds controversial opinions, especially one who publicly dissents from the officially accepted dogma.

That is, often, who I am. That I choose to write this is all the real proof you need. If you think about it.

This blog is to be my "thinking space" as I return to school in my chosen subject of philosophy. All topics are fair game. I can not promise that any of them will be interesting.

Let the fun begin.