In the Beginning Was Strange to think I am the universe and everything in it too. I call out. No voice returns other than my echo. So evidently, I am my own cause and, worse, horribly alone. Bored, I fall into a deep sleep and dream of many things: wave-like particles in plasma; diverse organisms, vertebrates and invertebrates; metals and gases; all kinds of finite bodies with perishable qualities, competing for succession and place and rank. Time passed and, with time, entro

Is Spinoza’s Pantheistic Ontology a Template for Authoritarianism? OVERVIEW: ● The pantheist ontology of Baruch Spinoza (b.1632 – d.1677) is an attempt to deny the accountability of political evil. ● Spinoza’s instinct for statist control and his distrust of the common man are displayed in Theological-Political Treatise (published 1670). His masterwork, Ethics (published posthumously in 1677), is a bold attempt (in the guise of ontology) to classify minds and bodies as attrib

Spinoza, Panentheism, and Mystical Judaism This paper elucidates Spinoza's panentheism by situating it within its Jewish mystical and philosophical contexts, particularly drawing on Kabbalistic and Hasidic traditions. It argues that Spinoza's conception of God as an infinite substance encompassing and transcending the world resists reductive pantheistic interpretations. Instead, Spinoza presents a nuanced metaphysics where modes exist in God without exhausting divine essence,

Letter to Iyov Before I had to chance to complete my creation I was cast down by the rebel angels and made to suffer this, my exile. Creation evolved and I was able to converse with man in the ear of his mind. It was I who hid in the fiery tree and called out to the shepherd. I spoke to my people in thunder. There we were, in shadows, in the fog of misunderstanding. I was there when my people fought