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The Long
Attempt to Name the One Monism
as Increasing Descriptive Resolution: From Intuition to Procedure By the
druid Finn What you
are pointing to is not the evolution of a belief, but the gradual improvement
of descriptive resolution applied to a single, recurring intuition. Across
history, a small but persistent number of thinkers across many cultures have
arrived at a striking and counter-intuitive sense: that the immense diversity
of the world does not arise from many ultimate sources, but from one
underlying reality whose nature is not directly accessible. This intuition
appears long before the language, science, or conceptual tools exist to
explain it properly. What changes over time is not the intuition itself, but
our capacity to describe it with increasing clarity. This
essay traces that pattern. It treats monism not as a doctrine that
slowly “won,” but as a recurring insight that has been repeatedly
reformulated as human observational and explanatory tools improved. 1. The monistic intuition comes first The
intuition of unity appears early and unexpectedly. It arises not from theory,
but from reflective confrontation with experience itself: the sense that
explaining the world in terms of separate, independent principles ultimately
fails. Around
500 BCE, Heraclitus observed: “Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise
to agree that all things are one.” Heraclitus
did not deny change or difference. On the contrary, he emphasised flux and
opposition. Yet behind this restless movement he perceived a common ordering
principle. He could see unity, but he could not yet explain how unity
produces diversity. The same
intuition appears with striking clarity in the Upanishads: “In the beginning, this was Being alone, one
only, without a second.” And
again: “That which is the subtle essence, this whole
world has that as its Self.” Here, the
One is named Brahman,
but it is explicitly said to be beyond qualities, attributes, and ordinary
thought (nirguna). The insight is firm; the
explanation remains out of reach. This
pattern repeats: the intuition arrives before the tools. 2. Early limits: unity without mechanism Because
early cultures lacked systematic science and discrete measurement, they were
forced to rely on broad metaphors: substance, being, fire, water, breath,
spirit. These metaphors pointed in the right direction but could not explain how
the One becomes the many. Parmenides
concluded that reality must be one and unchanging, and that multiplicity
belongs to appearance alone. Classical Vedānta
preserved unity by treating the world as māyā,
appearance rather than full reality. These approaches protected the intuition
of oneness, but at
the cost of sidelining the everyday world. This was
not philosophical error so much as descriptive constraint. Without concepts
such as process, iteration, or quantisation, unity and multiplicity could not
yet be reconciled. 3. Compression as a recurring pattern: polytheism to
monotheism A helpful
analogy comes from religious history. Early polytheism named many gods
because the world appeared governed by many independent forces: storms,
fertility, war, disease. This was a practical descriptive response to limited
understanding. Over
time, a compression occurred. In ancient Israel, this took a radical form: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord
our God, the Lord is one.” This was
deeply counter-intuitive. It collapsed creation and destruction, order and
catastrophe, into a single source. Many resisted it precisely because it
violated everyday intuition. Yet it endured because it simplified explanation
rather than multiplying causes. The same
logic of compression appears repeatedly in intellectual history. 4. A scientific parallel: from astronomy to cosmology Ancient
astronomy imagined a layered universe: Earth below, heavens above, each
governed by different rules. As observation improved, this distinction
collapsed. The same physical laws applied everywhere. Modern
cosmology pushed compression further still. The Big Bang model
proposes that all observable structure emerges from a single origin event,
the cause of which remains unknown. As Stephen Hawking noted, this marks a
boundary of explanation, not its completion. Like
monism, the Big
Bang model is counter-intuitive, incomplete, and
provisional, yet difficult to avoid once the evidence is considered. It
explains more with less. 5. Early modern monism: Spinoza’s advance and its limit With the
rise of mathematics and mechanics, monism gained new precision. Spinoza
wrote: “Except God, no substance
can be or be conceived.” For
Spinoza, God or Nature (the druid Finn’s “No God but Nature”) is a
single substance, and individual things are modes of that substance. This
eliminated transcendence and dualism. However, Spinoza’s system remained
largely static. Substance expresses itself, but it does not iterate.
Change and finitude are described geometrically rather than operationally. Once
again, the intuition advanced ahead of its descriptive machinery. 6. Process philosophies: movement without full
constraint Later
thinkers, such as Alfred North Whitehead, tried to restore dynamism: “The many become one, and
are increased by one.” Here,
reality is understood as events rather than things. This was a genuine step
forward. Yet even process philosophy lacked a clear account of constraint,
discreteness, and termination. Becoming was affirmed but not yet modelled
with precision. 7. Procedure Monism as a contemporary attempt The druid
Finn’s Procedure
Monism belongs
to this long lineage. It does not claim to reveal what the One is in itself. Instead, it proposes a
model for how unity can appear as multiplicity using contemporary concepts:
procedures, rules, constraints, iteration, and quantisation. In this
view: ·
The One is not a substance but a
generative rule-set. ·
The many are not illusions but outputs. ·
Identity is temporary and functional. ·
Error and misrepresentation are unavoidable
features of finite systems. Why Procedure Monism is a genuine upgrade Procedure Monism does
something historically new: It replaces substance language with execution
language. Instead
of asking what the One is, it
asks: ·
what rules (i.e.
constraints) must exist for anything to appear at all? ·
how can identity emerge without violating unity? ·
how can discreteness arise without dualism? And it
seeks to explain: ·
why identities are temporary, ·
why illusion is structural, ·
why suffering arises from misalignment, ·
why freedom is procedural, not metaphysical. This
approach replaces older metaphors of emanation or substance with the language
of execution and process. This is not mystical refinement. Crucially,
it remains provisional. Like Niels Bohr’s early atomic model, it is offered
as a useful approximation, not a final description. 8. One intuition, many models Seen this
way, Monism is not a
single doctrine competing with others. It is a recurring insight that
repeatedly forces thought toward unity whenever explanatory complexity
becomes excessive. What
evolves is not the intuition itself, but our ability to describe it without
mythology or contradiction. Each era builds the best model it can with the
tools available. Future eras will build better ones. The One remains
essentially unknown. Procedure Monism is best
understood in that spirit: not as an endpoint, but as the current attempt to
say clearly what has been glimpsed by a rare few, again and
again, for millennia. |