Simultaneous Oneness and Difference

Philo­soph­i­cal thought regard­ing the rela­tion between God-dess and humans, God-dess and the world of finite expe­ri­ence, noumena and phe­nom­ena, fol­lows two main lines. Some empha­size basic dis­tinc­tion between infi­nite and finite and believe in the absolute tran­scen­dence of one over the other. Oth­ers empha­size iden­tity between them and believe in God-dess’ imma­nent pres­ence in the human spirit and the world of experience.

Both lines of thought con­tain strengths and weak­nesses. We need both for an ade­quate, full expla­na­tion of the sit­u­a­tion. God-dess rec­on­ciles beliefs of iden­tity and dif­fer­ence in a higher syn­the­sis out­lined by Krishna Chai­tanya and devel­oped by his fol­low­ers like Jiva Goswami.

Simul­ta­ne­ous one­ness and dif­fer­ence encour­ages a high tol­er­ance for ambi­gu­ity like quan­tum the­ory. Rather than either/or, it is both/and, which gives much room for com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tives and dif­fer­ing inter­pre­ta­tions. Chai­tanyaism is a diverse het­ero­doxy despite efforts of cer­tain camps to estab­lish an ortho­doxy. Nev­er­the­less, ambi­gu­ity is fun­da­men­tal to the spir­i­tual quest for that which remains unknow­able in our present state of existence.

Tran­scen­dence and imma­nence exist as asso­ci­ated aspects of an inher­ent unity in God-dess, as a form of panen­the­ism. The imma­nent aspect of God-dess called Cos­mic Con­scious­ness exists simul­ta­ne­ously with God-dess’ full splen­dor of infi­nite per­fec­tion, poten­cies, and attrib­utes tran­scend­ing all finite things. Cos­mic Con­scious­ness reg­u­lates and observes the actions of the finite souls and uni­fies all things. This is sym­bolic lan­guage used to help us com­pre­hend God-dess’ omnipres­ence and full­ness of knowl­edge. God-dess exists as the bliss­ful, per­sonal absolute above and beyond the world of our senses. God-dess simul­ta­ne­ously per­vades the uni­verse in a hid­den form in which all beings exist. He-she sup­ports all, yet exists beyond all as the source of everything.

God-dess remains simul­ta­ne­ously dif­fer­ent from the world and iden­ti­cal with it. God-dess cre­ates the world from him-herself and remains sep­a­rate. Iden­tity and dif­fer­ence para­dox­i­cally exist simultaneously.

Simul­ta­ne­ous one­ness and dif­fer­ence applies not only to God-dess and his-her ener­gies, but to all objects and their ener­gies. God-dess appears in many forms but remains one. God-dess’ sports, names, and forms are simul­ta­ne­ously dif­fer­ent and non-different. Even the var­i­ous parts of God-dess’ body are one and dif­fer­ent. Each part can carry out the func­tions of the other parts and of the whole. The part is iden­ti­cal with the whole, but still a part, thus dif­fer­ent from the whole.

God-dess’ form remains incon­ceiv­able because it is infi­nite and immea­sur­able, mostly beyond our con­cep­tion. The Vedic scrip­tures describe God-dess:

as “the great­est of the great” and “the small­est of the small,” as “one who moves and yet moves not,” as “one who is far as well as near, imma­nent as well as tran­scen­dent,” and as one who does not have the mind or sense organs like ours and yet per­forms all the func­tions of these. (Kapoor 156)

God-dess para­dox­i­cally indi­cates union of the oppo­site ideas of dif­fer­ence and non-difference lead­ing to a higher, fuller unity. This means per­fec­tion, or the abil­ity to encom­pass all extremes of expe­ri­enc­ing real­ity. God-dess’ potency rec­on­ciles tran­scen­dence with imma­nence and main­tains her-his full­ness in rela­tion to the mate­r­ial world by rec­on­cil­ing real dif­fer­ence with real iden­tity. This per­tains to God-dess, the liv­ing enti­ties, and nature, as well as to all ener­gies and their possessor.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 10:19 and is filed under Jungle dispatch and tagged with God-dess, panentheism, philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.