When I look at the life and work of Benedict Spinoza (1632 – 1677) from the perspective of a Holoramic Panosopher, I see many parallels with my own lifelong inquiries into the relationship of human beings to God and the Universe—intended to heal my fragmented mind and split soul in the Peace and Truth of Wholeness through self-inquiry. This is clear from the title of the first piece he wrote in his mid to late twenties, after he was expelled from his Jewish community and family: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect.
The word emendation here derives from Latin ēmendare ‘to free from errors’, from ē– ‘out’ and mendum ‘fault, mistake, blemish’, related to mendāx ‘lying, deceitful’, the root of mendacious, indicating a chronic inclination toward untruth, beyond occasional dishonesty. Making such intelligent emendations to our cognitive processes is as important in today’s world of ‘fake news’ as it was in Spinoza’s day. For it is a fallacy to believe that computing machines with so-called artificial intelligence (AI) could soon exceed human intelligence. Most significantly, dehumanizing technological development cannot drive economic growth indefinitely.
Even in the 1600s, Spinoza clearly understood that we need to develop a quite new way of thinking about ourselves and the world we live in if we are ever to live in love, peace, and harmony with each other. Nearly three hundred years later in 1946, Einstein made a similar call for clarity, sanity, and peace in an article in the New York Times Magazine. Earlier, in 1929, when the American Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein had asked Einstein whether he believed in God, Einstein replied, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of the world, not in a [personal] God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind.”
Spinoza set out to be free from his cultural conditioning to find the ‘true good’, “which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity”. He first noted that to do so, he would need to adopt a radically new work ethic, quite different from those seeking fame and fortune. As he said, “The mind is … distracted not a little by the pursuit of honours and wealth, particularly when the latter is sought only for its own sake, because it is assumed to be the highest good.”
Spinoza was not only concerned about himself here. For, as an aspiring psychospiritual therapist, he said, “it is part of my happiness to take pains that many others may understand [Nature] as I understand [it].” For with “the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature,” this would enable us “to form a society of the kind that is desirable, so that as many as possible may attain it as easily and surely as possible.”
However, Spinoza did not finish his initial attempt to develop a coherent system of thought, for to do so “is a task far beyond the powers of the human intellect. … So other aids will have to be sought beyond those we use to understand the eternal things and their laws.” This introductory statement of purpose, still unfinished when he died, was eventually published by his friends in Opera Posthuma, which the Vatican soon after placed on its Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, along with Ethics, the unfinished Political Treatise, and the previously published Theological-Political Treatise.
In the event, it was to take another 350 years before evolution could reveal humanity’s place in the Cosmos by starting afresh at the very beginning—at the Divine Origin of the Universe. The result is Integral Relational Logic (IRL), the commonsensical system of thought and reason that we all implicitly use to form concepts and organize our ideas. It is a generalization and extension of the relational model of data that the mathematician Ted Codd of IBM introduced in 1970.
As IRL is nondeductive and holographic, quite different from the mechanistic methods of reasoning that Spinoza inherited from Aristotle, Euclid, and Descartes, I have not been directly influenced by Spinoza’s deductive reasoning in the development of my own semantic modelling methods of the nonlinear psychodynamics of human society, starting with the ancient Greek maxim “Know thyself.” Nevertheless, his ‘geometric method’ paved the way for mathematics to lead us to a universal theory of causality through what I regard as a meta-algebra or taxonomy of taxonomies—as a universal category theory that encompasses all others.
Indeed, because Spinoza left his family to find his True Nature in union with God, his life story can be seen as a particular instance of the universal spiritual journey, which recapitulates the Cosmogonic Cycle, as this schema illustrates. Joseph Campbell mapped out how our split souls can be healed, nearly three hundred years after Spinoza embarked on his quest.
For when Spinoza says that God – as Substance with infinite attributes – causes substances to emerge with particular attributes (like humans), he is describing the Transcultural Cosmogony, known to mystics and sensed by many others through the ages. In Panosophy, the Ultimate Substance, which is indivisible, is the Datum of the Universe, as ‘That which gives or causes’.
Substance derives from Latin substantia ‘being, essence’, literally ‘that which stands under’, a translation of Greek ousiā ‘essential nature of anything’, like psūchē ‘soul’. Going even deeper, parousiā ‘presence; arrival’ is cognate with presence, from Latin præsentia ‘presence’, participle of præesse ‘to be before’, from præ ‘before’ and esse ‘to be’. Etymologically, we can thus see that the Presence of the Divine is ‘before being’ and ‘prior to existence’. So, when we arrive back where we started our journeys in life, there is just Peace, Perfect Peace.
However, without further study of the meanings behind Spinoza’s terms, I don’t yet know how close he came to such an inner understanding. Even though, like me, Spinoza saw that God and the Universe are one (Deus, sive Natura), there has been much uncertainty among intellectuals over the centuries about the depth of Spinoza’s mystical experience, for, like everyone else, he was never separate from the Divine for an instant.
Even though the details of Spinoza’s rigorous rationality are not directly relevant today, a study of the cultural environment in which he formed his naturalistic cosmology could help us with our own endeavours to bring order to the psychosocial chaos humanity is in today. For, just as Spinoza was living at the dawn of the first scientific revolution, since the 1970s the final revolution in science has been unfolding beneath the notice of the ruling authorities and most of the population—freeing reason of the distortions imposed by a materialistic and mechanistic worldview and a divisive monetary way of conducting our business and political affairs.
Spinoza’s Portuguese-Jewish parents Michael and Hanna Deborah d’Espinoza named him Bento ‘blessed’, the surname meaning ‘from a thorny place’. In other languages, Benedict was known in the synagogue as Baruch in Hebrew and as Benedictus in Latin, when he began his writing career as a heresiarch. Michael, born in Portugal about 1588, had moved to Amsterdam about 1622 from Nantes in France. Spinoza’s grandfather Isaac had moved there with his brother Abraham and sister Sara and their families in the early 1590s, escaping the barbarity of the Portuguese Inquisition.
Their ancestors had possibly moved to Portugal from Spain before 1636, when John III and Charles V, Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor (John’s brother-in-law), persuaded a reluctant Pope Paul III to introduce Inquisitional Courts, with John’s uncle Henry, later to become Cardinal and King, as the Grand Inquisitor. So, began a horrendous period of three hundred years of massive social upheaval, documented in at least three Portuguese historiographies in 1852, 1969, and 2013.
Earlier, on 30th March 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella, as de facto Catholic monarchs of a united Spain, issued the Alhambra Decree or Edict of Expulsion, within the framework of the Spanish Inquisition, which Pope Sixtus IV had permitted them to establish fourteen years earlier to protect Catholicism as the one true Christian faith. At the culmination of the centuries-long Christian Reconquista – ending the presence of any Muslim rule on the Iberian Peninsula – Jews were told to convert to Christianity, as conversos, or to leave the country.
Many moved to Portugal, but were not permitted to leave, more for economic reasons than religious ones. Rather, they were ordered to convert to Christianity as ‘New Christians’, often disliked by the ‘Old Christians’, who suspected them of being ‘Crypto-Jews’, disparagingly called Marranos ‘swine’.
These New Christians, when hiding their Jewish faith, had to give up eating kosher meat, circumcising their sons, and conducting customary funerary rituals, for instance. For these public acts would be difficult to maintain under the watchful eyes of their neighbours, who did not hesitate to report them to the Inquisition, which had the power to punish those not rigorously observing the Catholic liturgy. It is pertinent to note that several of Bento’s forebears were tortured, executed, and had their possessions confiscated during the last third of the sixteenth century.
So, when Baruch was going through adolescence in the 1640s, he did so within a Sephardic community that would have been deeply traumatized from a century of abuse that their ancestors had suffered. This, too, must have profoundly affected Spinoza when he was bar mitzvahed, in the pubertal rite of passage in Judaism, after several years studying orthodox Hebrew texts.
As there is no documentary evidence of Spinoza’s thought processes during adolescence, we can just surmise that he was questioning his community’s fundamental beliefs and assumptions, on which its members would base their sense of security and identity in life. Such intelligent critical inquiry would have clearly terrified and angered the Sephardim, rejoicing in practicing traditional rites and rituals within a comparatively accepting social environment; able to conduct their Jewish customs relatively freely within the framework of the Dutch judiciary.
Tensions reached breaking point on 27th July 1656, when Spinoza was publicly excommunicated in his absence at the age of 23 in a crowded synagogue from his Sephardic community for his ‘evil opinions’, ‘abominable heresies’, and ‘monstrous deeds’. The accompanying document of excommunication (ḥērem) stated, in the harshest possible terms, that Blessed Spinoza was to be ostracized, expelled, execrated, and damned, “with the consent of Blessed God and with the consent of this entire holy congregation”.
The cherem went on to say, “Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not forgive him.” Unlike other cherems issued at this time, there could be no redemption.
There is no documentary evidence of the specific offences that led to such vehemence and rage from the lay leaders of Spinoza’s Jewish community. We can just speculate what these might have been from his financial predicament and his treatises and correspondence, as several scholars have done.
Not only was Spinoza banished from his Jewish community. He also had to stop working in the family mercantile business, which he had joined around sixteen when his older brother Isaac died. It seems from the school records that Baruch was not able to complete his formal education, despite being a brilliant scholar. Five years later, in 1654, Spinoza’s father Michael also died. So, at the age of twenty-one, Bento was left to run the debt-laden trading firm with his younger brother Gabriel.
We have no information about what happened to Spinoza next. He seems to have stayed with friends in both Amsterdam and Leiden, where he attended lectures. It is possible that Spinoza boarded for a period with Franciscus van den Enden, who was Spinoza’s Latin teacher and a radical thinker seeking an ‘ideal society’ through a revision of the education system, not unlike Comenius. Spinoza also spent much time in the company of the Collegiants of disaffected Mennonites, Remonstrants, and Quakers, who sought a less dogmatic and non-hierarchical form of Christian worship.
What we do know is that from 1661 to 1663 Spinoza boarded in Rijnsburg near Leiden close to the Collegiants, who had a centre there. He then spent about seven years in Voorburg near the Hague, before moving to the city for the rest of his life, where he had many friends.
Regarding earning a livelihood, Spinoza kept his material needs to a minimum, with his friends, attracted to his calm demeanour and philosophizing, providing a good deal of financial help, like the friends of Charles Sanders Peirce, when he was ostracized by American academia and New England society. Spinoza was also drawn to optics, becoming an expert lens grinder and instrument maker, which Christiaan Huygens greatly admired. In the event, this occupation, perhaps a main source of income, probably led to his early death from the glass dust in the air in his workshop.
Turning now to Spinoza’s writings, I see them as an expression of his True Nature as Wholeness, but written at a time before the necessary conceptual structures had evolved in human consciousness—within the nonmaterial Cosmic Psyche, the vast domain inaccessible to our physical senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
Most significantly, what did Spinoza mean, when he said, in Part IV of Ethics: Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, that humans are never separate from Nature, or “the eternal and infinite being we call God”? Spinoza was inspired by Euclid’s method of proof in Elements of Definitions, Axioms, and Propositions, which he then ‘demonstrated’ in a very strange manner. Ten years after Ethics was posthumously published, Isaac Newton’s The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy followed suit, with no mention of Spinoza.
Natural philosophy at Spinoza’s time was the philosophical study of the physical universe, called ‘nature’, while ignoring any supernatural influence. Similarly, Spinoza excluded the supernatural from his cosmology, as he emphasized in Theological-Political Treatise: Concerning the Freedom of Philosophizing in the State, anonymously published in 1670. Seeking to demonstrate a proper guide in life, freeing people of the dogmas of the sacred texts, Spinoza said that the natural light of reason is far superior to the supernatural light of revelation.
Now, to discover the natural, original meaning of nature, we need to turn to etymology, as the study of the true senses of words, from Greek etumos ‘true, real, actual’. Here, nature derives from Latin nātūra ‘birth’, from nātus, past participle of nāscī ‘to be born’, from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) base *gen– ‘to give birth, beget’, also root of Greek genesis ‘origin, birth’, from which genetics and many similar words are derived.
Similarly, physics derives from Greek phusis ‘nature’, from phuein ‘to bring forth, produce, make to grow’. So, nature in science indicates expressions of Nature, which is ‘supernatural’ at its original moment of birth, as I know from my own experience, on which Panosophy is based. Miracles, as acts of God, are absolutely necessary for the creation of novelty, contrary to what Spinoza asserted.
We see here a prime example of the way that the Western worldview is upside down, placing the cart before the horse; illogically putting second things first. Spinoza made a worthy attempt to correct this aberration. But, as he was living three hundred years before the invention of the stored-program computer – which uses ‘generative AI’ to simulate some aspects of human reason, sometimes from erroneous assumptions – he could not fulfil his life purpose, outlined in Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect.
Furthermore, Spinoza only had twenty years to write about his vision in a foreign language within a broad hostile environment, with a further ten or fifteen years of preliminary critical thinking. In my case, after thirty years of preparation, I have been actively engaged since 1980 in creative writing, seeking to bring a modicum of order to the world of learning, not the least in mathematics, psychology, and business operations and management.
I began when a big bang miraculously erupted in the utmost depths of my psyche, leading me to conduct a thought experiment in which I imagined that I was a computer that switched itself off and on again, so that it had no programs within it, not even a bootstrap program to load the operating system. To lift myself up by my bootstraps, the creative power of Life has given me a small selection of primal concepts in order to get started with the development of the coherent system of thought that is Integral Relational Logic. These emergent bootstrap concepts correspond to Spinoza’s notions of structure, attribute, and mode, with which he began his own reasoning, as revelatory primal concepts.
But, I don’t think there is any benefit in attempting to interpret Spinoza’s terms within the context of the Panosophical lexicon. Even understanding the ambiguities of Spinoza’s terminology is a massive undertaking, as Emilia Giancotti Boscherini has demonstrated in a 1,400-page Lexicon Spinozanum, cross-referenced to the Latin text.
This corresponds to the hyperlinked Glossary of terms used in Panosophy, tracing their roots to their common ancestors in Proto-Indo-European, as much as possible. For, as David Bohm said to me in 1985, we must study the archaeology of language to reveal the true meanings of the words we need to explain what is causing scientists and technologists to drive the pace of scientific discovery and technological development at unprecedented exponential rates of acceleration. We can only understand humanity’s place in the Cosmos when we are free of the distortions of hundreds and thousands of years of fragmented thought, out of touch with Reality.
So, to what extent is Spinoza a kindred spirit and how relevant is his valiant attempt to show that God and Nature are indivisible to resolving the unprecedented existential crises facing humankind today? Well, to explain the relationship of us humans to the Totality of Existence, Spinoza said, “we are … like waves of the sea driven by contrary winds; we toss to and fro unwitting of the issue and of our fate.” That, essentially, is my own worldview. We are all waves and currents on and beneath the surface of multidimensional Ocean of Consciousness, as an extension of Bohm’s notion of an indivisible one-dimensional holomovement underlying the manifest universe, with which he unified quantum and relativity theories.
As our human souls are never separate from the Cosmic Soul – at the still centre of the Ocean, visualized as a hyperball of water – the Genuine Identity of humans is immortal. In contrast, as we humans rise and fall with the movement of the Eternal Ocean, our unique souls are not immortal, as Spinoza declared, to much religious consternation.
However, Spinoza did not seem to understand that we have inseparable Divine and human identities, for he was an extreme rationalist. So, his philosophy was rather one-sided, which is a principal defect of the Western mind, as Carl Jung pointed out, when exploring Eastern mysticism. Because paradoxes are ubiquitous in the world we live in, we can only reveal Truth by starting afresh at the very beginning with the Principle of Unity, as the Primal Axiom, which states Wholeness is the union of all opposites. This includes science and spirituality and mysticism and mathematics, which, when unified in transdisciplinary Panosophy, squeeze philosophy, as a distinct discipline with boundaries, out of existence.
Nevertheless, we can still be inspired by the spirit of Spinoza, who was dedicated to questioning the beliefs of the cultures he lived in no matter how others might respond, even when they viciously attacked him for his wise words. Yet, he still hoped that by finding the ‘true good’ within himself, he would be able to help others to do likewise.
This is particularly important at the present time, with dehumanizing AI taking over our lives, while Earth passes through the eighth mass extinction of land animals during the past half a billion years. In Spinoza’s terms, as Structure is the Ultimate Cause of everything that happens to us in life, we can just trust that the Divine power of Life – emanating directly from the Source, as this schema illustrates – will carry us to where we are all meant to be in the coming months and years.
This means that democracy – as the sovereign power serving the needs of the body politic, which Spinoza advocated – is only viable when all members of the democracy are prophets, speaking directly from the Divine. So, as there will be no banks or stock markets on Earth after humankind becomes extinct, the rational way of living our lives in community at these end times we live in is to pool our skills and financial resources for the benefit of us all in a philanthropic ‘human-loving’ manner.
The word community derives from Latin commūnis ‘shared, common, public’, originally in sense ‘sharing burdens’, from cum ‘together with’ and mūnus ‘office, duty; gift, present’, from mūnare ‘to give, present’. Community is cognate with Sanskrit maitreya ‘friendly, benevolent’ and Pāli mettā ‘loving-kindness’, akin to Buddhist compassion (karunā) and love or charity (agapē) in Christianity.
So, when our lives are based on Love, the Divine Essence we all share, we realize that kindness is our True Nature, for kind is the native English word for nature, having the same root. As the Sufi poet Rumi beautifully put it, “Love is the sea of not-being and there intellect drowns.”