August 21, 2002

• What Reality do You Live Under?

  
  

  We have no choice but to live in harmony with what we believe to be true.  Once we have a conviction that life is A and not B we will automatically act on this belief.  For this reason I think that one of the most important activities we can perform is to examine our underlying beliefs.  The structure of our beliefs form our worldview.  Life in a multicultural, multi-viewpoint society means that we are constantly trying to relate to people who literally live in a different reality than we do.  Their worldview predisposes them to act in a particular way and to consider certain ideas right and others wrong, some actions to be good and others evil.  Unless we understand the foundations of various worldviews, we have no hope of understanding other people and we are doomed to work at cross purposes unaware.

  
  

  I'm not suggesting that mere understanding of another person's worldview will lead to goodness, harmony, the alignment of the planets, universal justice, or a shortcut to the Generalized Universal Theorem.  On the other hand, only understanding of another view offers real hope for communication unlike the false "tolerance" preached by the political correctness gurus who assume that lack of critique of another's view is sufficient to promote societal cohesion.

  
  

  Yesterday, I said that there are four distinct worldviews to which people in this day and age subscribe and that various philosophies and divergent doctrines are subsets of these four views.  As I was making my notes last night, I realized that the distinctions separating Eastern Pantheistic Monism and it's Western version - New Age thought could arguably be great enough to justify separating the two into a fourth and fifth category.  I still think that Eastern Pantheistic Monism provides the overarching worldview which makes New Age thought possible, but I have decided to treat the two separately. 

  
  

  I had also thought I would be constructing a table.  Four (now five) views of the seven basic questions would be clearly delineated in a side by side comparison for easy reference.  That's what comes of assumptions.  I could still make such a table, but it wouldn't be a Xanga post, it would be a wall chart.  So scrap that one.

  
  

  Instead, here is my comparison of Worldviews.  It's long. 

  
  

  Christian Theism -

  
  

  Christian theism dominated the view of Western society for close to a millennium.  This is not to say that everyone believed all the premises of Christian Theism, but our systems of law and government, ideas of justice and morality, and beliefs about the nature of the universe and the possibility of science were almost universal in their scope and application.  For this reason I'm placing Christian Theism first so that the later worldviews - some of which grew out of challenge to the premises of Christian Theism can be understood in context.

  
  

  Ultimate Reality - God is infinite, personal (triune), transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign and good.

  
  

  Nature of the World - God created the cosmos ex nihilo (out of nothing) to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system.

  
  

  Nature of Man - Human beings are created in the image of God and thus possess personality, self-transcendence, intelligence, morality, predisposition to relationship, and creativity.

  
  

  Knowledge - Human beings can know the world around them because God has designed them with the capacity to do so.  (God is rational and man created  in His image is rational.)  In addition to our ability to know through reason, we can know through revelation (God is able to communicate truth to man that man cannot know through reason alone.)

  
  

  History - Human beings were created good, but through the Fall the image of God has become defaced though not so ruined as to be incapable of restoration.  Through the work of Christ, God redeemed humanity and began the process of restoring humanity to goodness, though any given person may choose to reject that redemption.

  
  

  Death - For each person death is a gate leading to either life with God and his people or to eternal separation from God, which is to say eternal separation from that which is ultimately real.

  
  

  Ethics - Ethics is transcendent and is based on the character of God as good (holy and loving.)

  
  

  Naturalism

  
  

  Ultimate Reality - Matter exists eternally and is all there is.  God does not exist.

  
  

  Nature of the World - The cosmos exists in a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system.  (Every action has a specific "natural" cause including the behavior of man - the sense of free will is an illusion that we possess because we do not have perfect awareness of the causes of our actions.)

  
  

  Nature of Man - Human beings are complex "machines", personality is an interrelation of chemical and physical properties we do not yet fully understand.

  
  

  Death - Death is the extinction of personality and individuality.

  
  

  History - History is a linear stream of events linked by cause and effect but without any overarching purpose.

  
  

  Ethics - Ethics is related only to human beings.  Values are manmade.

  
  

  Knowledge - Consciousness and capacity for reason are emergent properties of matter.

  
  

  This last premise is a soft spot of Naturalism which in great part has led to the rise of the postmodern view as outlined below.

  
  

  Eastern Pantheistic Monism  - My sister deserves a space to comment here.  She volunteered to define this one for me and came up with "A view of life based on Monks worshipping Panthers on the Eastern Seaboard."

  
  

  Ultimate Reality - The essence, the soul of any person is the essence, the soul of the cosmos.  Each person is God.  God is the one, infinite, impersonal, ultimate reality.  That is, God is the cosmos.  God is all that exists, nothing exists that is not God.  If anything that is not God appears to exist it is illusion.  In other words anything that exists as a separate and distinct object - this chair not that one; this rock, not that tree; me, not you - is an illusion.  It is not our separateness that gives us reality, it is out oneness.  Ultimate reality is beyond distinction - it simply IS.

  
  

  Nature of the World - Some things are more one than others.  Reality is a hierarchy of "appearances."  Some appearances/illusions are closer than others to being at one with the One.  many (if not all) roads lead to the One.

  
  

  Nature of Man - To realize one's oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond the illusion of personality.

  
  

  Death - Death is the end of individual, personal existence, but it changes nothing essential in a person's nature.  Human death signals the end of an individual embodiment of the soul.  No human being in the sense of an individual or person survives death.  The soul survives but the soul is impersonal.  When the soul is reincarnated it becomes another person.  Thus Eastern Pantheistic Monism teaches immortality of the soul through reincarnation, not personal and individual immortality, the personal and individual cannot survive because they are illusions.

  
  

  History - To realize one's oneness with the One is to pass beyond time.  Time is unreal.  History is cyclical.

  
  

  Knowledge - To realize one's oneness with the One is to pass beyond knowledge.  In this sense the word 'realize' does not imply nor does it depend upon consciousness or reason.  The realization is experiential.  The principle of noncontradiction does not apply where ultimate reality is concerned.  To BE is not to know.

  
  

  Ethics - To realize one's oneness with the One is to pass beyond good and evil; the cosmos is perfect in every point.
                       This is the touchiest part of Eastern thought because people refuse to deny morality.  They continue to act as if some things are good and others are evil.  Moreover, Eastern Pantheistic Monism confirms the concept of karma.  Karma is the notion that one's present fate is the result of past action, one's present life circumstances result from action in a previous life.  karma follows from the general principle that nothing that is real ever passes out of existence.  It may take century upon century for the soul to find its way back to the One, but no soul will ever not be.
       On its way back to the One, the soul passes through whatever series of illusory forms its past action requires.  If you have "sinned," there is no God to cancel debt and forgive.  The sin must and will be worked out.  However, a person may choose his specific future acts and thus karma does not imply determinism or fatalism.
       This sounds very much like a description of a moral universe.  People should do good, otherwise they shall reap the consequences.  Tow things should be noted, however.  The basis for doing good is not so that good will be done or to benefit an individual soul (self or other - remember there is no distinction).  Karma demands that every soul suffer for past 'sins', so there is no value in alleviating suffering.  The soul so helped will have to suffer later.  one does good deeds in order to attain unity with the One, but any deed which benefits a soul interferes with karma and is thus evil.
       Second, all actions are merely part of the world of illusion.  The only 'real' reality is beyond differentiation, beyond good and evil.  Everything is good (which is identical to saying 'nothing is good,' or 'everything is evil.')  The thief is the saint is the thief . . .

  
  

  New Age

  
  

  The New Age began with an influx of Eastern Mysticism to Western Culture.  But over the past century a particularly Western spin on the concepts of Eastern Pantheistic Monism has spawned a view that bears less and less resemblance to the seeds from which it grew.

  
  

  Ultimate Reality - Three distinct attitudes are taken to the metaphysical question of the nature of reality under the general framework of the New Age: 1) the occult version, in which the beings and things perceived in states of altered consciousness exist apart from the self that is conscious, 2) the psychedelic version, in which these things and beings are projections of the conscious self, and 3) the conceptual relativist version, in which the cosmic consciousness is the conscious activity of a mind using one of many non-ordinary models for reality, none of which is any "truer" than any other.

  
  

  The Nature of Man - Whatever the nature of being (idea or matter, energy or particle), the self is the kingpin, the prime reality.  As human beings grow in their awareness of this fact, the human race is on the verge of a radical change in human nature.  We are on the cusp of a New Age.

  
  

  The Nature of the World - The cosmos while unified in the self is manifested in two more dimensions: the visible universe, accessible through ordinary consciousness, and the invisible universe (or Mind at Large), accessible through altered states of consciousness.

  
  

  Knowledge - The core experience of the New Age is cosmic consciousness, in which ordinary categories of space, time and morality disappear.

  
  

  Death - Physical Death is not the end of the self, under the experience of cosmic consciousness, fear of death is removed.

  
  

  Ethics - New Age proponents have not articulated a coherent approach to ethics.  To be sure, many assert that the survival of the human race is a prime value, and they insist that unless humanity evolves, unless people become radically transformed, humanity will disappear.  But, just as time and space disappear into illusion and reality, so do moral distinctions.  The reason ethical questions receive so little attention is clear from the proposition regarding the Nature of Man.  If self is king, why worry about ethics?  The king can do no wrong.

  
  

  Postmodernism - The Vanished Horizon

  
  

  Ultimate Reality - The first question postmodernism addresses is not what there is or how we know what is there, but how language functions to construct meaning itself.  a. The truth about reality itself is forever hidden from us.  All we can do is tell stories.  Truth is whatever we can get our colleagues or community to agree to.  Worldviews as described above are "metanarratives" and the claim that they say something "true" across times and cultures is arrogant illusion.  According to postmodernists, nothing we think can be checked against reality as such.  There is no way to step outside to compare our understanding with reality per se.  We must not abandon our ordinary perception that a bus is coming down the street and we'd better get out of the way.  Our language about there being a 'bus' that is 'coming down' a 'street' is useful.  It has survival value!  But apart from our linguistic systems we can know nothing.  All language is human construct.  We can't determine the "truthfulness" of the language only the "usefulness."   The world does not speak, only we do. b. All narratives mask a play for power.  Any one narrative used as a metanarrative is oppressive.

  
  

  The Nature of Man - Human beings make themselves who they are by the languages they construct about themselves.

  
  

  Ethics - Ethics, like knowledge, is a linguistic construct.  Social good is whatever society takes it to be.

  
  

  Knowledge - The cutting edge of culture and epistemology  is literary theory.

  
  

  History - The postmodern historian denies any reality to the past apart from what the historian chooses to make of it.  The past is neither objective nor fixed.

  
  

  Science - Most scientists are critical realists whether they are Naturalists or Christian Theists.  They believe there is a world external to themselves  and that the findings of science describe what the world is like more or less accurately.  Postmodernists are anti-realists in that they deny that there is any known or knowable connection between what we think and say with what is actually there.  Scientific truth is the language we use to get us what we want.  Again it must be emphasized that postmodernists affirm that the physical world exists.  They deny the status and nature of scientific claims to knowledge in light of the impossibility of directly accessing reality with language.  Because language is imprecise we must never forget that everything we SAY is imprecise.

  
  

  As you can see, postmodernism is not so much a full blown worldview as it is an attempt to correct what are seen as excessives and flaws in previous worldview systems - most notably Naturalism for it's claims regarding science and Theism for the language with which it communicates regarding God.  It makes no attempt to argue for a specific understanding of the nature of Ultimate Reality or the Nature of Man so much as it argues for the degree to which we are able to assert knowledge of these phenomena.  The most important reason to understand Postmodern thought then is in order to assess it's impact in bringing modification to other worldviews.

  • 4:32 pm
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