The Argument from Unselfish Love

We are now in the position to draw a very important conclusion about the way God and the world are related. I frame this as 'the Argument from (Unselfish) Love': 

1. God loves us unselfishly (from Postulate 3), 
2. Unselfish loves cannot love only themselves, 
3. Therefore, we must be separate from God in some ways: God is not us. 

This Argument from Love has a number of important consequences. From an essential aspect of core theism, we see that there must be an irreducible distinctness between us and God. This must be an absolute distinctness, not just an apparent one, because it must be a difference which appears so to God, who presumably sees things as they really are and not just as they appear.

This need for an ‘otherness’ between God and all those loved by God has long been recognized as essential to theism, but it is rarely given a logical justification. It is usually assumed by religious writers that creating independent and freely-choosing humans is a ‘great good’ which justifies many other things. Now we have gone back one step in the logic and can see that there is a reason for some kind of independence. That reason stems directly from the kind of love that God has for us.

Another consequence is that, though God could conceivably create those creatures who are continuous extensions of his divine being, there would be no point in his doing so. God could not love those creatures unselfishly, since they would be entirely part of himself. It may not be that God is lacking in omnipotence, but that there are consequences of the nature of God that directly limit what is good to do. Think how cruel it would be to make a creature who could not be loved by God!

This otherness is dramatically expressed in the writings of many theists, especially those who have had spiritual or mystical experiences. God is like a mighty brilliant sun—it is as if God is brighter by millions than the noon-day sun—and we are minor creatures walking on the face of the earth. Others have described how the numinous sight of God induces fear and trembling, and a feeling of great humility arises from the enormous differences immediately apparent.

To deny this otherness is a serious mistake from the theistic point of view. However often mystics may experience temporary oneness with God, they are still distinct and lovable-by-God creatures, and, as such, they return to their individual consciousness afterwards. Others may want to deny this absolute distinction and want to become ‘as God’. The Judaic bible in Genesis chapter 3 has a story of creatures wanting to become as God. They suffer badly because they want what is impossible.

We see that the Argument from Love has direct consequences concerning the systems of pantheism, nonduality and idealism. The necessity, if love is to function, of a deep division between divinity and us beloved beings is not allowed in pantheism. According to pantheism, we are all and entirely part of God, and that cannot be true if God is to love us unselfishly.

The problem with strict nonduality is even simpler. If God is to love us, we have to exist. This requires that our finite existence have some reality, and that it not be an illusion like maya. It can not be that our soul (Atman) is actually identical with the divine being itself (Brahman), no matter what the sages may have written. There must be some relation between them, but not one of identity.

Adapted from chapter 9 of Starting Science From God.

Arguing from 'God is Being Itself'

We want to know the basic principles that operate now, which govern all connections between God and the individual finite beings that are us. That is what useful knowledge -- science -- needs.

We will use one of the standard arguments of philosophical theism: the Argument from Being. We are arguing from 'God is Being Itself'. The argument uses Postulate 3 above, and proceeds as follows:

1. God is Being itself (Postulate 3)
2. We (as individuals) have being (as, we exist).
3. Therefore, our being either is, or depends on (derives from), God (Being itself). 

This argument uses the metaphysical principle that being can only come from being and not from non-being (which is nothing). It uses the empirical fact that individuals in the world do exist. At least I exist, Descartes would claim. That is, there are some objects that are being in existence, so that we say that they ‘have being’. Then, since God has just been defined as ‘being itself’, we say that God must have some role in our existence. Simply put, we say that “We are, because God is."

This argument establishes an ontological dependence of us individuals on God. We appear to be beings; God is Being itself; therefore we appear to depend on God. Some essence of our being (namely Being itself) is identical to God. A corollary of this argument is: we cannot have our existence separately from God or derived originally from anything other than God. If we had some other kind of being, then we would still have being itself, which is God. Postulate 3 establishes that just by existing, we are dependent on God.

Of course, this does not explain the manner in which we depend on God. I state an alternative formulation (‘derives from’) in the conclusion above but do not explain that. More details will come later.

Consequences

The Argument from Being does not establish that we are distinct from God at all. If we were somehow identical to God, then our being would be being itself, and our continued existing would be obvious. This argument, by itself, can lead to several non-theistic accounts of the manner in which we depend on God. For now, I only explain what these other accounts are. Only later will we have the logical means to discriminate between the other accounts and core theism.

The first non-theistic account says that all things of creation—all of us finite individuals—are in fact equal to God. This appears to solve the problem if all of us really are God (or Gods) though we simply never knew it. This is pantheism: that everything is God. An equivalent formulation is to say that “God is All That Is." Every smallest atom, every last bacterium, every planet, every galaxy, would then in fact be God. Religious life would then consist of learning (or remembering) this fact, which on the face of it is not obvious. It might be justified by Jesus saying that “the Kingdom of God is in you" (Luke 17:21) or Sankara saying that “everyone is in fact Divine." (The “I am Brahman" of Sankara (Sankaracharya).)  Certain mystical experiences, such as those arising in nature mysticism, certainly appear to show that the Divine is present in all of nature, and these can be used to support pantheism. Later I will dispute pantheistic belief. Here I only note that its simplicity seems attractive intellectually. However, most of us, on practical reflection concerning our state in the world, cannot bring ourselves to believe that we are identical with God. Our everyday world certainly seems to be far from God.

A second non-theistic account states that the everyday world is an illusion: a false appearance produced by imperfect perceptions. Reality—if only we realized it—is actually the Infinite glorious God and only that God. This account is called non-dualism, and asserts that our everyday world is maya, a veil or an illusion. There appears to be a duality between the Eternal Brahman and the world of finite creatures, but reality is actually non-dual. Only Brahman exists, and the religious task is to acknowledge that in our souls.

There are further accounts which develop some kind of monism about what exists. In Idealism, God is taken as some kind of thought (or thinker) that includes all our individual ideas that appear to make us separate. There is even a way to bring in materialism, if we take energy as eternally existing and therefore divine. In that case, God (as being itself) is identified with energy, and then, according to our Argument from Being, is the being itself of everything that exists. We see that it is sometimes strangely difficult to distinguish pantheism from materialism.

Finally, a claimant such as myself has still, with assertions like these, the responsibility of showing that God identified in such a way is identical with the traditional God of the theistic religions. From the religious point of view, it would be a failure if God turned out to be identical to eternal and immutable atoms!  Strictly speaking, logically if not theologically, that would be consistent with what has been asserted so far. In that case we could still define God in the manner of this chapter, even though God would not be a single being, and God would be distributed around all the individual atoms that somehow ‘participate’ in being itself. Individual atoms would have, say, instances of ‘being itself’ within themselves and hence be part of God. Further assertions may discount this possibility, but that will have to be the subject of discussion. Any ‘proof of God’, therefore, is not complete until we are satisfied that it is ‘our’ God who we are talking about and not other things such as microscopic atom(s). This is usually the non-trivial part of the argument. It will have to contain a demonstration of how God can be a One and yet multiple objects exist in the world.

Adapted from chapter 8 of Starting Science From God.

How Cohen's Nondualism is almost Theism

We continue to look at some statements of traditional nondualism that still appear in Cohen's presentation, and consider how they may be yet ever-so-slightly changed so as to be consistent with theism, while keeping a spiritual impact in form very similar to his original intention. This concludes the discussion started here and continued here.

That's when there is no longer any distinction between the inherent perfection of the Self Absolute and that response that is its expression in the world of time and space [p. 17] According to theism, everything good in the world of time and space is in fact belonging to God: it appears as if it is our own when we perform good act, but we must never claim ownership for ourselves and to become 'as God' (Gen 3:5).

To the question ''The ego can claim enlightenment for itself?'', Cohen replies ''Yes, and unfortunately it often does. But if the individual's motivation is pure, if there is a foundation of deep and profound humility, then the realization will not be corrupted by the desire for personal gain, and that's very rare indeed.'' [p. 21] It is clear that nondualism itself has nothing in its logic to stop 'atman = Atman = Brahman' to be reversed as 'Brahman = Atman = atman', and the Infinite claimed for oneself. Cohen's response points to lack of personal gain, but this response begins to make sense in a theistic framework where there is a distinction between Divine and personal objectives.

Cohen describes an early experience as ''that all of life is One that the whole universe and everything that exists within it, seen and unseen, known and unknown, is one conscious, glorious, intelligent Being that is self-aware. Its nature is Love but it is a love that is so overwhelming in its intensity that even to experience the faintest hint of it is almost unbearable for the human body. I saw in that moment that there is no such thing as death, that life has no beginning and no end.'' [p. 31-32] This wonderful experience is correct in almost every detail to the theist, only one identification needs to be remade. This, that really it is 'the life of the whole universe and everything that exists within it ... is one Being that is self-aware'. Since the Divine Life everywhere permeates and sustains the whole universe, one may be forgiven for missing the distinction between what is Divine (essentially infinite & overwhelming) and what is created (essentially finite & underwhelming).

Cohen sees our representation of the Divine as like a mirror [p. 45] which should be spotless. In theism, the manner of representation of the Infinite in the finite creature is more complicated than as a mirror, and in fact takes a whole biological body with all its myriad structures and functions to represent God properly. Discussion of this, however, is beyond the scope of this essay.

Our True Self is always paying attention in a way that we are usually not conscious of. And when we discover this Self - this mysterious depth that is already awake - we find that which is miraculous. We discover who we truly are. It's the Self that we cannot see with the mind, but when we experience it directly we will understand what it means to be enlightened. And when we liberate this Self that mysteriously sees and knows what we cannot see or know with our conscious mind, we will begin to respond to life in ways that, left to our own devices, we never could. [p. 76] Cohen is here using the phrase 'True Self' to refer to what theists call the internal spiritual mind. Most of us only come to this state after death, but then Cohen's description is remarkably accurate in describing a new 'heavenly proprium' (as Swedenborg calls it) that cannot be seen by our existing natural minds.

Cohen talks of the revelation of ''true conscience'', which is the unexpected manifestation of intense compassion. True conscience emerges from that very same mysterious part of our own self; it expresses a kind of care that the personality could never understand. It's the true heart, which is not the heart that we normally identify with the personality. [p. 77] Again we see Cohen expressing views that could not have come from traditional nondualism, but which clearly come from a person (or God) who works in a theistic framework. As he says beautifully, ''The degree to which we are able to liberate ourselves from self-concern will be the degree to which we are able to recognize that our true nature as human beings is love.'' He is only mistaken in thinking ''It happens automatically. This is one of the miracles of human life.'' It is well known that the God of theism mostly operates behind the scenes.

In the impersonal view, which is the enlightened perspective, the ego and the entire personal world that it creates is not seen as being real. That world is revealed to be empty of meaning, value, and purpose, ultimately serving only to perpetuate the existence of a separate self that doesn't really exist. [p. 104]Cohen speaks from the nondualist tradition, but this is immediately contradicted by the next page, which has a purely theistic observation: When that impersonal Self Absolute begins to emerge in consciousness as a living presence, the ''personal," instead of being the impenetrable fortress that the separate ego abides in, becomes a permeable vessel through which the impersonal Self Absolute seeps into this world. [p. 105] It is the idea of theism that the internal spiritual self can be modelled as a vessel that receives the Divine sustaining influx. This useful idea of a 'permeable vessel' is a development of strict nondualism toward the ideas of theism.

Cohen agrees that ''there's really nothing personal in either the absolute or the relative dimension of our experience,'' [p. 105] and insists that the ''enlightened perspective always points us to that which is singular, empty of anything personal, and free from any and all motivation that comes from ego.'' [p. 105] This reveals a failure to recognise the true nature of person as constituted by love and wisdom, a constitution that in theism applies primarily to God as the Lord, and then derivatively to us as persons sustained by influx. There is no 'ego compulsion' in the Lord, and when we conform ourselves to his life there need be hardly any in us either.

Cohen seeks ''That place of absolute singularity [which] is where true freedom and enlightened understanding are found. That is where the relative and the Absolute, the personal and the impersonal, merge and become one. In that mysterious place, they become one unbroken universal unfolding that is free from the bondage of duality.'' [p. 107]  Here, lacking the conceptual means to discriminate Source and creation, or between personal loves and Infinite Loves, Cohen has to resort to paradoxical assertions to make his point.

Cohen ends with the contradiction mentioned earlier, that ''This apparent paradox - that everything is already perfect and everything must change - is the complete picture of what enlightenment is all about.'' [p. 115] He says that paradoxes for the unenlightened mind may still be in his system, because ''the mind exists in and as duality itself, and therefore, by definition, cannot see beyond it to that place where no duality exists'' [p. 116]. Swedenborg as a theist agrees that a full understanding of the genuine truth concerning spirit and nature awaits the enlightenment at comes from the eventual awakening of our inner spiritual mind, but would insist that partial or 'apparent truths' may still enter our understanding even now, and may usefully portray spiritual reality without any essential contradictions. This allows some kind of rational understanding of spirituality, even if it is still incomplete. Sometimes, theistic portrayal may be more indirect, using representations in the structure of Sacred Scriptures, in order to allow a more external understanding.

We see from this examination of Cohen's book ''Living Enlightenment'' that the actual practice and understanding of 'nondual discipleship' requires ideas that go beyond traditional Advaita Vedanta. Many of these ideas turn out to be very similar to those advocated for example by Emanuel Swedenborg in his rational account of how theism should be understood. In that case, there is no need to hid behind paradoxes.