The metaphysical premise of Ambitheism poses the existence of an eternal Monad. This Monad can be understood in secular terms, as the Universe, multiverse, Omniverse, or related concepts, or it can be understood in religious or spiritual terms, as one of the many names of God. To the Ambitheist, it’s unimportant what we call it, because human terms and concepts will never sufficiently describe it, though we can approximate it the best we can from our various angles.
The Ambitheist understands the Monad to ultimately be One, in the manner of monism, but to express itself in nested pairs of duality. This makes Ambitheism a rendition of substance, qualified, or dialectical monism, with an associated property or attribute dualism.
Ambitheists hold that everything is reducible firstly to attributes or properties of, and finally to, a single Substance. Attributes come in pairs, such as ideas and matter. These almost fundamental pairs, or attributes, can be separated further into dual modalities of ideas and matter, such as communism and capitalism, or lightness and heaviness.
The Monad is fundamentally without space or time– it is eternal–, but it has the attributes of space and time as a sort of illusory epiphenomena. These epiphenomena themselves present us modal dimensions, each having a duality, or pole, to them: past and future, forward and back, and so on. The unity of the Monad is in its eternity, and its duality is in its processes.
There is a finite amount of material, but an infinite amount of time. The interaction between these facts gives us eternity, in the form of finite infinity– a hypersphere–, as everything is bound to repeat itself forever under such conditions. Because all energy is ultimately convertible, all energy is bound to share the same worldlines in this process, as in a knot of string. Looking at the process as a whole, we ultimately find stillness and oneness.
There is no nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. There is only everything, in its fullest or emptiest– that is, its most condensed or dissipated– forms. Its most condensed form is the singularity, or Source, and its most dissipated is the thermodynamic heat death on the edges of the pleroma. Because of this, approximation of, or proximity to, the Source results in fullness and richness of truth, love, beauty, and goodness. Descent from the Source results in emptiness and poverty of truth, love, beauty, and goodness.
Everything phenomenal comes from a prior primordial Source, a descent into formal matter from prime matter– from the singularity to the Big Bang–, and everything noumenal does the best it can to ascend as spirit back to that Source in a Big Crunch.
Time moves in more than one direction, and at least in two directions, forward and backward, but possibly also sideways, into imaginary time. The forward direction of time gives us entropy, the falling apart, decaying, dissipation, and destruction of everything in the universe, its descent. The backward direction of time gives us syntropy, the coming together, growing, coalescence, and creation of things, its ascent.
The backward direction of time, which gives rise to life in its clash with the forward direction, is an organizing force, which provides the emergent order and intelligent design found in nature. The forward direction, the cause of death, breaks things up into smaller parts. The forward direction presents us the natural laws of physics, while the backward direction presents to us the anomalies of spirit in biology. Their clash presents us with a spiraling, holographic experience of being alive. The universe spirals and changes, as do its galaxies, solar and lunar systems.
As we go throughout life on this growing planet, we find that some things lead to positive, enriching results, while others lead to negative, depleting ones. As all life does, we seek out the results that we favor, and avoid those for which we have a distaste.
To better understand and predict favorable circumstances, we search for the truth, to enrich our understanding of the modes and attributes of the Monad, and to try to live our best in accordance with it. We create a map of existence to help us navigate.
We know not to confuse our current understanding of the truth– our working truth– for the truth in fact, or absolute truth. That is, we don’t “confuse our map for the territory.” Instead, we work always to approximate the truth to the best of our abilities. Every new thought or experience is cause for some adjustment to what we already seem to know.
To understand the truth, we put to use the various forms of logic, including the inductive logic found in empirical science, the deductive logic of rational philosophy, and the abductive logic of mysticism. We find these forms of logic and areas of knowledge to each solve different areas of the puzzle. We know that the Universe, Monad, or God exists in some form or another through these forms of logic and their practices.
Universe happens to describe the situation best in inductive, empirical, or scientific terms, when the phenomenal reality of the objective world is studied a posteriori, or after the fact. God describes noumenal ideality as it emerges as different levels of consciousness into the future, as deduced in rational, philosophical approaches toward subjectivity. Monad describes extrasensory and extraconceptual existence of the Absolute, as understood through the abductive logic of the mystic. We know the characteristics of the physical Universe through sensory experience, those of the nous of God through rational anticipation, and the Substance of the Monad through intuition.
Virtue is the manner of approaching or approximating the Source. As we fill in the gaps of our maps– in order to be virtuous–, we are always playing Marco Polo with God or the Universe. We scream out “Marco!”– or “Where are you, happiness?”– and listen for God to cry back, “Polo!” for “I am here.” Our game of Marco Polo is much like walking tightrope. To either side there are large margins of error– excess and deficiency–, while virtues such as prudence and temperance are found toward the middle. The middle– virtue– is a hard place to be. The hardest, perhaps. To be virtuous, we act according to truth.
The more truth we discover, the more virtuous we are, and the higher we move in consciousness and more conscientious we can become. This occurs primarily through individual contemplation and study, or experiences in the world, and secondarily through communication, mutual understanding, and reciprocity.
In our pursuit of truth and habituation to virtue, we find that working with others is essential. Each person has a piece of the puzzle of existence, and as a subjective being, important parts of this puzzle depending entirely upon their revelation. This gives rise to the importance of communication.
To accomplish the goals which truth presents us with, we must act virtuously, and this is no less true for the association than it is for the individual. Associations bring many benefits, and the best of them balance or synthesize the goals of individuals to bring about greater returns.
However, it is a dangerous mistake to believe that others have similarly raised their consciousness if that is not the case. An individual with a concern for all the world, extending their care to an individual who concerns themselves only with family or self, easily falls victim to their own naïveté. Association, in and of itself, is not enough, and its participants must be willing and dedicated for it to go anywhere.
Successfully navigating such pressures gives rise to lower and higher orders of consciousness, and for differences in individual personality, as well as between associations and cultures. This reflects evolutionary struggles in the animal kingdom for survival. It is the cause of elite status and leadership within human societies, which, enabled by geographic surplus, gives rise to illegitimate government.
It is without doubt that we evolved from processes of natural selection, among others. As hunting and gathering homosapiens, we reached a peak of egalitarianism among primates. But the need for more, and the syntropic tendencies and niches in nature for order, eventually gave rise to political authority. Eventually, the Aryan or Indo-European man would establish himself sovereign over people of other races. This was not a result of especially advanced genes, so much as a culture adapted to harsh conditions, that emphasized procreation, social cohesion, and economic production, and centered largely around animal domestication. Because it took such coordinated effort to establish the force to rule over others– and likely depended on climatic pressures to even attempt–, but gave so much return, it was a rare occurrence, but had lasting impact, with bloodlines being tended through millennia.
It is a mistake to simply want to remove those who have established their dominance, particularly without establishing some other form of order. This is because Nature demands, and rewards, order. This makes it possible for well-organized minorities to establish dominance over majorities. However, such a process seems to mature when all fill this niche together, as when comparatively beta homosapien males ousted their homoerectus alphas. This limits the terms of governments, and ensures an evolutionary anacyclosis. It is why democratic governments began to overpower monarchical ones, and why Ambiarchy– the rule of all– will replace majoritarian democracy. It is a higher approximation of, or proximity to, the Source.
Back to Article Index