Christogenesis, Part 6: Monad-ology, Spiritual Seeing, Hearing, and Knowing

Christogenesis, Part 6:

Monad-ology, Spiritual Seeing, Hearing, and Knowing

by Joe Masterleo

Those who were seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music —Neitzche

We begin Part 6 referencing the above cosmogram, quote, and the following synthesis statement: A true spirit-science synthesis arises when spiritual seeing discerns spirit in matter, spiritual hearing attunes to the call of becoming, and spiritual knowing unites reason and wisdom. This integrated approach allows inquiry to participate in the universe’s awakening toward Teilhard’s vision of coherence, complexity, and compassion, and Thomas Berry’s calling for a New Universe Story.

Prophets schooled in wisdom traditions of old addressed the masses primarily in stories, koans, geometric patterns, allegories, or parables which functioned as a filter that both reveals and conceals truths hidden to the separation consciousness (dualistic thinking) of ordinary awareness. They did so in their time and tradition, and continue doing so today, calling everyone to see, hear, and know universal truths as they have come to see them in insights of universal application. Significantly, such means of conveying integrated truths also test the spiritual condition, maturity, and receptivity of listeners and readers.

One of the many prophets from Teilhard’s religious tradition was the Cosmic Christ, who taught in parables, that it might be fulfilled  which was spoken of by the prophet, saying, ‘I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret since the foundation of the world (Matt. 13:35)

However, the “prophet” referred to recorded in verse above is not Jesus, but Asaph, a prominent Levite musician, singer, and seer appointed by Israel’s King David, recorded in Old Testament scrolls (1 Chronicles). Asaph is credited with writing twelve Psalms and served as a prophetic worship leader. The above verse in Matthew paraphrases Asaph’s Psalm 78:2.

Asaph, whose name means “he who gathers,” was noted for his ability to blend deep, personal reflections on faith with musical praise, participating in the Universe’s awakening toward coherence and compassion through his musical gift. Meaning, his skill was in “gathering” (coupling) necessary complements together via the “the Muse,” defined among the ancients as someone, usually feminine, who provides creative inspiration to a person of the arts. In pre-Abrahamic cultures most deities were women. In Greek and Roman mythology the Muses consisted of nine goddesses of inspiration who presided over arts and sciences. In Asaph’s case, musical inspirations were deeply tied to prayer and synagogue chants — tasked with matching music with words, notes, instruments, and vocals — the dual-aspect monads of worship, song, and praise.

Monads defined

A monad is an indivisible, non-material unit of reality, functioning as the fundamental building block of all existence, a simple substance not made of parts that cannot be divided or destroyed naturally — here posited as consciousness or God or spirit (seen here as equivalent). A dual-aspect monad proposes that reality is composed of a single, fundamental, and underlying substance that possesses both a mental aspect (consciousness/spirit) and a physical aspect (matter/energy). Teilhard referred to them as radial energy and tangential energy repectively. Radial energy is the inner/psychic-spiritual force, wheras tangential energy is the outer/mechanical-physical force. The two aspects are considered inseparable and parallel manifestations of the same reality, rather than two substances that interact.

Think of them as one room viewed through two windows, or a coin with a face on one side (qualia), and numbers on the other (quanta).

Monads exist in simultaneous time containing past, present, and future simultaneously. Simultaneous time is the liminal space between worlds, a threshold place laden with the past and pregnant with the future, all folded within the monad. Monads are psychic/spiritual in nature rather than material, mind-like substances that are conscious. While creation is a space-time permanent state, monads are generated by continual fulgurations from a higher-order vibratory realm (divinity), like flashes of lightning (L. root, fulger = lightning). To fulgurate means “to flash or dart like lightning,” descriptive of a leopard that darts suddenly toward its prey, also used in medicine to describe blasts of electricity applied during surgical procedures. Along spiritual lines, the term is associated with light energy (illuminations), describing flashes of insight, inspiration, or awareness in the creative process, such that Asaph or any artist or gifted or spiritually informed person might experience. Gottfried Leibniz popularized the term in the early 18th century to describe the indivisible, immaterial “atoms of nature” annexing the visible and invisible worlds, addressing the mind-body problem from Cartesian dualism.

The idea of music as a divine intermediary is a timeless theme, a bridge between the visible and invisible worlds. Like music, the personal integration and universal synthesis processes (convergence) are whole-making endeavors, gathering apparent differences and contaries together in the human spirit-soul as dual-aspect monads. Music can be viewed a dual-apect monad because it represents a single unified phenomenon (sound entity or “monad”) that simultaneously possesses inseparable physical and mental/emotional aspects. This framework posits music as a “synthesis dance,” a foundational experience where the physical vibration (matter/energy) and the psychological interpretation (meaning/emotion) are two sides of the same, inseparable coin. Such is beyond duality, where a larger system merges the binary components of music, like melody, harmony, and rhythm, into a single experience.

Pauli & Jung: The Woodward & Bernstein of Separation-Gate Conspiracy 

The term “dual-aspect monad” was hypothesized by physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychologist Carl Jung who collaborated and coined the term in the 1950’s. The term proposes that mind and matter are complementary aspects of single, underlying reality, or monad consisting of two contraries as integral parts. This hypothesis further posits these two parts emerge from a third psychophysically neutral plane. Process wise, this notion is similar to Teilhard’s vision that coupled spirit and matter, or Einstein’s theory that coupled light energy with matter, just as Asaph coupled music with a variety of expressive musical forms, or parables couple inner and outer worlds.

Eventually, in a true spirit-science synthesis, all disciplines must gather and center around the “music of the spheres” whose mystery code must be cracked in an inclusive spirit-science synthesis. Koans, parables, and dual-aspect monads express the paradoxical nature of the ethereal “music” that co-inheres the material spheres. Namely, the metaphysical quality (qualia) of the created order, one uniting quantum physics with classical physics (quanta), or Teilhard’s radial and tangential energy as seamlessly one and undivided. Spiritualized seeing, hearing, and knowing (unitive consciousness) is that which comes from the realm of the undivided in the God-of-the-Whole.

Monads and Holons: Sweet Music of the Spheres

Compared to sense-bound, or materialist/scientific consciousness that tends to divide and subdivide in analysis, unitive or spiritual consciousness always unifies, bringing together the parts (holons) into the wholes (holarchies) they nest in. As a scientist theologian, Teilhard was gifted with a unique capacity for analysis and synthesis, seeing the parts (holons) interconnecting with the whole (holarchy) they embed in. Those who fulfill his spirit-science vision must be likewise gifted.

Asaph knew that words without music, or, as revealed in the ancient scrolls, matter (flesh) without Spirit, are like clouds without wind and rain (Pr. 25:14), in themselves empty without their dual-natured complements and counterparts. As a woman cannot be half-pregnant, half a dual-aspect monad is not a dual-natured monad at all.

Hence, lyrics without music is a poem, not a song.  Ditto, science without religion.

Recall Einstein’s oft quoted saying, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Ironic, from a spiritually blind and deaf physicist who did not see or believe in a personal God, only a remote, deistic one. Praise a compassionate and inclusive God-of-the-Whole who often manifests through the gifts, talents, and genius of persons unaware of their Monadic Source.

Had Einstein a cursory understanding of his ancestral religious scrolls, mystical, and/or wisdom traditions, or attained their requisite spiritual illuminations (liminal “downloads”) along the way, he might have been privy to the greatest of all God’s “secret things,” the union of spirit and matter. Einstein did prove light = matter alright. But was one step short of seeing that light = Spirit (or consciousness), and therefore unable to conclude that if light = matter, and light = spirit, then by the same token (monad) it must also follow that spirit = matter, because things equal to the same things are equal to each other. Reasoning thusly, such makes the entire created order sacred— divinity (consciousness/spirit) appearing as everything, masquerading as the substance of their unique forms everywhere, at all scales.

Today, this view is known as panpsychism or panentheism.

Einstein’s unparalleled genius bought us closer to that realization, however, not knowing that the light energy that becomes matter and converts back into it again is indeed spiritual in nature. By contrast, Teilhard gleaned from his religious tradition whose scrolls declare that God is Light, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, first and last. Holy writ is saturated with light throughout, Genesis to Revelation. Evidenced universally in CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation), light was the very first thing divinity created and will be the last thing divinity transforms, transmutes, and transfigures in Omega, what his tradition refers to as the Pleroma or heavenly “City of Light” (Rev. 21-22).

Physics & Metaphysics: Old friends Who Never Met

Just think how close Pauli-Jung, Tesla, Teilhard, and Einstein were to nuancing same, as they were all contemporaries who never met. Had they met and collaborated 75 years ago, this innovative quartet might have completed Teilhard’s spirit-science vision, and/or Einstein’s unified field theory, as the psycho-physical dots were there to connect, and with Nobel accolades appertaining. Einstein’s famous quote updated and reframed might then have read as follows: “Science without seeing energy as spirit become matter is blind, and religion without science to affirm it is lame.” Everything in its time.

It is for those in our time to make that definitive statement, and with corroborating spirit-science evidence.

     Lessons from the past clearly indicate that the quality of things (qualia) cannot be quantified, especially love. One must posit that such is by divine decree. That doesn’t mean qualia aren’t nonetheless real, just because the materialist High Priests of Scientism have dogmatically denied them their due since the 17th century. But it does mean they cannot be measure by science’s empirically limited methods and means. Arguably, as experiences qualia are more real in ways far transcending anything quantifiable, or that thoughts and words can ever contain, know, or express. In the God-of-the-Whole holarchy, the heart was made to know things the mind will never understand. For certain, Einstein knows that now. On Earth, he was God’s wonderful gift to the world in immeasurable ways, explaning it to us via equations, the symbolic expression of an empirically inexpressable Monad.

Nonetheless, even blind squirrels manage to find a nut now and then.

Likewise, in their time physicists have discovered the laws of nature throughout history, even if their cosmic Source remains unrealized as a conscious experience. For others, pursuing the creative Source of discovery or invention is much more interesting than the discoveries or inventions themselves. Among them philosophers, religious, and cosmologists.

Truth be told, dual-aspect monads are fractals that contain the whole in each part, the entire ocean contained within a single raindrop in the “within of things,” where Teilhard, the prophets, and mystics said it could be found. Science begins and ends in mystery, the latter an expansive generative energy and information field that contains and animates the former, and does not give up its secrets easily. Such is what makes the Source of creation indeed more fascinating than creation itself in any of its measurable parts, or the sum of them taken as a whole. The methodology? Equal parts rational, transrational, intutive, and dual-aspect perception and thought are the keys. Only those equipped with unitive consciousness who can see, hear, and know accordingly can crack the code, and ultimately unite what those in science and religion in themselves can never do.

To reiterate, in monad-ology, one part of the dual-aspect monad always contains the whole (radial/quantum energy), while the other part contains as aspect of the whose push-pull tensions express as (matter/tangential energy) in the field of space-time. And their nexus is a singularity, the liminal “sweet-spot” (psychophysically neutral space) between being and non-being, the visible and invisible worlds from which all things emerge.

Thus defines a spirit-science synthesis or unified field, without religion or science collapsing into the other, naming their primary unity and simple substance as light, and its properties that manifest as consciousness = spirit = information. It’s fascinating that key religious creation stories place light (or blinding radiance) as the very first event, the  causal force that triggers the transition from a timeless void into a physical reality — Egyptian, Hindu, Greek, and Zoroastrian. In that way, their creation stories mirror the Big Bang Theory, where the universe begins as a singularity (point of infinite density and heat) that suddenly expands into a flash of radiation, eventually cooling to form space, time, and matter as we recognize them today. Such is the psychophysical pattern, transformative energy dynamic, and counter-balancing forces at play behind creation in both outer and inner worlds.

Nobel Prize in Peace and Physics Up for Grabs

It seems the Nobel Prize science committee has some work to do making room for Spiritual Physics, because a few pioneering candidates representing the cutting-edge of this new spirit-science will sooner emerge to tell the rest of the story, seeing the Monad (God-of-the-Whole) expressing in dual-aspect monads everywhere. Such is now plausible, explained in ways which must now include qualia, giving pride of place to same as Universal Source. Nothing is more natural than the supernatural, or more supernatural than the natural. Religion and science are ontological bedfellows. Religion is the physics we’re just beginning to understand, coaxial dual-aspect monads nesting in a seamless, undivided whole in space-time, quark to quasar (see the video short on top).

Try as they might, one cannot tell the New Universe Story in its entirety without recognizing their spirit-science coupling in spiritualized human consciousness (see Christogenesis, Part 5: The Spiritualization of Consciousness, listed on this website).

Summarizing: According to many religious traditions, Creation began by transforming uncreated light (Spirit) into created light and matter in the Big Bang event from the start. Billions of evolutionary years later the awareness of divinity in creation began to dawn on humans, recorded in Vedic and Upanishad records 3,000 years ago. “Seer” Asap saw it circa 1000 BCE, uniting inspirations from the Muse (music) with words, vocals, and instruments. Unitive awareness  accelerated in the First Axial Age 800-200 BCE, peaking around 500 BCE. Around 6-4 BCE, the prophets, seers, and healers of all religious traditions began correcting and healing humanity’s third-eye blindness. Namely, binary splintered-vision that causes subject/object splits in perception that dominate the prevailing scientist/materialist (Scientism) view that splits and silos disciplines, a limitation remedied only by spiritual consciousness — seeing, hearing, and knowing. This religious trend was followed by the medieval mystics, who via the spiritual disciplines, experienced the oneness of all things.  The Second Axial Age began in the mid-20th century when Nikola Tesla intuited that “everything is the light” in the early 1900’s. In the 1950’s Teilhard theorized that spirit and matter were one and undivided in the “heart of matter, about the same time Pauli-Jung hypothesized them as dual-natured monads, and Einstein scientifically proved it via theorems and equations.

While by nature mankind’s inherent separation-consciousness scatters, the God-of-the-Whole remains, like Asaph, steadfastly the He that gathers, inspiring the work of all who gather in his service. The latter see, hear, and know in wholes, rescuing human thought and being from its limitations in separation consciousness that has evolved over deep time by degrees. To use an apropos ancient term, its the Muse (creative spirit) at work uniting all things — music and lyrics, arts and sciences, spirit and matter, particle and wave, space and time, and uncreated light via the quantum world healing binary plagued human perception and thought. The mystery of the far-off has always been hidden in the near, fast closing the gap in awareness between spirit and matter telling a New Universe Story toward a more unified world.

The present is saturated with the past, and pregnant with the future, gathering all things into itself as one.

We end where we began this healing column as follows: A true spirit-science synthesis arises when spiritual seeing discerns spirit in matter, spiritual hearing attunes to the call of becoming, and spiritual knowing unites reason and wisdom. This integrated approach allows inquiry to participate in the universe’s awakening toward Teilhard’s vision of coherence, complexity, and compassion as imaged in the cosmogram at the top. And in this new consciousness, to fulfill Thomas Berry’s mandate to tell the New Universe Story for our times.

Quite soon, some similarly illuminated individual, synthesis duo, or group will follow in the evolutionary footsteps of all who have gone before them, equipping others to to see, hear, and know in ways that tell the whole story, overcoming native separation consciousness that has hindered its long-awaited narration.

And then, to know that Omega and the Pleroma are nearby about to consummate all things.

Until then, the mystery shall remain a parable as spoken by an ancient prophet, revealed to those who can see it, concealed to those who cannot, as it should be:

When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer, and the upper like the lower; and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female . . . then you shall enter my Father’s domain.

 About the Author

Joseph C. Masterleo, LCSW-DCSW, is a clinical social worker in private practice in Syracuse NY, and Rockledge FL. His half-century of service in the mental health care field includes faith-based counseling and psychotherapy, with an emphasis on psycho-spiritual integration. His subspecialty involves developing a novel paradigm for the synthesis of science, religion, and psychology, identifying the energy and geometric patterns that connect the quantum world with space-time, inner and outer worlds. His model explains how spirit and matter can co-exist as two facets of one reality in a unified field, dissolving the walls of partition between previously siloed disciplines. Inspired by the writings of Thomas Merton (ecumenism), Teilhard de Chardin (synthesis), Thomas Berry (ecotheology), Nikola Telsa (electromagnetism), Richard Rohr (Cosmic Christ), Ilia Delio (christogenesis) and others, his objective is to tell a new, future-looking story for the Ecozoic Age, one that forms a connecting bridge between the biblical story of creation, modern science, and ancient cosmologies. His columns on these and related subjects have appeared on websites such as The Center for Christogenesis, Progressive Christianity, and in newsprint via The Goodnews Paper, the Syracuse Post Standard, and the Syracuse Sports Magazine, where he comments on sports as reflecting the best and worst of American character and culture. Further information about Joe and his Spirit-Science model can be found in his book, The Ambient Christ, the Untold Story of God in Science, Scripture, and Spirituality, listed on Amazon Books, Barnes & Noble, and on his website www.joeknowsgod.com