iMurphy

Ontology is the branch of philisophy that seeks to answer “What is there?” or “What is real?” These may seem like straight-forward questions, but consider things like Mathematics or The Spirit of Christmas. Are they real? How do you determine what is really real? Most cultures, religions and philosophies can be assessed by how they answer these questions. Traditionally, the West has been labeled Dualistic, that is, considering that there are two fundamental kinds of things in the universe (matter and spirit), while the East has been called Monistic, considering there to be only one thing at heart (the Tao or Brahman). I think that they are both right, but for the wrong reasons.

In the West, we inherited the wonderful traditions of the Hebrews and then foisted upon them the Greek’s errand nonsense. Jewish tradition maintained that a person is his or her body, that the breath was given to man by God and that as long as so animated, he or she was as living soul. Words like soul, mind and heart also mean breath, kidney and wisdom in Hebrew. When someone died, they didn’t have an inner “Casper the Friendly Ghost” float off somewhere: they were simply dead. Sheol, Hebrew hell, was simply an extended metaphor for the nothingness of the grave. It’s grey, monotone description indicates that death was empty and void. The word in Genesis 2:7 where Man becomes a living “soul” is rendered “creature” twelve verses later.

Greek philosophers, who presupposed no God, saw abstract concepts as having some reality beyond the physical. If everyone knows that right triangle obey the Pythagorean theorem, yet only perfectly in the mind, then the mind must be a kind of different thing from crummy, hand measured triangles. The New Testament was written in Greek because it was the lingua franca of the day, but now we’ve taken the pagan etymologies of the word to be what first century Jews were thinking. We are merely perpetuating Greek Dualism.

In the East, the ideas that everything is an expression of the Tao or Brahman, helped people remember that they are their body, not that they have a body. Never mind that God will resurrect everyone, then judge them: we have to have our bodies to exist. God is uncreated, however, and though the word doesn’t fit, He is the only thing of a different substance than everything else. Therein lies the correct definition of Dualism.