The Universe is Divine and Full of Spirits

Pantheism, panpsychism, and animism

In my article ‘Why There is Almost Certainly No God’ I outline the reasons that monotheism fails to compel me. I do not disavow anything I said in that article, and in fact, what I am about to say follows nicely from my previous arguments. Through much logical and spiritual reflection I have come to think that panpsychism, and relatedly, pantheism, are true. I have discussed these ideas before in ‘The Ubiquity of Consciousness and the Divine Mind’ so that article is well worth a read as it provides the logical and rational basis for this article. What I want to do here is argue for the truth of panpsychism and explore it’s philosophical and spiritual implications.

[Edit: I am now an idealist panentheist, see here for more details].

Panpsychism: Consciousness is Everywhere

Panpsychism seeks to solve the mystery of consciousness by positing that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. Seeing insurmountable problems with mind-body dualism and naturalism respectively, panpsychism is a monist metaphysics in which fundamental matter is understood as identical to consciousness. Essentially, mind and matter are two sides of the same coin. Whatever reality is at the most fundamental level, whether it be irreducible particles, the energy-field, or quantum soup; that is consciousness. Consciousness is thus not a magically emergent property of an unconscious universe, but that matter is just consciousness viewed from a particular standpoint.

Okay, but why would anyone believe this? Well it seems very difficult to reason to pansychism from empirical premises. The issue with consciousness is that prima facie, it is private and not publicly available. Usually, we only infer the existence of consciousnesses in others because we observe behaviours that correlate with our own conscious experiences. Rather, panpsychism is usually arrived at in an attempt to fix the problem with other theories.

On the one hand, mind-body dualism cannot solve the hard problem of consciousness and fails to explain how or why immaterial consciousness correlates to, and interacts with, the material brain. On the other hand, naturalism fails to account for the qualitative nature of conscious experience, nor why there seems to be an immaterial aspect of it. For example, I can’t cut open your brain and find the quality “redness”. There seems to be an experiential aspect to consciousness that resists materialistic reduction. Thus, panpsychism seeks to present an elegant solution to these problems.

What this means is, at base, reality is full of awareness and consciousness. The world is imbued with life. The universe is alive. At least for me, this evokes particular feelings of reverence and respect for other living beings and the natural world around us. It means that our spiritual posture towards the world should be to see it has having moral worth. This doesn’t mean everything is of equal value. As I’ve discussed in my articles about veganism and abortion; there are gradations of moral value and limits to our ethical considerations. Nonetheless, when we begin to understand that we are made of the same stuff as everything else, we can properly integrate ourselves into this cosmic web of consciousness.

This also means that there must be forms of consciousness that are radically different from our own. We can see this thread throughout the history of religion and spirituality, in which other modes of perception and other forms of consciousness are tapped into via ritual, meditation, visualisation, and psychedelic drugs. I think what this points to is that fact that there are underlying realities that we fail to perceive in day to day life, but can nonetheless be accessed through the right methods. How we interpret this reality will differ depending on our own worldview and and cultural language, but I believe that all of these phenomena are rooted in something deeper that is beyond the realm of analytic understanding, but is usually expressed through symbolism, mythology, and narrative instead.¹

Pantheism: Divinity is Immanent

What this also means is that we should also understand the universe itself as being conscious. If consciousness exists in gradations that scale up and down, there must be something at the top of the ontological hierarchy. Many people will imagine this to be some type of God with certain “omni” attributes, but this only works if you embrace a Cartesian dualism that panpsychism seeks to undermine. As every other type of mind is made of matter- the divine mind must be also. This leaves us with something like pantheism. Without trying to justify or analyse the use of the term theos in pantheism, I’m simply going to commit to the idea that the universal consciousness is divine in some way. Or at least, when people talk about divinity, this is what they actually mean.

This conception of cosmopsychism means that divinity is entirely immanent. There is no form of being or reality that transcends the material world as such. Divinity is identical to the universe and thus pervades every particle, every wave form, every cell, and every mind. I think this is attested to in nearly every mystical tradition throughout history. As Meister Eckhart, the Catholic mystic, says:

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”

What mystics describe by and large, is that the divine isn’t accessed by looking for something “out there”, as if there was a God that exists as a separate subject, but that divinity is within you. The mystical journey is a descent into the self, whatever that is, and ultimately, a dissolution thereof. Mystical union is presented as a plunge into the darkness and emptiness that is beyond all concept and experience. Again, how these mystical experiences come to be described will differ depending on culture and religion, but the reality that they are pointing to is the same.

This reality is what led the Sufi mystic Al-Hallaj to claim: “I am the Truth”. Many of his peers interpreted this statement as a claim of divinity and thus blasphemy. Whatever he actually meant by that statement, it is clear that the mystical traditions all speak of some form of non-dualism. The idea that the subject-object distinction is an illusion and that everything is fundamentally connected is the mystical consensus of all religions and cultures. We are all participating in “God” all the time through our very being and awareness. Of course, classical theism with it’s panentheistic bent admits this, but the pantheistic vision of reality goes deeper still.

Our consciousness then is just one aspect of a greater whole, ever shifting and interacting with the broader conscious universe. This means that that reality is a construction of our consciousness which is a mere dissociation from the unified whole, but that which we can alter, adapt, and expand. Other people, and other forms of consciousness, can and will inhabit totally different phenomenological realities. We see this trivially in how much eye witness accounts of the same event can differ, but this is a truth that runs all the way down to metaphysical bedrock. Genuine disagreements between people show that how we view the world is largely a product of our experience. Contrary to scientism, there is no amount of technology and no number of experiments which will render objective reality entirely transparent to us.

Despite this fundamental flaw in our phenomenological reality, these metaphysical truths should reshape how we understand the world and our place in it. If it is true that everything is ontologically one, and that we are all simply conceptual distinctions within the divine mind, this should commit us to radical compassion and mettā (loving-kindness). This is not a call to puritanism or self-degradation- quite the opposite. It is an invitation to see reality for what it truly is. In our best moments, this is something we can all experience and know to be true. I think this is what sets pantheism apart from atheism more broadly. Although the rejection of monotheism is common to both (and so technically I remain an atheist), the spiritual implications radically differ.

Faeries, Gods, and Spirits

What this form panpsychism also suggests is that the world is littered with conscious entities. Sure, not all of them will look or behave like us, but nonetheless, the world around is is conscious in some sense. This means that there is something it is like to be a dog, a flower, a river, a tree, etc. This concept has perennial roots in animism, the proposition that everything is animate, of which my interpretation of panpsychism can be seen as a modern analytical retelling.

This worldview is common to nearly all forms of paganism, in which nature is revered or worshipped, and that gods are associated with particular natural and astrological phenomena. Most of the Roman gods for example are named after the planets. In ancient Egypt, Ra is the sun god. In Norse mythology, Thor is associated with thunder. In Celtic culture, faeries were understood as nature spirits. I would reinterpret these mythologies as peripheral or mystical experiences of other forms of consciousness that exist within the natural world, that are then extrapolated into cultural narratives.

These ideas didn’t disappear with the advent of Christianity though- on the contrary. In the Bible for example, the stars and planets are constantly associated with angels. Some theologians interpret this to mean that stars are literally the bodies of angels. Equally, demonic entities like Leviathan and Behemoth were said to reside in the sea and earth respectively, and were the embodiment of chaos. Although these monsters weren’t understood to be biological entities like humans or animals, they were nonetheless regarded as real forms of consciousness, actual subjects, that were closely associated with natural phenomena.

It seems me then that stories of spirits, gods, demons, angels, ghosts, faeries, etc; are real experiences of conscious entities. It’s not however that these beings are supernatural or spiritual- they are just as material as we are. The problem is simply that there normally exists ontological barriers between our phenomenological reality and theirs. In the same way it’s nearly impossible for you to communicate to a fly, it’s equally difficult for other forms of consciousness to communicate with us. Especially in the modern world, we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of other forms of consciousness, instead preferring to see the world as a flat meaningless series of mechanisms. Despite the claim to rationality, I think this way of viewing the world is deeply irrational and incongruent with our actual experience.

Anyone who has spent any time in remote or liminal spaces, and/or attempting to expand their field of awareness, knows that we are usually only tuning into a narrow set of wavelengths. The effectiveness of mindfulness practices shows us that it is all too easy to fail to perceive what is actually going on around us. I’m sure most people have at one point in their lives been sat in a room surrounded by people, but nonetheless felt entirely disconnected and deeply lonely. What if we have done this with the world around us? It’s no surprise that people often feel most at peace and present when they are in nature, and that spiritual encounters with other beings are as common as anything else. We simply need to pay attention.

Conclusion

It’s my opinion then, that this vision of panpsychism and pantheism is not only true, but vital to the spiritual health of humans. The enlightenment has failed us because it was based on a lie. We can’t simply reason our way through life, nor can we exist in a materialistic universe. If we want to solve the ecological and mental health crises that we are facing, on top of the radical lack of empathy that is leading to wars and genocides around the globe (often at the hand of religious folks), we need to re-enchant the universe. Our existing paradigm isn’t working, so it’s time for a new (old) one. The above musings are just the beginning of my thinking on this matter, so I hope to present clearer and more detailed thoughts in the future!

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1. I explore this idea more in this article: Why Critiques of 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Fail