Working Toward a Panentheistic New Thought
By C. Alan Anderson

Delivered at the Society for the Study of Metaphysical Religion session, July 18, 1997, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

The program says that my presentation is called "Working Toward a Panentheistic New Thought." Well, what I'm really here to talk about is love, and I think that you'll quickly see that love has everything in the world to do with panentheism.

Since panENtheism is not exactly a household word yet (though Deb and I are working on it), I'll begin by defining it. PanENtheism is the notion that all is in God and God is in all; in other words, that the universe is God's body. The word has been around since 1828, when Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832) coined it for his own philosophy. Krause was trying to mediate between the extremes of conventional theism, which emphasized a personal God who had created the world but did not include it within his own being; and pantheism, which rendered God and the world indistinguishable. We have a good illustration of the panENtheistic worldview in the words of David Ray Griffin, "if God is the soul of the universe, that all-inclusive creative unification which makes the many finite things into a unity, then neither God nor the world can be understood apart from the other."1 So panENtheism says that God and we are a one made up of many.

What has this to do with love? Love, whether human or divine, is an experience that requires "two to tango." In other words, there are a lover and a beloved, in relation to the other. Moreover, there must be freedom to accept or reject love. Some forms of pantheism, applying the term broadly, as Huston Smith accepts,2 require that there be only one entity, God or Godhead or emptiness or void.3

It doesn't take much thinking to realize that if God loved even one other entity, or if one human being loved another human being, that theory would fall apart. On the other hand, to be distinct from God means to have a perspective other than God's. If it were true that God is all, God would have to be, in exactly the same way at the same time, both God's unique perspective and all the other unique perspectives (divine schizophrenia!) Some people say that God is not divided but somehow is individualized or individuated as myself, but this apparently is a meaningless claim, since no one can explain how it could be. Other forms of pantheism say that all the parts of the world together make God, if you even want to bother to call it God, and some would prefer to call it nontheism. Some advocates of such positions are not even willing to reason philosophically and logically, and so it is impossible to hold a discussion; we must agree to disagree. David Griffin and Huston Smith attempted such a discussion, and though they did come together on a number of issues, they fell apart over the issue of logic.4 But I am not here primarily to talk about pantheism; I am here to show how panENtheism is a logical and powerful central position for New Thought to take in assuming its leadership role for spirituality in the twenty-first century. Indeed, it is the only position that even attempts to synergize both theistic and pantheistic approaches, to create a metaphysical middle way.

PanENtheism generally is associated with two other P-words: process and personalism. Process thought is derived in part from quantum physics. It holds that reality is activity, energy, experience. An experience is not a thing in the sense of a continuing self-same something; it is, rather, an occurrence, a happening, an event, and--getting ahead of myself for a moment--a mind. We are used to thinking of the terms process and outcome as opposites. In this instance, however, the opposite of process is substance, the old, static view of the universe. Process is dynamic, is constant change. In a process view, the actions are basic, and things are just collections of actions.

Personalism, the other p-word, is a philosophy that "considers personality the supreme value and the key to the meaning of reality."5 In other words, person is the ultimate category in terms of which everything is to be understood. Personal does not mean in philosophy what it means in common parlance: something for one's private use, such as a monogram, or a diary. Nor does it correspond to traditional religious use, such as the expression "my personal Savior." Nor does it mean a lesser appearance of one's underlying self.

Philosophically understood, a person is a self, an experience, that is self-conscious, rational, and purposive. Human beings are persons, dolphins and other highly developed animals may be persons, angels presumably are persons, and God is the supreme person, not simply personal as we apprehend God, but personal in Godself. Divine personality has nothing of the pettiness, unreliability, capriciousness, and other imperfections of human personality, often associated with anthropomorphic views of God as a giant human being. God is morally perfect, utterly reliable, and completely loving. To experience God as unconditional love is to experience God as a person. Things cannot love.

To say that God is the ultimate person is to say that God has such qualities of self-consciousness, rationality, and purposiveness as are required to keep track of every part of the universe and to offer each part the most helpful guidance. A so-called intelligent computer terminal can be impersonal, but not an intelligent God. Whatever we think about God, we assume some sort of cosmic order; now we realize that that order makes sense only if there is a high-order, benevolent, self-conscious, lovingly giving intelligence coordinating it. That is what we mean by divine personality, by saying that God is the divine person, whose body is the universe. A body is simply the collection of subordinate minds (experiences) that cluster around a supervising mind (like groupies around a rock star, whom they gladly would serve).

Process philosophy is also called panexperientialism, meaning that all is experience. The most famous process philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), accepted the finding of physics that nature is made up of momentary bursts of energy. He concluded that interpreting these bursts or events not as lifeless, but as living, enabled him to understand them much better. However, Whitehead still was unable to explain how an event was able to depart from the pattern found in earlier events. So he introduced into his system of thought the personal God to select from the vast field of possibilities those that were appropriate for each event in question. If there ever had been only a field of possibilities or potentialities, there never would have been anything else. A divine actuality within whom the potentialities reside has to select them and offer them to the momentarily-developing experiences.

Process thought often is referred to as process-relational. This emphasizes that nothing exists in isolation. The most important relationship of all is the relationship between God and the world that is God's body, and "God so loved the world that he gave . . ." So with process thought as with panENtheism, we are talking about love.

Why should New Thought adapt panENtheism rather than pantheism or traditional theism?6 I suggest that the pantheistic or nontheistic affirmation of the allness of God is (first) an impediment to New Thought's spreading among millions of theistic Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and (second) an understandable, yet unnecessary, unfortunate, and incoherent attempt to deal adequately with some important problems. It is essentially an overreaction to the great inadequacies of traditional theism, which has offered enormously inadequate portrayals of God as a petty, capricious tyrant. I thoroughly sympathize with our founders who rebelled against such views. They were unaware of more adequate understandings of divine personality, some of which were barely known in their days, yet demand our attention now. I can easily understand why they affirmed an impersonal God, regardless of whether they merely meant impartial or intended to follow Eastern and Western mystical experience.

There appears to be widespread belief that mystical experience can directly supply knowledge. However, some eminent thinkers maintain that mystical experience requires rational reflection on it in order to produce knowledge (even if the reflection takes place so shortly following the experience as to be confused with it). I believe that those thinkers are correct.

On the other hand, the experiences both of love and of ethics demand an "other," a second party. This does not mean that the "other" is separated from God. The great insight of panENtheism is that the "other" is within God, yet never separated from God, never identical with God. God's influence is in each experience. It is just playing with words to say that the other is God somehow appearing or manifesting or individuating as the other. It nullifies free will. An other is a different, unique perspective. If there are two or more perspectives, there are two or more entities, two or more experiences. Anything identical with something is that something; anything not identical with something is not that something, no matter whether we call it God, void, or Mickey Mouse. Stephen Covey7 puts it rather well when he says, "If two of us see things exactly the same way, one of us is unnecessary." Covey is talking about valuing diversity, and it is our diverse perspectives that make up God's body. God still has a mind of his own, as we would say colloquially, better expressed in terms of realistic idealism as God is a mind of God's own. I have a body, but I am not my body. Similarly, God has a body, but God is not God's body.

Mystics often claim that the ineffable ultimate and we are indistinguishable. Many people who do not think of themselves as mystics have had an experience of universal oneness, the highest order of perception. I do not mean to question the genuineness of these experiences, only the interpretations of them. It is easy to say that God is all, but it is impossible to explain it in any rationally adequate way. It requires God's both being the unique perspective that is mine and also being the unique perspective that is God's. One may draw an analogy with a bay as part of an ocean, but the bay has no free will and no life as a totality, whereas I do. It makes great sense to say that I am in God, but it makes no sense to say that I literally am God.

I have summed up the process panENtheistic approach in a formula: past + divinely-given possibilities + free choice = new creation.8 This is the way that reality always has worked and always will work in every dimension. This audacious claim is what metaphysics is all about: to say what universally could not be otherwise. While the formula itself is my work, what it says is the result of the thinking of some of the greatest minds ever to exist.

With this understanding, we can state other important ideas in process or experiential terms. The Christ is the divinely-offered initial aim or first perfectly-oriented beginning of a response to the past. Notions such as the subconscious, the Law, and Karma, refer to the parts of the past that are most relevant for us to choose either to continue or to depart from. To the extent that we adopt positive expectations, we make the past our ally as we modify it by our momentary choices, working in conjunction with God's influence rather than against it. Healing, whether of mind, body, pocketbook, or relationships, is the moment-by-moment building up of such a positive past that it is only a small step to full acceptance of the transformation constantly offered by God.

When I assert that panENtheism is the single best solution, I do not mean to imply any intolerance for people espousing other outlooks. But reality is as it is, and only one explanation of the foundations of everything can be the most fully adequate one. At the same time, I freely grant that no human formulation can do full justice to all reality, that our understandings are approximations of truth. Nevertheless, we should strive for ever-closer approximations of truth in all our understandings.

In closing, we have seen love as a relationship, illustrative of all relationships, all experiences, to understand which is to grasp the creative pattern of everything. We also have seen love as the essence of God's giving the initial aims, the Christ mind needed in order for any actuality to exist. We have seen the synergy of the thought of many fine minds creating a system of metaphysics that takes into account the current developments in science as well as longstanding religious traditions. Process thought and personalism meet in panENtheism to form a middle way where we can all come together and move forward together under the guidance of the God whose name is love.

Guest, thanks for your interest in and information about panENtheism. I have been aware of the concept, intuitively, since I first began to think about the god-concept. I have been aware of the word since I heard the former Domican priest, Matthew Fox speak of it, in Toronto, in the early 1970's. Have you seen the stuff I have been writing about it, here?

yes, thanks Lindsay. I am reading your posts now.