Nature of the Absolute — Part 1

Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism offers a panen­the­is­tic⁽¹⁾ the­ol­ogy. The per­sonal Absolute enfolds even the form­less, attribut­e­less Absolute, which we call Undif­fer­en­ti­ated One­ness. God-dess’ power to rec­on­cile the irrec­on­cil­able rec­on­ciles our imper­fect, con­tra­dic­tory ideas of qual­i­fied and unqual­i­fied Absolute in a higher synthesis.

We can­not fully express the infi­nite unbounded Absolute in words, but this does not mean we can­not express it at all. We reject the idea of the Absolute as ulti­mately pure, undif­fer­en­ti­ated being. The Absolute must exist as a pos­i­tive con­cept to be intel­li­gi­ble and real. Since noth­ing pos­i­tive exists with­out attrib­utes, the Absolute must be qual­i­fied. Being infi­nite, the Absolute must be deter­mined and qual­i­fied in end­less ways. It encom­passes all and lacks noth­ing. The idea of per­son­al­ity remains con­sis­tent and essen­tial to the infi­nite Absolute. God-dess pos­sesses char­ac­ter, which implies some­thing def­i­nite and lim­it­ing, but God-dess remains unlim­ited in the sense of being immea­sur­able and all encompassing.

Vedic writ­ings por­tray the Absolute as both qual­i­fied and unqual­i­fied, often clearly describ­ing the Absolute as both qual­i­fied and unqual­i­fied in the same breath. Those who wish to merge with the unqual­i­fied Absolute may do so. Those who wish a rela­tion­ship with the per­sonal Absolute, God-dess, may do so. The Absolute is both-and. God-dess rec­i­p­ro­cates accord­ing to our mode of approach.

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⁽¹⁾* Panen­the­ism is a con­structed word com­posed of the Eng­lish equiv­a­lents of the Greek terms pan, mean­ing all, en, mean­ing in, and the­ism, mean­ing God. Panen­the­ism under­stands God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world. It offers an increas­ingly pop­u­lar alter­na­tive to tra­di­tional the­ism and pan­the­ism. Panen­the­ism seeks to avoid both iso­lat­ing God from the world as tra­di­tional the­ism often does and iden­ti­fy­ing God with the world as pan­the­ism does. Tra­di­tional the­is­tic sys­tems empha­size the dif­fer­ence between God and the world while panen­the­ism stresses God’s active pres­ence in the world.

Pan­the­ism empha­sizes God’s pres­ence in the world but panen­the­ism main­tains the iden­tity and sig­nif­i­cance of the non-divine. Antic­i­pa­tions of panen­the­is­tic under­stand­ings of God have occurred in both philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal writ­ings through­out his­tory. How­ever, a rich diver­sity of panen­the­is­tic under­stand­ings has devel­oped in the past two cen­turies pri­mar­ily in Chris­t­ian tra­di­tions respond­ing to sci­en­tific thought. [Bor­rowed from Stanford’s Ency­clopae­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. Please see links below for more.]

Inter­ested to learn more? Just click here to visit Stanford’s Ency­clopae­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, here for Wikipedia’s arti­cle on panen­the­ism. To learn more about Sym­bi­otic Panen­the­ism — A Uni­ver­sal Phi­los­o­phy for Humankind, just click here. The pur­pose of that fifty-year project is to fuse Onto­log­i­cal, Cos­mo­log­i­cal, and Meta­phys­i­cal Sys­tems into one sys­tem in order that we, humankind, (as the authors sug­gest) may ‘put our house in order. Here’s their excerpt about the his­tory of panen­the­ism.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 13:08 and is filed under Jungle dispatch and tagged with Absolute, God-dess, panentheism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.