Spirituality: Panentheism 101

Good evening Lord. I've been thinking of the conversation Kirk started last week. A lot of interesting view points but I'll stick to my comment that people with high levels of serotonin being more susceptible to religious/spiritual experience. Kirk rightly pointed out that that fact would make him more skeptical about the existence of a supreme being not less. In my case I came to belief in a god of my understanding years before my serotonin levels were artificially boosted by SSRI's.
  I call you a figment of my imagination, yet I believe in you wholeheartedly. I have no objective proof of your existence. Nothing I can show somebody and say "See, here is God." The closest metaphor I can come up with is mathematics. The highest I've ever progressed in that field was a semester of Pre-Calc and another in Statistics. Most of which I barely understood enough to keep up with the class. I needed lots of tutoring. But someone with a strong understanding of mathematics can go places I can barely imagine.  I believe that the same may be true of spirituality. Some may just get it. others may not and others might need a lot of tutoring to begin to approach a transcendental experience. To prime the pump so to speak.What say you.

An interesting question, Michael. Let's go back to basics for an answer. We have in the past defined God as how the universe works, Yes?

 Sure, that's my basic working definition.

So next we ask where does the universe exist? I believe you and I settled on the form of  God called panentheism: 

Theism vs Panentheism

“Panentheism” is a constructed word composed of the English equivalents of the Greek terms “pan”, meaning all, “en”, meaning in, and “theism”, meaning God. Panentheism understands God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world. It offers an increasingly popular alternative to traditional theism and pantheism. Panentheism seeks to avoid both isolating God from the world as traditional theism often does and identifying God with the world as pantheism does. Traditional theistic systems emphasize the difference between God and the world while panentheism stresses God's active presence in the world. Pantheism emphasizes God's presence in the world but panentheism maintains the identity and significance of the non-divine. Anticipations of panentheistic understandings of God have occurred in both philosophical and theological writings throughout history (Hartshorne and Reese 1953; Cooper, 2006). However, a rich diversity of panentheistic understandings has developed in the past two centuries primarily in Christian traditions responding to scientific thought (Clayton and Peacocke 2004) - Definition from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Right we agree that a definition of you needs to include that you are of the world (universe) while simultaneously transcending the universe.In other words physical and non-physical. The way I see this is that it has to occur on two level the physical and the spiritual.

So let us define our terms spiritual and physical. Would you agree that the physical is the world of your senses and those devices that extend your senses beyond the limitations of your bodies?


Yes, we have discussed this before. I understand the spiritual to be the intangible portion of our universe, The realm of emotion, thought, understanding and imagination and perhaps Carl Jung's concept of collective unconscious. This is where we meet. In that spiritual realm of imagination. I ask my questions, you provide answers but nothing beyond what I can't know. It would be much easier if you could just give me the lottery numbers. So you don't work independent of my imagination, which makes it difficult to believe in an objective GOD. Though some folks do and I wonder if my experience is different from theirs. I seem to have to jump through rational hoops to believe in you yet I feel your presence as a physical entity. Fully alive, fully formed with personality, a sense of humor, and deep, abiding compassion for physical life. Even omnipotent despite all the evidence to the contrary. That's where faith comes in. Because I do feel your intangible physical presence here in our universe it is easy to have faith.

So back to your original question. Some people just "get it" some get it with a bit work such as meditation and yoga, others can be brought to understanding through rationality and some are just not ready yet. But all will eventually understand. There is no separation from me, I am the alpha and omega, the yin the yang. the material and immaterial. The only separation that exists is the result of your individual freedom of choice.