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A recent article called “All Is One” in the online magazine “aeon” presents an excellent overview of the scientific and philosophical schism between what is called “monism” and its dialectical opposite “dualism.” If you are interested in the nature of reality and the history of the argument over whether or not there is a single, unifying reality behind all of the apparent differences we see around us, you should check out that article. I have included the link here in this podcast transcript that you can find either at Gnostic Insights dot com or the transcript on Substack.
As so often happens, my brother read the article first and forwarded it to me. After I read it, we had a good conversation about certain concepts in the article. By good fortune, we had the zoom app running during our conversation and I was able to preserve our discussion to play for you today.
There are two reasons why I want to share the audio of that conversation with you. One reason is the content—Bill had a good gnostic insight he wanted to get across to me, and that is presented to you here. The second reason is that I want to share with you the process by which my brother and I discuss these deep thoughts. I consider our discussion process an ideal model for how philosophical discussions should take place, although they rarely do because of ego.
I think of our philosophical discussions as an example of the Simple Golden Rule. We are both arguing not from a position of ego, but from a shared exploration of truth, and gnosis is the object in the middle we are both working on to level up. The discussion isn’t polite in the sense that there are plenty of interruptions and disputes, yet no negative or egoic emotions, only love and laughter. Keep in mind that Bill is a professor emeritus of Philosophy, and I am a Ph.D. rhetorician and university lecturer, so you can imagine we have both seen our share of unpleasant and offensive philosophical disputes in the halls of academia. Our conversation is how I imagine such talks should proceed for the benefit of all.
Let’s begin with the beginning of the aeon article by Heinrich Paes, a professor of theoretical physics at TU Dortmund University in Germany. He says,
‘From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolized by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as ‘all that has been and is and shall be’ and the ‘mother and father of all things’.
Let me jump in here to say that we Valentinian Gnostics would identify this One as the Father rather than Isis. Back to the article:
This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: ‘entanglement’, nature’s way of integrating parts into a whole, and the topic of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; and ‘decoherence’, caused by the loss of quantum information, and the reason why we experience so little quantum weirdness in our daily lives.
Again, let me interject by suggesting you read my article “Quantum Entanglement and Karma” on my Simple Explanation blog, originally posted May 13, 2011. The link is in this transcript.
Now, back to the aeon article.
Yet, despite the throughline in philosophy and physics, the majority of Western thinkers and scientists have long rejected the idea that reality is literally unified, or nature and the Universe a system of one. From judges in the Inquisition (1184-1834) to quantum physicists today, the thought that a single system underlies everything has been too odd to believe. In fact, though philosophers have been proposing monism for thousands of years, and QM is, after all, an experimental science, Western culture has regularly lashed out against the concept and punished those promoting the idea.
The article then goes on to describe the long and torturous history of the clash between monists and dualists in both philosophy and religion. Quote,
Even then, Christianity adopted Platonic ideas by identifying the monistic ‘One’ with God. But Christianity drew also on dualistic philosophies such as Manichaeism, which advocated a world caught in an epic struggle between good and evil. This is how concepts such as God and devil, heaven and hell, or angels and demons received their prominent role among Christian beliefs. At the same time, the monistic influences were pushed into an otherworldly beyond. The Christian God was understood as different from the natural world that he governs from outside.
With the Christian Church rising to political power and the fall of the Roman Empire, much of antiquity’s culture and philosophy got lost, and monism got suppressed as a heresy. If ‘all is One’, God gets conflated with the world, and medieval theology understood that as atheism or a devaluation of God.
Here I can tell you that Gnosticism was one of those heresies that could get a philosopher burned at the stake with its insistence that the Father is the One Source of All that is, and that the emanation of the God Above All Gods is here in the world and in each of us. However, a “soft monism” began to arise in the realm of science, with forces such as gravity and electro-magnetism and, later, Quantum Mechanics, being proven to exist universally within our cosmos. You can read the details in the “All Is One” article. The article concludes by saying,
The 3,000-year-old concept of monism may actually help modern physicists in their struggle to find a theory of quantum gravity and make sense out of black holes, the Higgs boson, and the early Universe. Chances are high that we witness the beginning of a new era where science is informed by monism and the Universe is perceived as a unified whole.
Now, here’s Bill and myself talking this over. Before I share that with you, there will be references to the “Cherry Jello Block Universe” that is fully described in the episode called “Consciousness and Time—Our Cherry-Jello Universe and Free Will”—link included in this transcript. My Cherry-Jello theory is a kind of “many worlds in One world” idea that proposes the cosmos is already fully formed, with all, nearly infinite, possible choices and outcomes already present in the form of “cherries” floating in an almost limitless sea of static jello where nothing really happens; it is only our consciousness that moves through it from cherry to cherry. We could say the giant jello bowl is the mind of the Father and Son present in the cosmos. There is no time, only the motion of consciousness swimming from cherry to cherry using free will. This is how it is that all of creation is entangled in the manner that Quantum Mechanics claims.
We also move into a brief off-topic discussion of what the Tripartite Tractate calls “The Third Economy,” which is our final destination that replaces this apparently “material” cosmos. That leads to my brief interpretation of the Tribulation and 1,000 year reign of Christ as described in the Bible’s book of Revelations.
Cyd: Hey Bill, good to talk to you. What are we going to talk about here, Bill?
Bill: Hi, Cyd. Well, that particular article that you sent me, what was the titling there?
Cyd: We shared an article that was published in aeon.
Bill: Oh, it’s called, yeah, it’s called All is One.
Cyd: Oh, yeah, All is One. And it’s about monism. It was an excellent article about monism. I never really understood the difference between monism and dualism until I read this guy’s article.
Bill: You mean you haven’t been listening to me?
Cyd: (Cyd laughs loudly) So monism is what we say all the time. In the beginning, there was only the Father.
Bill: That’s right.
Cyd: And it really… dualism doesn’t occur, I don’t think, in Gnosticism until… Does it occur when the Son is born, because now there’s two monads? Or does it occur after the Fall, and now we have a material universe with all of its negativity?
Bill: Well, my response to that, I mean, first of all, historically, it was a great article. It shows you how it all developed out. It shows you the biases and the nastiness of it, even being killed because they were monists, and so forth. I won’t go into all of that…
Cyd: Terribly killed—tortured and killed.
Bill: But what we’ve talked about before, I made the point when we were talking about entanglement, is that the reason there’s entanglement is because there’s no space and time. I’ve told you that. That’s how it works.
Cyd: Right. It’s the jello universe. It’s all there.
Bill: Right. Now, the question of dualism you brought up—there technically is no dualism. The material world, I’m going to make a comment about that—no space and time. In other words, we’re talking the ethereal—consciousness and purity, and so forth—and then out of that comes the Gnostic development, the pleroma, et cetera—all that going out. Yet at all points in there, it’s still no space and time. There’s no creation of…
Cyd: Of actuality. It’s all thought. It’s all consciousness.
Bill: Yeah, it’s all thought. And the Fall itself, it takes place where the Demiurge then takes the chaos of the Fall and makes all these things, “material” so to speak… It’s still not… He’s not created anything new. He’s organized and we call it material. There’s never been dualism. That’s my point. What is called the material that physicists work with and others now in the world and so forth, in reality, it’s not.
Cyd: It’s still the consciousness of God just expressed in smaller and smaller fractal ways.
Bill: Yes. Back to your…
Cyd: But, but…
Bill: But the organ…
Cyd: Well, hold on. Isn’t there a duality between virtue and vice?
Bill: Well, yes, but that’s not… We’re not talking- Yeah, but…
Cyd: I mean, that’s somehow compartmentalized away from the One because there’s no room in heaven, so to speak, for vice.
Bill: Well, the compartmentalizing doesn’t make it real. It doesn’t make it material, doesn’t make it– You can compartmentalize, yes, but it’s still the ethereal.
Cyd: But, I mean, it seems to be different in kind. Sin is different categorically than God’s consciousness, is it not? Because we don’t want to say that God embraces sin. It’s not a yin-yang type of God.
Bill: No, but that’s the imitation. Talking imitation…
Cyd: So what I’m saying, isn’t the dualism between then the imitation and that which was from the beginning. Isn’t that the dualism split? Not from material to ethereal, but that which was from the beginning and then the imitation, which will return to nothingness.
Bill: Well, see… I’m going to come at it another way. All of this is a theory.
Cyd: Right. I agree with you. I got you. There’s no material. I get that part. But yet there is…
Bill: There are concepts, but there are concepts. That’s part of the thoughts. That’s thoughts.
Cyd: But it’s not God’s thoughts. It’s fallen thoughts. It’s our thoughts that are incorrect. I’m talking dialectics, you know?
Bill: Well, the fact that we have free will, you see, we can make choices, right? Remember, we’ve said technically there’s no evil. God doesn’t create a universe where it’s possible to have evil. That’s not it. The actions that are taken, those are the memes, and so forth. We create this illusory stuff, but they’re wrong acts, but there’s not evil.
Cyd: Okay. True.
Bill: It’s not… Again, it’s not Manichaeism again, you know? There’s good and evil, bad, good and bad, right? It’s not the yin-yang, as you make the point. That’s not the universe. Yeah. We make it happen through our willful actions. And the Demiurge, because of demiurgic control, you know, makes the choices and how to disrupt us, right? Archonic disruptions and so forth?
Cyd: Right, right. Okay. So—that which was not from the beginning and therefore will not return to the virtue in the roll-up… So what is the roll-up? What is humanity coming back into the Fullness? What is that? What would you call that? Because we’re going to shed the wrong beliefs. That’s what the redemption is.
Bill: That’s right. That’s right. Those memes. Which again, your question might be, what are memes? How do they exist? In other words, do they have an existence?
Cyd: Right. Right. I mean, are they…? Okay. If it’s a giant torus of jello with cherries floating in it—are those cherries… we’ve always expressed them as choices or choice points.
Bill: Yes. Yes.
Cyd: But are there memes out there? When we roll back in towards the Fullness, does the jello bowl get smaller?
Bill: Yes. The jello bowl of the universe.
Cyd: Okay.
Bill: Of the universe. Right.
Cyd: But God is illimitable. But God is illimitable.
Bill: That’s right.
Cyd: Hmmm. Well, then the jello bowl of this universe is just going to go all the way to <poof> and then it’s all going to be part of the illimitable God, but with identity. That whole… you know what I’m saying? Cherry jello universe swimming from choice point to choice point, that will not occur after redemption, the third economy.
Bill: Yes. The third economy is not going to have that.
Cyd: It’s not going to have the torus around us.
Bill: It’s not going to have any jello-ness.
Cyd: Or cherries, I guess.
Bill: Now, in the ethereal, you know, in the wrap up there in the third economy, you still have free will. The Aeons always had free will. So, the ethereal, that notion of free will, but we’re acting out of free will without any memes that were the result of the Fall.
Cyd: Right.
Bill: Does that make sense?
Cyd: Yeah! (she shouts out). So, it’s just, shall I do this good thing or that good thing?. Visit this wonderful person and love them or that wonderful person and love them?
Bill: (laughing) Yeah.
Cyd: I think I’ll just pet my dogs for a thousand years. How about that?
Bill: Yeah. Or even longer.
Cyd: Interesting. Okay. Yeah.
Bill: We’ve got something going here. You know, I mean, we need to incubate and percolate a bit more because it’s evolving right now… or not evolving—it’s mining.
Cyd: Right. It’s revealing itself to us.
Bill: It’s revealing itself. Right. So, the essential point to start with is there never was a material world in fact. It’s funny. It’s a jungle out there.
Cyd: (singing: It’s a jungle out there. Click this link to hear a funny song.) Exactly.
Bill: Whether we’re talking food politics or anything else, it’s…
Cyd: Well, skepticism is at an all-time high, as they say, you know.
Bill: (laughing) Yeah, as it should be.
Cyd: And this idea of AI taking over and the rise of the Demiurge, it seems as though we’re in the end times. You see, the people, they’re all for this kind of stuff, people like Musk—they think this is all going to turn out for the good. They are expecting what I call the Star Trek universe where it’s a very beautiful Federation of Planets and everything’s going well and you’ve got unlimited food and everybody works at jobs they love and everybody gets along, no more war. That’s what they think is going to be the outcome of progressivism and socialism and the rise of the AI and technocratic systems. I, however, think that just the opposite is going to come out, especially since it’s Demiurgic. It’s all going to turn into… I’m expecting more like the Terminator universe or Mad Max, you know? Dystopia. Dystopia versus Star Trek.
Bill: Well, again, as you say a thousand times before, is the science fiction writers always have…
Cyd: (interrupting) We’re the prophets! We’re the prophets.
Bill: And you’re going to write this new book. Love it. Love it! Yeah, yeah. I can see playing that out, right?
Cyd: Yeah. Well, obviously, the brain implants in the VR world must be AI. They’re probably very miniaturized AI bots. They’re nanobots run by AI, else they couldn’t do what they’re doing to your brain. (plot line of new sf book)
Bill: So, yeah. See, I want to stay alive. I want to see the world play out a little bit longer. I want to see where it’s going.
Cyd: Except it’s going to go down, man.
Bill: The thing is, but see, everything gets sort of sad and tragic and everything, yet I know where I’m going, so what’s the… It’s not like, oh, I feel terrible. All of my life is done, and it was fine.
Cyd: Okay, because it’s just temporary anyway.
Bill: Yeah, it’s temporary.
Cyd: There might be a period of time where it’s all internment camps, but we know we’re going to heaven.
Bill: So what would be the AI analogy, in the thousand-year time of Christ?
Cyd: What do you mean? What’s your question?
Bill: In the Revelations, what would be the thousand-year reign? What would the equivalent be in the AI?
Cyd: Of Christ? Okay, so the thousand-year reign isn’t the bad stuff. That’s called the Tribulation.
Bill: I understand. So how would that play out?
Cyd: Well, that tribulation period is going to be what’s going on now. The buildup of AI, the repression of actual humanity, and what’s that called? Antinatalism? That’s all going to go… That’s just going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. It’s just going to be more and more and more horrific, and people will become more and more evil, because I think the good folks are going to stick the landing up above, and not want to come back, not be made to come back into the Tribulation.
Bill: Well, it would be kind of like I don’t want to be reincarnated.
Cyd: Well, yeah, right, and not required to be. The only people that have to be reincarnated, that’s that 144,000 that are called the Remnant. So only at the end of times, there will only be 144,000 righteous people on the earth, period. And it’s not going to be easy on them, but that’s their job. So if you want to come back as one of the 144,000, be my guest.
Bill: So there won’t be a time where AI purely and simply is all there is?
Cyd: No, because then that would… It’s going to be like Terminator at the end, where the AI is trying to be all there is, but the humans are fighting back. There’s still that 144,000 underground. But then Christ actually comes back, and various Aeons incarnate, and people like you and me come back along with the Christ. And somehow, I don’t know what the mechanism is, but everyone is persuaded to redemption at that point. Maybe they realize it’s not so much fun living under this demiurgic AI horrid place. And then everybody truly wants to repent. And when that repentance comes back, everybody’s redeemed. The Demiurge is redeemed, and that’s when the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth happens. So there will be a “material” world for a thousand years after the return of Christ and all the good guys, and it’ll be pretty nice. But then after that is when everything rolls up.
Bill: Okay. And when we say “material,” we put quotes around it.
Cyd: Right. Right.
Bill: Materialism as it’s been experienced.
Cyd: Right. So there’s going to be like a transition period, I would guess, for the second order powers to transition between… It’s all the love of God now, the Demiurge is not messing with us anymore. Eden. Eden. The Garden of Eden returns worldwide, and we’re all living in a happy, happy place. But then after that thousand years, everything is going to roll back up into the ethereal space and we’ll be part of the completely non-material or completely ethereal. That’s when the cherry will… The bowl of jello shrinks back into only the Fullness of God.
Bill: That’s a good description! That’s a podcast!
Cyd: Well, here we are. We’re recording it. So I think it will be.
Bill: That’s a good podcast right there. Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Very good.
Cyd: We’ve been taping. So let’s say…
Well, Billy, thanks for joining me on one of these rare audio podcasts, and it’s always nice to talk to you. And I hope we can do this more often.
Bill: Me too. Thanks for inviting me and inviting me even more often. Well, you’ve done that more than once. I just haven’t come in, right?
Cyd: Right, right. But I think now maybe we… If this recording works out well, then maybe we have a system finally where you and I can have these recordings and make more episodes. For example, we know we want to talk about the difference between science and…
Bill: Religion.
Cyd: The true difference. Or the difference between theories and knowledge, which is a… That’s another discussion. We have to have these discussions.
Bill: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which by is relevant to this point about religion, physics, anyway.
Cyd: Yeah, yeah. So if this all works out, we’ll talk again very soon and we’ll have another podcast to put out. How’s that?
Bill: I would love that. Thank you.
Cyd: Well, onward and upward, Billy.
Bill: Onward and upward, Cyd. Love you.
Cyd: Love you, too. Bye-bye. Hanging up now. Bye-bye. sweetie.
Bill: Bye-bye.
I hope you have enjoyed this unusual episode. It’s an episode that probably requires more than one listening. And, if you really want to understand it, I recommend you follow the links to the aeon article by Paes and the links to my articles referred to here and there.
Onward and upward! God bless us all!