Identity of opposites  pantheism.

This  theology qualifies as a vision of 'Identity of opposites Pantheism. '  Pantheism  supposes that God and the universe are one:  God is the universe.  The universe is God.  Identity of opposites implies that every statement, even those which seem antithetical, is in some sense true.  This does not preclude rational discourse, though the objects of discussion become logical structures contained in a largest whole, which is God and the universe. It does imply that a proper understanding of reality, and God, transcends logic, and requires developing an 'intuition.'  This entire discussion is limited by this fact, which should be borne in mind.

This is the most inclusive theology possible, or perhaps  one should say necessary, since all other theologies qualify as 'aspects' of it.  All theologies which posit a God 'beyond'  reality are included, since their ideas are necessarily incorporated into, and contained as structures in, the ideas of this form of pantheism.  That is all ideas are contained in this God/Universe.  Consider that this must include the intuitions various religions maintain. This includes panentheism, which  formally posits a God who is greater  than the universe, but of whom the universe is a part. 

If that part of God 'beyond' the  universe interacts physically with the universe, the universe may for all practical purposes instead be considered coextensive with Him.   If that part of God beyond the universe does not interact with the universe, that part is unnecessary.  One can always define a God larger than necessary, but what is the point?  One is positing the existence of something which has no effect, but even this discussion about it constitutes an effect, and thus an interaction, thus that part of God is indeed a part of the universe.  (We are not here confusing the physical universe with the universe of discourse.  Thought, and discourse,  is part of the physics of the God/Universe. )

 Our position here is that anything that interacts with the universe is a part of the universe.  Any interaction that was 'un-physical' would be so only because the physics had not been discovered. Since any statement is true, however, the object  of statements of Theism for the ' identity of opposites  pantheist'  is to discover how it is true, and in what relationship it stands to other statements. Is the statement of Theism true by restricting the definition of the  physical, and restricting the definition of God,  this latter specifically by saying some things are not God? Clearly, the pantheistic God is larger, since it includes these things and Theistic Gods, as well as by a larger definition of what is physical.  The Theistic God is literally smaller than the pantheistic  God, and therefore cannot be expected to explain the universe.  That is, there must remain unsolved problems by considering a limited God, since the universe, the real evidentiary universe, is larger than any limited Theistic explanation.  Indeed, the more the Theistic God is qualified,  the more intractable these problems become.  For instance omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, are already enough to cause problems for many Theistic explanations of God. 

The idea here is that theology must include an explanation of the universe.  That is, it must include science. If it cannot explain the experiential, how can it claim to explain anything?  No explanation of God is complete without an explanation of the universe, even to the Theist, even though the Theist considers the universe 'merely' God's action, and not God Himself. To explain God he must explain His action.  To explain His action He must explain the universe, which is His action. To claim it is a mystery beyond explanation is to beg the proof.  Firstly, they should at least prove that it is so.  Secondly, should they prove that it is so, they will leave mankind,  not without meaning, though it may indeed be there is none, but with a meaning he cannot discover.  That is, mankind  can never understand why God created him.  Thirdly, historically the Theist has tended to restrict explanations of reality, despite clear problems with his own limited explanations.  For one example, the Theist tends to deny, or explain away, the most obvious explanation for the creation, that God was alone, and wanted company.  But the Theist cannot admit this because of the corollary: If God was alone, He would create equals.  Finally, much mystery has been explained, limits to these explanations becoming more firmly established, and these are the limits defined by pantheism, where the mystery becomes not so much one of content, since in principle one contains everything, but one of assemblage.  Of course, there will always be content beyond explanation, but the essential content is clear.  

This is not to deny the lunatic fringe.  Indeed, there is explanation in madness, and each and every paranoid fantasy has an element of truth,  or more correctly is an aspect of truth.  The mad are also God. (And God is also mad. The insane are each a face of God, as are you, dear reader.)

 God defined by pantheism is thus the greatest necessary God, and all other versions of God constitute a part, or aspect, of Him.  More correctly, they constitute an incomplete understanding of His true nature.  These understandings are true since they are aspects of the greatest necessary God.  They are false in that they exclude contrary statements which are also descriptions of aspects of God.  So far as they demand consistency, they further limit understanding. 

Since every idol is a face, or limited aspect of God, the Theist in worshipping his limited aspect of God is thus the idolater he decries.  But the pantheist worshipping his  God is idolatry, since the  pantheistic God is also identically the worshipper, which fact worshipping denies.  On the other hand, not worshipping the pantheistic God is also idolatry.  The pantheist recognizes that He stands in all relationships with His God, including identity, that every act is prayer, and the issue is merely whether He is conscious at it. 

In the 'Identity of opposites, ' God is defined in terms that are formally contradictory.  Since God is everything, the universe is also so described.   Since every statement , when applied to the divine and the universe is true, all statements (and in a sense, their realizations) are true.  Thus the statement 'You are God.' is a trivial truth.  It is also true that you are not God.  But God is not God, too.  That is He includes His own negation.  As we will discuss below, however the reality described by the statement  'You are not God.'  is a refinement, thus an aspect of the reality described by the statement 'You are God.'  The negation of God is thus a part, or aspect,  of God.

The fact that no consistent explanation of the universe is possible lies at the root of quantum mechanics.

All statements about panentheism also have truth.   Still, in the panentheistic universe, each of us is a just a part of God.  But the rest of God is rather behind us, since we would be the part of God which interacted with the universe,  in an intelligent manner.  We would thus be like faces, just so, our expressions informed by a higher 'power,' which we would perceive as  'inside' us,  which our unconscious is.  But all of God interacts with the universe, (except for that part which does not,)and so is either included or excluded from the 'universe' as a matter of convenience of discourse.

For instance, for the convenience of the sake of discourse, one can consider  a God entirely fixed and changeless for all eternity, and a God entirely mutable, the ever changing universe.  One could imagine fixed God as a limit mutable God is approaching, or the fixed God a higher dimensional  space-time, like a cube which the plane of the mutable God, the 'physical' universe, passes through instant by instant.  (Note this is allegory. In fact, allegory, symbolic representations of reality,  is really all we have.) God is all of these.  Such is His nature.  Then also God is none of these.  Now the panenthieist affirms the larger and denies the smaller, except as a part of the larger.  But the ideation of the statement is contained in the pantheistic universe, (that is in the mind of the panentheist, and the mind of pantheist, and the mind of the theist, for that matter,)  and the panentheistic God is not necessary to form the ideation, which is really all we have. That is, the thought of that which is beyond the universe is contained in, and limited by, the universe itself.  ( Now one could set aside a part of thought as being beyond the physical, but if thinking is in part beyond the physical, it would be hard to say what was in part not.  Our position is that thinking, and any such as might be (a part of) God behind it, is part of the physical.)

On the other hand the Theist, where describing his God as fixed and changeless, often claims that He is only changeless.  This leads to problems of motive and meaning, since a changeless God is, by definition, unchanged by His creation.  That is, any such creation is pointless to Him, unless He is affected, or changed by it,  unless He is also the mutable God, as the 'identity of opposites pantheist' would maintain.  (The 'identity of opposites pantheist' maintains, like many Theists, that there is only one truth.  Unlike the Theist, his truth does not exclude any other 'Truths.')   Thus He would be, in a sense, like any person, both changed and unchanged by any experience.    

Just by the way, the Godiverse can also be regarded as what is called a 'cellular automaton,'  where each instant, each 'state,' is derived, more or less deterministically, from the instant before, and the future and past literally do not exist, in a physical sense.  A time machine would have no place, no past or future, to go to.   That is the fixed God does not exist. But this is just another picture, or aspect of reality. We will say more or less deterministically because we now have, as I will discuss in another place, the Free Will Theorem, which may or may not be true.

 Indeed, it is known that there exist statements which cannot be derived from some set of other statements in any formal language.  That is, if we have a set of statements 'known' to be true, we can derive, or 'prove,' other statements from them.   However, there are still other statements which cannot be 'proven,' from those statements, and indeed are contradicted. 

Where such a set of statements describes the Godiverse,   they cannot constitute a complete description, and to complete the description,  we must include all the statements which  cannot be derived from them.  Those statement which  cannot be derived must eventually include the negation, or contradiction of the previous statements, as part of a larger, more complete description.

Since  God is identified with the Universe, a statement about God is a statement about the Universe, and vice versa.  This includes nonsense statements, which in a peculiar sense represent 'deeper' truths, relationships which, while existent, do not correspond with our (limited) ideation  of reality, those relationships we experience, that we share.  In fact, the shared world, which is what science studies, must be relatively simple to be shared.   Of course, it must also have a degree of complexity, for there to exist others, of sufficient complexity, to share experience with.  These must also have different experiences to differentiate them from ourselves and each other. 

On the one hand, it seems as if, since any statement is true, we have no structure to any argument.  This is not the case, since it is precisely  the logical structure which describes an aspect, or face, of reality, and the structure of the contradictory, another.  Indeed, it is the totality of the logical structure of statements about our reality which describes our universe.  We merely claim that any logical structure is limited in its ability to describe the universe.  All must be combined for a complete description.   Thus all theological descriptions of reality are true, completely true,  just limited in the scope of their explanation.  And because of their limitations, completely wrong.

 The scientific description of reality (actually the scientific description of  mathematical reality) has a cohesiveness which mirrors the cohesiveness of  reality itself.  This mathematical basis of reality is not arbitrary.  It is in a real sense absolute, and severely qualifies the truth value of nonsense statements.   Indeed, the very validity of nonsense statements rests on underlying mathematical structure. So also statements with certain structure are more relevant to our experience, and others are not.   Nonsense statements represent what is to our intents and purposes a random sampling of disparate aspects of reality, without apparent correlation.   If we consider the stringent demands realty places on discourse, it's a wonder we can talk about it at all.

However, the sciento-logical description of the world must be transcended by the scientist if he is to come to a true apperception of reality.  Data must still be interpreted, and can only be interpreted in a context larger than the experiment.  The whole of science may be regarded as such a n experiment, and  limited by the very logic and cohesiveness of which it is constituted. (The whole of human experience can be considered as such an experiment.)  What is sought is rather an intuitive understanding.  (This understanding is a goal of certain forms of meditation.  However, in the absence of mathematical experience and intuition, only a limited  understanding ,  limited to the extreme relativistic aspects of what we are here discussing, can easily be attained.)

dexcription tramcended nearsense wh ole

This is an intuition but it seems rather that the logical and descriptive structures developed from sense can be imagined analogous to  a tree, nearsense as shrubbery, farsense as grass and such, nonsense as atoms and molecules. 

For a simple image, imagine two people on opposite sides of a street.  A car goes by.  One says it goes to the left.  The other says it goes to the right. Both statements are descriptions of reality. Both statements are true, and false.  But by rising 'above' the situation, looking at it in a larger perspective, a third observer may say the car goes West.  Meanwhile, an observer still farther away, and not rotating with the earth, may say the car goes East.

Of course, there will be many contradictories to a statement,  and together with the statement, these constitute a multifaceted picture of reality, of which the statement itself is but the face we see. A self-contradictory statement creates a very small logical structure.  It is, in fact, rather implicit in modern physics that physical systems express logical relationships. 

Suppose I were to hold up an object, a pencil, say, and say, "This is not a pencil."  First of all, the word pencil is just a code. I think the idea pencil.  I say, "Pencil,"  which you hear and this creates the idea of pencil in your mind. To simplify the process.  The word pencil is not a pencil.  It is a symbol, a sign, which I use to convey the idea of pencil from my mind to yours.  Second and more to the point, the pencil is an aspect of God, a face, thus a face of everything. Were we to dig deeper into the pencil, then, we would find that inside it is the entire universe.  In fact were we to dig into the eraser, or  the ferule,  holding the eraser, or any piece of the lead, or any molecule, we would find the Universe, God, and all It, He contains. The totality of God is, and is contained in a very large number of times, any particular aspect of reality.  But by the identity of God with everything, including His own faces, the pencil is God, and since God is everything and anything, the pencil is also say, a banana, or an elephant.  Or whatever a person chooses to call it. (We might say there was an operation which transformed a pencil into a banana, another operation which transformed it into an elephant, thus an operation which transforms an elephant into a banana.) However  this would not be particularly useful to communicate the idea of pencil, which is the object in my hand.  For that I use the code word pencil, which by common agreement of our minds, represents the idea of pencil in our minds.   

Of course, my idea of pencil is not exactly the same as your idea of a pencil.  Where there is overlap, the signal provided by the word pencil is true.  Where there is not, it is false.  Since my idea of pencil is probably much the same as yours, certainly in its most 'important' or 'relevant' aspects  there is likely considerable overlap.  But each of our experiences of pencil s  is also different.  My experience of pencils may include happy success with  tests, yours may include childhood trauma.  I will send one and  you will receive the other.   All communication thus contains both truth and falsity. (The situation would be intolerable except we learn to disregard the differences, the brain in processing the signal 'pencil,' to downplay our peculiar experience, our dynamics with the pencil, and focus on the fundamental idea itself. This is an aspect of the brain's formation of nouns,  and the separation of which from verbs and other parts of speech, which your brain wasn't always good at.)  Still, each of our ideas of the object pencil is somewhat different. Not everyone will be thinking of a wood, golden yellow hexagonal Sanford American USA No2, between seven and eight inches long, somewhat dull with a well worn but still useable eraser and don't forget that silvery band attaching the eraser to the wood.  But nobody thinks I'm talking about a banana.  (Although I am.)

Since any set of statements must ultimately be limited, that is, give rise to contrary statements, and since even these are limited, the universe, and God, are ultimately indescribable.   The relativistic position is that we have gained nothing by the effort, unless we grasp the point that such effort is futile. However, We can come to an intuition of the most important aspects of reality.  If we could not come to such an intuition, we could not relate to reality at all.  By developing this intuition, one can come to an understanding of ever larger, (and smaller,) issues.  Failing this, one is limited in one's understanding to the middle scales, and essentially the victim of events beyond these limits.  Of course, whatever the effort at understanding, there are always limits to understanding.   

Now the relativistic understanding is that scaling is infinite in both directions, and thus the role of victim is inescapable.  However, the mathematical- physical understanding is that , in a sense, it is not inescapable, since structure changes with scale, and 'attenuates' toward both extremes.  Beyond the middle scales, things simplify.  Sort of.  The descriptions of cosmology and particle physics are not simple, but they are in a sense universal, compared to the descriptions of chemistry or biology.

Consider  the well-known self-contradictory statement:  "This is not a true statement."    It's sort of a verbal Necker Cube, flickering back and forth between one truth state and another.  Like a drawing, a statement is an abstraction of reality, a reduction of the many dimensions of the reality to the limited dimensions encompassed by the statement. So it properly  encodes a simplification of reality.  Every description is a simplification, thus ambiguous in the more complicated realities it describes. And as a drawing can contain images of objects which would be physically impossible, statements can also be made which encode physically impossible realities. Thus also ideations of physically impossible realities. (However, these physically impossible realities are manifest, somehow, just as nonsense statements are.)

Now 'Pencil' could be a description of any of perhaps billions of pencils. (Ideas of, actually, since it is the idea which is encoded, and only indirectly the reality. Even when I hold the pencil in my hand, I only have an idea of it in my mind, an idea itself colored by perception, that is also containing un-true statements about it.)  Since any statement can be decomposed, each part of a statement also has truth values.  Indeed, shorter statements represent more basic truths, and longer statements are refinements, or qualifications of these shorter statements.  Thus the statement:  'Pencil.' constitutes a truth, unqualified by verb or adjective,  code for the idea pencil which forms in your mind.  Each word is thus also a statement, 'simpler' than a sentence in some ways, more complicated in others .  Indeed, each letter, each symbol constitutes an idea in the mind, although these ideas tend to be forgotten and repressed, as not being found of practical use to the adult mind.  The meaning ascribed to the letters constitutes a hindrance for the interpretation of the words, since the meanings of the letters  are not usually correspondent to the meaning of the word in any conscious manner, although these meanings are unconsciously incorporated.   A is for Apple, etc.   This is the basis for much Kabbalistic manipulation. 

Of course, we're not just talking about writing.  Sounds also carry intrinsic meaning, perceived by the developing mind, but later repressed, though incorporated.  This  is the basis for mantras and the meditations using them.  One of the goals of these forms of meditation is the recovery of the primal, pre-developed self.  One can say that, for instance, the meditation on the mantra AUM seeks the meaning of that sound, as well as the mental state which understood that meaning. 

To return to pencils. On the other hand, 'yellow pencil' is a particularization, both code for a more complete description, and a  delimiting of the number of pencils so described. We assert that the negation is also such a refinement, that is claiming that pencil also contains the entire universe,  the not pencil inside itself.  That is pencil forms the boundary, or closure of the universe, and God, itself, and the not pencil is in this sense interior to it. 

Since the negation of something is necessarily a refinement of that something, everything contains its own negation as an aspect of itself.  Denial is not possible without first affirmation.   But if a statement is non-physical, (by which I mean a statement whose physics is not understood,) the negation may well be as well. 

We must be careful to distinguish the codes, the symbols in the mind, and their manipulation,  from the realities they represent.  Magical thinking is based on conflation of code with reality, since in the early  stages of mental development the mind does not clearly distinguish itself from the external world, thus its representation of reality from that reality itself. 

But then, the world is the creation of the mind of God. Is the mind of God. Is God. Is mind.  Your mind. 

And then, it is the  solitude of the developing mind that forms the psychic basis of identification of the self with God.

But I digress.

Of course, this argument is entirely spurious , and should be disregarded.

fOr is it this last sentence which should be disrebtarded.?      Indescribable.

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Identity of opposites pantheism

The opposites of ordinary discourse are identified in the supreme instance. God and his relation to the world are described in terms that are formally contradictory; thus reality is not subject to rational description. Whether being is stressed or the void, whether immanence is or transcendence, the result is the same: one must go beyond rational description to an intuitive grasp of the ultimate.

"pantheism."  Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD 9 Nov.  2010 .