Introduction

What it's all about.

The challenges we face today are overwhelming. Our climate, the condition for life on this planet, is degrading at an alarming rate and worsening already existing epidemics of violence and poverty. Far from offering solutions to these problems, our political systems are exacerbating them. They are overwhelmed by the influence of corporations invested in the continued destruction of our planet and increasingly unconcerned with the opinions of the people they claim to represent. Instead, we are offered the illusion of security in exchange for compliance with this suicidal status quo. As the climate crisis progresses, the divide between the hyper-surveilled “green zones” and the militarized “red zones” will grow clearer, as will the gruesome purpose of our ever-expanding technological capabilities: to preserve the few in luxury while the masses are slaughtered beyond the walls.

How can we avert this catastrophe? Trying to effect positive change via an increasingly captured and unrepresentative government seems doomed to fail. Non-profits and NGOs are merely appendages of a capitalist system that is as exploitative as it is inescapable. Even charity work seems to be nothing more than a subsidy for the already-rich and powerful. The ineffectiveness of non-violence will become the inevitability of violence, and perhaps even the violent destruction of the status quo. But what should take its place? What, ultimately, lies at the root of our problems? What does a better world look like?

The work I share on this platform will begin to answer these questions. It is meant to be practical, that is, it is meant to ultimately change our world. But action is a fruit that grows from our understanding of the world, and incomplete understanding leads to ineffective action. So, to know how to change the concrete world of our everyday experience, we must understand how it is an expression of a deeper principle. 

Considered in isolation, this principle will seem very abstract and remote from the life and death concerns we ultimately hope to address, but once this principle is grasped, it can be seen just below the surface of everything with which we are familiar. Just so, the failure to grasp this principle will be found at the root of all our problems.

This principle concerns the nature of reality, what things really are and what it means to be. Most people, most of the time, think of reality as a kind of backdrop for an assemblage of things. There are countless things of all shapes and sizes, and some things are (maybe) (also) people. These things are all basically self-contained and unconnected except when they act on one another. Each thing is what it is and isn’t anything else, and it’s possible to tell them apart.

This view of reality isn’t untrue, but it isn’t completely true either. Perhaps the easiest way to see why is to consider how such separate things could come to influence each other, that is, how anything can reach across the divide to something else. There are a couple famous demonstrations of this problem. Most directly related to the problem as I’ve just presented it is Hume’s claim that causality isn’t something we observe, something that “exists,” but rather something that we’ve learned to infer from a lifetime of seeing things move when other things bump into them. You can’t see causality; you can only see one thing moving, then see it touching another thing, then see that second thing moving. Causality is a kind of narrative we apply to explain what we saw. Now, in terms of living our lives and predicting what will happen when things interact, this narrative of causality has been perfectly serviceable. But any scientist, if they’re being honest about what science is capable of, will admit that what we call the laws of physics or nature are only inferences arrived at from observation. 

Kant took this argument and flipped it on its head. If we can’t observe causality, then causality must be something that the human observer somehow applies to reality. In other words, the only way reality can make sense to us is as things with causal relationships. What reality might actually be, in itself, is impossible for us to know. So, Hume thought causality was something we took from reality, while Kant thought it was something we put onto reality, but neither could say how actual things actually interact with each other, only that they seem to for us.

Here is a different formulation of the same problem: the so-called Is-Ought Problem. This asks how a fact about the world “out there” can give us “in here” a reason to act. How can a mere fact “make” us move? Or can it? Moore claimed that there are absolutely no facts - not even “moral” facts like “killing is wrong”, not even if we know for certain that they’re true - that prevent us from asking whether they should be otherwise. This is all to say that facts alone, without our agreement with them, are not enough to move us; they can’t crash into us like a billiard ball and send us spinning off. So where does the motion come from? What, finally, moves us?

Alan Watts writes: “Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.”

As he suggests, the problems caused by thinking of things as separate disappear when we think of them as one thing, or parts of one thing. This isn’t even scientifically controversial anymore; for example, it’s not wrong or somehow “woo woo” to say that the billiards table and all the balls on it can be thought of as an energy system, part of the total energy field of the universe in which matter can become energy and vice versa. Viewed this way, the two billiard balls aren’t moving each other; it is rather the universe moving in the shape of two billiard balls, just as we would move the fingers of our hands.

The Is-Ought Problem can be solved in the same way. Me, my reasons for action, my action, and the thing I act upon can correctly be thought of as expressions of a single system. My relationship to food is that I eat it, but if something I try to eat turns out not to be food, my reasons for trying to eat it will vanish, and I myself will no longer be a person that tries to eat that thing. All of the elements of the system are entangled with each other and change together.

So, reality is the backdrop for an assemblage of things. But it is also, equally, one infinite thing with no outside. One thing is different from another thing, but it is also the same thing. Problems arise when you claim one part of these statements to be true but not the other, or fail to understand how both are true at the same time.

The work I share on this platform will attempt to explain the nature of this fundamental principle of reality, as well as the profound effects that understanding can have on our ethics and our politics. I’ll say it again: the topic of this work is practical. It discusses, in fact, the sum of all practice. A metaphysics of separateness will produce - has produced - an ethics and a politics of separateness. What comes after must flow from a metaphysics of wholeness in which not only the difference but also the sameness between thing and thing, self and other, is grasped. So while this work will deal with abstractions, they will nevertheless prove to be concrete in their expression as new forms of interpersonal relationships and political structures. It will deal with mysticism that is fully rational, and how self-interest and universal love turn out to be the same thing. It will deal with all the apparent paradoxes of the world’s great religious teachers and demonstrate how they’re not actually paradoxes or even hyperbole, but the best attempts we’ve had to describe the practical means to escape personal and collective suffering. Finally, this work is about the connections between things, how you can find yourself in otherness, how the outside is inside, and how heaven and hell are the same place, and so is the world we live in.

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Thanks for reading.