How is everything connected?
I’ve been intrigued by an answer called “panentheism.” According to panentheism, the foundational reality, God, connects all things together. The view here is not pantheism—that all is God. It’s rather that God is in all things (in some sense). On this view, everything is connected by a fundamental reality, which exists within all dependent things.
Panentheism is relevant to who we are. If fundamental reality is in things, then it is in us. In this sense, fundamental reality is a deep part of who we are; it is the “stuff” out of which we are made.
But what could it mean for fundamental reality to be “in” things?
I began to think more about this question after I had conversation with Philip Goff about the nature of fundamental reality. Goff suggested to me that foundational reality (the ultimate source of all else) may be the whole universe. This picture flips the panentheistic picture I had in my mind. Instead of fundamental reality being in things, it’s the other way: all things are in fundamental reality. This wasn’t the first time I thought about Goff’s whole-first view (i.e., that the whole of reality is the fundamental reality), but it was the first time I began to wonder how the whole-first view might fit together with the God-inside view.
My conversation with Philip reminded me of a conversation I had years ago with John Culp, the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on panentheism. Culp shared with me a slogan: all is in God, and God is in all. This slogan seems to combine Goff’s whole-first view with the God-within view.
The slogan has two sides:
God is in all.
All is in God.
Can these be combined?
I want to share an idea I have about how both could be true. I will first share how God could be in all things. Then I will share how all things could be in God. I will offer a theory in terms of categories that, in my view, are knowable in first-person conscious experience.
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