Quotes & Sayings About Monism

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art. — Jewel Spears Brooker

I have yet to meet a single person from our culture, no matter what his or her educational background, IQ, and specific training, who had powerful transpersonal experiences and continues to subscribe to the materialistic monism of Western science. — Albert Einstein

The conscious events that we are aware of are physical events in their own right, just as much as the brain events observed in the lab by researchers. If we allow the mental its own existence as a category disjoint from the physical, we will never be able to get it back in. — William Hirstein

Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational. — William James

Solipsism may be logically consistent with present Quantum Mechanics, Monism in the sense of Materialism is not. — Eugene Wigner

This criticism of Wolffian monism is by no means Kant's own accomplishment. In the first introduction to the Critique of Judgment he writes: "Yet it is quite easy to establish, and has in fact been realized for some time, that this attempt to bring unity into that diversity of faculties, though otherwise undertaken in the genuine philosophical spirit, is futile."25 However, if we seek to determine who was the first to have that insight, then both Kant's text and Lehmann's — Anonymous

Thomas Merton, of course, constitutes a special threat to Christians, because he presents himself as a contemplative Christian monk, and his work has already affected the vitals of Roman Catholicism, its monasticism. Shortly before his death, Father Merton wrote an appreciative introduction to a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is the spiritual manual or "Bible" of all Hindus, and one of the foundation blocks of monism or Advaita Vedanta. The Gita, it must be remembered, opposes almost every important teaching of Christianity. His book on the Zen Masters, published posthumously, is also noteworthy, because the entire work is based on a treacherous mistake: the assumption that all the so-called "mystical experiences" in every religion are true. He should have known better. — Seraphim Rose

The Gnostic is a born revolutionary because total rejection is the perfect proclamation of his divine autonomy.

The Greek roots of the Gnosticism of late antiquity are not to be found in Platonic dualism, but rather in Stoic monism.

Christianity and Gnosticism shared the question. Feeling "allogenous" was a common characteristic. The state of "alienation" is an historical constant, but becomes more acute in times of social crisis. "Alienation" is the ground in which either a Romantic Christian or a democratic Gnostic answer germinates. — Nicolas Gomez Davila

Dualism is the closest human feeling, but it is not necessarily the highest human philosophy. On the contrary, all great philosophies have been monistic. Man experiences the world dualistically, but monism is the essence of all human thinking. Philosophy disagrees with dualism. However, this fact does not mean too much, because life, being superior to thought, may not be judged by it. In reality, since we are human beings, we are living two realities. We can deny these two worlds, but we cannot escape from them. Life does not depend too much on our understanding of it. — Alija Izetbegovic

Division and differentiation are the processes by which things are created. Since things are emerging and dissolving all the time, you cannot specify the point when this division will stop. — Liezi