26th December 2009= should a P2P metaphysics move away from conceptions of oneness/wholeness and instead opt for a manifoldness?
This contribution by Mushin shows how conversation by social media, including Twitter, can lead to collective insights into complex philosophical matters.
So his contribution is of interest both regarding content and form.
See also the comments for an elaboration of a discussion relating this poly-theistic worldview to Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of the morphic fields.
Mushin:
“Here is the thing: A great many people on the front of the new social movements are 'spiritually’ – and by that I mean the way they are making sense of (their) life, reality and everything – influenced by ideas that center around wholeness, Oneness, unity, a fundamental truth and similar notions or ‘philosopies’ or ‘myths’.
Some of them we’ll be encountering as we look at people’s responses on Twitter and elsewhere to a tweet I sent one evening after contemplating reality as it presents itself to me:
What if there is no unity connecting all and everyone but “polithy”? What if it’s not Wholeness but Manifoldness? What if fantasy is more fundamental than reality? What if we aren’t here to grow but to bloom? What if we’re not here to learn but to deepen?
The word “polithy” I’m using in that tweet derives from the Greek ‘poly’, as in Polytheism – the belief in many gods, which stands over against monotheism, the belief in one supreme deity – or ‘Polyverse’, which in my mind stands over against universe, the one or singular cosmos that is thought to be our basic reality.
A first response came from my friend Matej Forman:
To grow brings the question where to, to what extend. To bloom brings the answer: to full beauty. That’s what makes sense to me.
And then Christy brought up this:
What if it’s both, always and inseparably? The One manifesting as the Many, the Many rooted always in the One?
This required a longer answer than Twitter allows so I answered using Posterous:
I’m saying that the One without an outside is an egoic or heroic invention that dominates our culture. I’m saying that this One is not fact but an imagination, a repressing image or concept or - and I’ve experienced it’s reality first hand often - a dominating myth. It is positioning itself as the One beneath it all that everything and everyone is rooted in. This is the conviction that it comes with. And I am saying that, really, we live in a Polyverse that does NOT require or have an underlying unity. And that I feel that this is good, beautiful and true.
I was happy that Christy didn’t let me get away with this so easy, and she responded:
I think I still don’t quite understand - it seems to me that the gorgeous Polyverse, where we all live, is composed of parts that must remain separate parts - though in some kind of relationship perhaps - if their belonging together, arising from singularity, is denied. Is this not the reductionist perspective? The viewpoint of current conventional science that says that the universe is composed of parts? My experience is shaped by working for years within the Taoist perspective, beholding each arising phenomenon (the 10,000 things) as a unique expression of a single whole.
Again, happy that Chrissy gave me the opportunity to delve in deeper along the lines she indicated I came up with this response....
Read the whole article.
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