Perennial philosophy
aeon.co
aeon.co
Oneness is perennial because it is one of the most common aspects of a mystical experience -- indeed, it is one of the primary factors in validated measures of mystical experiences [1].
However, the concept of Oneness is uncomfortable -- so uncomfortable that it didn't even show up in the Aeon article! (For a different view, see Wikipedia [2])
Why is Oneness an uncomfortable concept? It is uncomfortable for theists, because it puts an abstraction ("the ineffable oneness") higher than any personality god ("god of Abraham"). Yet, even for atheists, it is an uncomfortable idea. Why?Perhaps it seems so similar to monotheism, to claim that the One is the origin of all things. While an atheist might accept that the universe originated from a singularity (i.e., the big bang), it may be uncomfortable to connect scientific ideas to spiritual awareness.
However, I think we should either reject spirituality as incompatable with science or put more effort in rational attempts to integrate them.
[1] Hood Jr, R. W. (1975). The construction and preliminary validation of a measure of reported mystical experience. Journal for the scientific study of religion, 29-41.
By what principle do we determine that there isn't room for both even though they might not integrate at all?
The paradox though is that scientific knowledge is knowledge acquired through observation and reason, both of which must present themselves to an observer. Specifically, it must present itself to an observer-beyond-quality (or present themselves within a field of observation) because if we find an observer that has qualities, those qualities would be perceived by something "earlier." That is to say, if a measurement or argument is made then to whom (or in what) is it made?
Science is always limited in scope. It can only describe that which is observable (or deductions made from observation). You could extend science to include philosophy (and consider even our discussion here as philosophy) and then the limits of reason allow you only to define its own limits.
This argument has been made in some form or another by Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Bohr, Godel, Susan Greenfield, Roger Penrose, and hundreds of others. The One (or the Zero) is the only way to solve any problem of hard consciousness, by allowing Knowingness itself to have modulations of experience within itself.
The proper integration of science and spiritualism would seem to be that each acknowledges the domain of the other. That is, if the discussion is about the observable or rational, it's in the realm of science and made more understandable by the methods and tools of science. If the discussion is about That, quality-free substratum in which observations or deductions are made, then it is an act of autotelic contemplation. That last statement is a bit absurd. It means one can contemplate the original substratum of the Self by just being without thinking, which is exactly what the various mystic traditions have taught.
It would be a treasure if someone were to articulate this simply for a modern, secular-minded audience, in a way that would convince them to keep quiet for a few minutes and let the experience of "zero-ness" become self-evident. Even this self-evidence appears in a substratum of course, but in that moment, there's a blissful aha that would put a lot of these long essays and discussions to rest.
For another model, I see the way science and spirituality were integrated in the early days of the scientific revolution by folks like Kepler, Mersenne, Kircher, Descartes, Leibniz, Hooke, Newton, etc.
All adopted a spiritual frame of (roughly) "there is a universal harmony" and a scientific frame "I can articulate and understand this harmony through empirical data and mathematical modeling". The spiritual side deeply motivated them as individuals to conduct science. The data inevitably showed that their original ideas of universal harmony weren't quite right -- but that there was ample evidence for the real universal harmony, which were taken as both scientific and spiritual insights.
Clarify? There are mysteries in the one, such as the fact that if there is something surrounded by nothing (like a black dot on a sheet of paper), that is already a Twoness, not a Oneness.
A panpsychist would say whatever this is, it must contain the most fundamental building blocks from which we derive conscious experience. But you don't have to go that far, you just have to sit still and inquire into that original zero point that allows for your own individual (seemingly dualistic) subject experience.
You could make an analogy (this is borrowed from Advaita): yes there are many waves on an ocean, but the ocean itself is one. Conceptually there are many waves but in reality there isn't anything such as a wave.
Similarly your own bubble of conscious experience is tied to local instrumentation (your eyes, your brain, etc). But like bubbles in a basin of soapy water, it's really not substantially apart.
If you think of matter probabilistically, you realize the best analog is just "information" — every experience of this information arises from something. Of course twoness in this information is a matter of fact, but it's easy enough to say yes, these are abstractions of One. Or these are abstractions of Zero.
It's just a matter of language and what you prescribe to reality or what you prescribe to conceptual illusion.
Regardless of where/when people come about, our shared humanity is strong enough to lead us to have similar experiences and (somewhat) similar explanations for what we experience.
On an unrelated note, I would like to recommend Huxley's Island as a nice outline of what a realistic utopia might look like.
Quote: Why do folks present this idea like it's new and radical? It's literally thousands of years old. Aldous Huxley wrote "The Perennial Philosophy" in 1945.
If there's any branch of human inquiry where no question is off limits then it's surely philosophy. Debate about the practical application of philosophy has been part of it's fabric for it's entire history. The Greeks certainly regarded it as something that should inform one's life choices and I'm pretty sure that is one of the main areas of focus in Existentialism.
Without this theory, science assumes no such thing, and ultimately ends up with a very difficult problem of defining where consciousness begins and where it ends.
Existence of consciousness is obvious and intuitive to most people, it is rarely disputed (and such disputes yield no useful conclusions or thoughts when they take place), but if the starting point is that "some humans have consciousness, or a potential of a consciousness, and the rest of the world does not", then the problem of defining it seems very hard. Drawing a hard border between consciousness and dead matter seems hard to do while still being completely intellectually honest.
If however, we just assume (as the perennial philosophy does) that consciousness (or at least potential of) is a self-evident property of reality and everything in it, we can view the problem of defining it as more of a question of where in the world is there "more" of this consciousness, where is it more concentrated, where did the potential of it most prominently manifest itself (places like human brains that host it or possibly similarly built computers in the future), and where is it "less" of it (like in a rock formation), then we can use this framework to more easily navigate this landscape.
For me the promise of philosophy is in examining the deepest assumptions that we use to interpret our experiences and guide our thinking. This is a hard task because just like sea creatures that are surrounded by water their whole lives and thus don't notice it, we don't notice these assumptions and they remain hidden and non-obvious.
Ultimately I feel that current philosophy falls short of this promise. It either descends into technicalities or regresses to a prescriptive "this is how you should think" manual. Probably I am not well-read enough.
Once that is in place, philosophy can become much more valuable.
It doesn't seem to me that from this it follows that "the point of philosophy is better living". It might be obvious, but I just don't see it.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.0037...
Hoo boy. Huxley living in the 21st century would just explode.