Daily Archives: March 2, 2017

Spinozism (also spelled Spinoza-ism or Spinozaism) is the monist philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza which defines "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, with both matter and thought being attributes of such.

In a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza wrote: "as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken".[1] For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world. According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus sive Natura" (God or Nature) Spinoza meant God was Natura naturans not Natura naturata, that is, "a dynamic nature in action, growing and changing, not a passive or static thing."

In Spinozism, the concept of a personal relationship with God comes from the position that one is a part of an infinite interdependent "organism." Spinoza argued that everything is a derivative of God, interconnected with all of existence. Although humans only experience thought and extension, what happens to one aspect of existence will still affect others. Thus, Spinozism teaches a form of determinism and ecology and supports this as a basis for morality.[citation needed]

Additionally, a core doctrine of Spinozism is that the universe is essentially deterministic. All that happens or will happen could not have unfolded in any other way. Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind attainable. More specifically, he defined this as the ability for the human intellect to intuit knowledge based upon its accumulated understanding of the world around them.

Spinoza's metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications (modes). Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that there is only one substance, which is absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal. From this substance, however, follow an infinite number of attributes (the intellect perceiving an abstract concept or essence) and modes (things actually existing which follow from attributes and modes). He calls this substance "God", or "Nature". In fact, he takes these two terms to be synonymous (in the Latin the phrase he uses is "Deus sive Natura"), but readers often disregard his neutral monism. During his time, this statement was seen as literally equating the existing world with God - which is why he was accused of atheism. For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or, what's the same, Nature, and its modifications (modes).

However, one should keep in mind the neutral monist position. While the natural universe humans experience in both the realm of the mind and the realm of physical reality is part of God, it is only two modes - thought and extension - that are part of infinite modes emanating from God.

Spinoza's doctrine was considered radical at the time he published and he was widely seen as the most infamous atheist-heretic of Europe. His philosophy was part of the philosophic debate in Europe during the Enlightenment, along with Cartesianism. Specifically, Spinoza disagreed with Descartes on substance duality, Descartes' views on the will and the intellect, and the subject of free will. [3]

Spinoza defines "substance" as follows:

This means, essentially, that substance is just whatever can be thought of without relating it to any other idea or thing. For example, if one thinks of a particular object, one thinks of it as a kind of thing, e.g., x is a cat. Substance, on the other hand, is to be conceived of by itself, without understanding it as a particular kind of thing (because it isn't a particular thing at all).

Spinoza defines "attribute" as follows:

From this it can be seen that attributes are related to substance in some way. It is not clear, however, even from Spinoza's direct definition, whether, a) attributes are really the way(s) substance is, or b) attributes are simply ways to understand substance, but not necessarily the ways it really is. Spinoza thinks that there are an infinite number of attributes, but there are two attributes for which Spinoza thinks we can have knowledge. Namely, thought and extension.[5]

The attribute of thought is how substance can be understood to be composed of thoughts, i.e., thinking things. When we understand a particular thing in the universe through the attribute of thought, we are understanding the mode as an idea of something (either another idea, or an object).

The attribute of extension is how substance can be understood to be physically extended in space. Particular things which have breadth and depth (that is, occupy space) are what is meant by extended. It follows from this that if substance and God are identical, in Spinoza's view, and contrary to the traditional conception, God has extension as one of his attributes.

Modes are particular modifications of substance, i.e., particular things in the world. Spinoza gives the following definition:

The argument for there only being one substance (or, more colloquially, one kind of stuff) in the universe occurs in the first fourteen propositions of The Ethics. The following proposition expresses Spinoza's commitment to substance monism:

Spinoza takes this proposition to follow directly from everything he says prior to it. Spinoza's monism is contrasted with Descartes' dualism and Leibniz's pluralism. It allows Spinoza to avoid the problem of interaction between mind and body, which troubled Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy.

The issue of causality and modality (possibility and necessity) in Spinoza's philosophy is contentious.[6] Spinoza's philosophy is, in one sense, thoroughly deterministic (or necessitarian). This can be seen directly from Axiom 3 of The Ethics:

Yet Spinoza seems to make room for a kind of freedom, especially in the fifth and final section of The Ethics, "On the Power of the Intellect, or on Human Freedom":

So Spinoza certainly has a use for the word 'freedom', but he equates "Freedom of Mind" with "blessedness", a notion which is not traditionally associated with freedom of the will at all.

Though the PSR is most commonly associated with Gottfried Leibniz, it is arguably found in its strongest form in Spinoza's philosophy.[7] Within the context of Spinoza's philosophical system, the PSR can be understood to unify causation and explanation.[8] What this means is that for Spinoza, questions regarding the reason why a given phenomenon is the way it is (or exists) are always answerable, and are always answerable in terms of the relevant cause(s). This constitutes a rejection of teleological, or final causation, except possibly in a more restricted sense for human beings.[4][8] Given this, Spinoza's views regarding causality and modality begin to make much more sense.

Spinoza's philosophy contains as a key proposition the notion that mental and physical (thought and extension) phenomena occur in parallel, but without causal interaction between them. He expresses this proposition as follows:

His proof of this proposition is that:

The reason Spinoza thinks the parallelism follows from this axiom is that since the idea we have of each thing requires knowledge of its cause, and this cause must be understood under the same attribute. Further, there is only one substance, so whenever we understand some chain of ideas of things, we understand that the way the ideas are causally related must be the same as the way the things themselves are related, since the ideas and the things are the same modes understood under different attributes.

In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published a condemnation of Spinoza's pantheism, after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was thought to have confessed on his deathbed to being a "Spinozist", which was the equivalent in his time of being called a heretic. Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time, which Immanuel Kant rejected, as he thought that attempts to conceive of transcendent reality would lead to antinomies (statements that could be proven both right and wrong) in thought.

The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy to late eighteenth-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative to materialism, atheism, and deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas strongly appealed to them:

Spinoza's "God or Nature" [Deus sive Natura] provided a living, natural God, in contrast to the Newtonian mechanical "First Cause" or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine." Coleridge and Shelley saw in Spinoza's philosophy a religion of nature[9] and called him the "God-intoxicated Man."[10][11] Spinoza inspired the poet Shelley to write his essay "The Necessity of Atheism."[10]

Spinoza was considered to be an atheist because he used the word "God" [Deus] to signify a concept that was different from that of traditional JudeoChristian monotheism. "Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law...."[12] Thus, Spinoza's cool, indifferent God [13] differs from the concept of an anthropomorphic, fatherly God who cares about humanity.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers believed that Spinoza, in his philosophical system, did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence.[14] Even God under the attributes of thought and extension cannot be identified strictly with our world. That world is of course "divisible"; it has parts. But Spinoza insists that "no attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided" (Which means that one cannot conceive an attribute in a way that leads to division of substance), and that "a substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible" (Ethics, Part I, Propositions 12 and 13).[15] Following this logic, our world should be considered as a mode under two attributes of thought and extension. Therefore, the pantheist formula "One and All" would apply to Spinoza only if the "One" preserves its transcendence and the "All" were not interpreted as the totality of finite things.[14]

French philosopher Martial Guroult suggested the term "panentheism", rather than "pantheism" to describe Spinozas view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, "in" God. Not only do finite things have God as their cause; they cannot be conceived without God.[15] In other words, the world is a subset of God. American philosopher Charles Hartshorne, on the other hand, suggested the term "Classical Pantheism" to describe Spinoza's philosophy.[16]

Similarities between Spinoza's philosophy and Eastern philosophical traditions have been discussed by many authorities. The 19th-century German Sanskritist Theodore Goldstcker was one of the early figures to notice the similarities between Spinoza's religious conceptions and the Vedanta tradition of India, writing that Spinoza's thought was "... a western system of philosophy which occupies a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus, did his biography not satisfy us that he was wholly unacquainted with their doctrines... We mean the philosophy of Spinoza, a man whose very life is a picture of that moral purity and intellectual indifference to the transitory charms of this world, which is the constant longing of the true Vedanta philosopher... comparing the fundamental ideas of both we should have no difficulty in proving that, had Spinoza been a Hindu, his system would in all probability mark a last phase of the Vedanta philosophy."[17][18]

It has been said that Spinozism is similar to the Hindu doctrines of Samkhya and Yoga. Though within the various existing Indian traditions there exist many traditions which astonishingly had such similar doctrines from ages, out of which most similar and well known are the Kashmiri Shaivism and Nath tradition, apart from already existing Samkhya and Yoga.[19]

Max Muller, in his lectures, noted the striking similarities between Vedanta and the system of Spinoza, saying "the Brahman, as conceived in the Upanishads and defined by Sankara, is clearly the same as Spinoza's 'Substantia'."[20]Helena Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society also compared Spinoza's religious thought to Vedanta, writing in an unfinished essay "As to Spinozas Deitynatura naturansconceived in his attributes simply and alone; and the same Deityas natura naturata or as conceived in the endless series of modifications or correlations, the direct outflowing results from the properties of these attributes, it is the Vedantic Deity pure and simple."[21]

Continued here:
Spinozism - Wikipedia

By Bro. Peter Dimond

Since the practice of Yoga is rampant in Novus Ordo religious orders and also secular institutions such as the YMCA, its important to quickly discuss whats wrong with it. Isnt it just stretching? No. I will quote a Novus Ordo priest, Fr. James Manjackal, who is very knowledgeable about the subject:

The word Yoga means union, the goal of Yoga is to unite ones transitory (temporary) self, JIVA with the infinite BRAHMAN, the Hindu concept of God. This God is not a personal God, but it is an impersonal spiritual substance which is one with nature and cosmos. Brahman is an impersonal divine substance that pervades, envelopes and underlies everything. Yoga has its roots in the Hindu Upanishads, which is as old as 1.000 BC, and it tells about Yoga thus, unite the light within you with the light of Brahman. The absolute is within one self says the Chandogya Upanishads, TAT TUAM ASI or THOU ART THAT. The Divine dwells within each one of us through His microcosmic representative, the individual self called Jiva. In the Bhagavad Gita, the lord Krishna describes the Jiva as my own eternal portion, and the joy of Yoga comes to yogi who is one with Brahman. In A.D. 150, the yogi Patanjali explained the eight ways that leads the Yoga practices from ignorance to enlightenment the eight ways are like a staircase They are self-control (yama), religious observance (niyama), postures (asana), breathing exercises (pranayama), sense control (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), deep contemplation (dhyana), enlightenment (samadhi). It is interesting to note, here, that postures and breathing- exercises, often considered to be the whole of Yoga in the West, are steps 3 and 4 towards union with Brahman! Yoga is not only an elaborate system of physical exercises, it is a spiritual discipline, purporting to lead the soul to samadhi, total union with the divine being. Samadhi is the state in which the natural and the divine become one, man and God become one without any difference (Brad Scott: Exercise or religious practice? Yoga: What the teacher never taught you in that Hatha Yoga class in the Watchman Expositor Vol. 18, No. 2, 2001). (http://www.jmanjackal.net/eng/engyoga.htm)

The idea that the divine is to be sought for and found within oneself is, of course, occultic. The idea that the divine permeates all of creation the idea upon which the practice of Yoga is based and toward which it is geared is Pantheism and reprobated by Vatican I.

Pope Pius IX, First Vatican Council, Session 3, Chap. 1, On God the Creator of all things: The holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church believes and confesses that there is one, true, living God, Creator and Lord of heaven and earth who, although He is one, singular, altogether simple and unchangeable spiritual substance, must be proclaimed distinct in reality and essence from the world (Denzinger 1782.)

God is distinct in reality and essence from His creation. Pantheism teaches that God and the universe are one.

Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge (# 7), March 14, 1937: Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. (The Papal Encyclicals, Vol. 3 (1903-1939), p. 526.)

As an aside, John Paul II himself taught this condemned pantheistic notion in his encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem (50.3), May 18, 1986. He stated:

The Word became flesh. The Incarnation of God the Son signifies the taking up into unity not only of human nature, but in this human nature, in a sense, of everything that is flesh: the whole of humanity, the entire visible and material world. The Incarnation, then, also has a cosmic significance, a cosmic dimension. (The Encyclicals of John Paul II, p. 316.)

Notice that as he was expounding (as usual) on his heretical belief that Christ is united to each and every man, in this case John Paul II decided to take it one step farther: not only has Christ united Himself with every man, he says, but with the entire visible and material world. According to Antipope John Paul II, the grass, trees, rivers, lakes, oceans, etc. were all united with Christ by virtue of the Incarnation. He develops the thought in the next sentence of this encyclical.

John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem (50.3), May 18, 1986: The first-born of all creation, becoming incarnate in the individual humanity of Christ, unites himself in some way with the entire reality of man, which is also flesh and in this reality with all flesh, with the whole of creation. (The Encyclicals of John Paul II, p. 316.)

Antipope John Paul II was a Pantheist. In Pantheism, the world and God are a singlething.

A Catholic Dictionary, by Attwater: Pantheism A false philosophy which consists in confounding God with the world. According to some the world is absorbed by God (Indian pantheists, Spinoza); others teach that God is absorbed by the world of which he is the force and the life But all [Pantheists] seek to establish an identity of substance between God and the world. (A Catholic Dictionary, by Donald Attwater, p. 366.)

The Catholic Encyclopedia: Pantheism, the view according to which God and the world are one. (The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 11, New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1911, p. 447.)

Since, as we saw above, the practice of Yoga is based on the idea of union with the divine within oneself and within all of creation, the practice of Yoga is therefore an expression of belief in the condemned pantheistic heresy that God and His creation are a single thing. Truly practicing Yoga, therefore, is practicing a false religion and expressing belief in a false god. The conservative Novus Ordo priest I quoted above, who is outraged by the rampant practice of Yoga in Christian and Catholic circles, summed the situation up quite well:

The practice of Yoga is pagan at best, and occult at worst. This is the religion of antichrist and for the first time in history it is being widely practiced throughout the Western world and America. It is ridiculous that even yogi masters wearing a Cross or a Christian symbol deceive people saying that Yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism and say that it is only accepting the other cultures. Some have masked Yoga with Christian gestures and call it Christian Yoga. Here it is not a question of accepting the culture of other people, it is a question of accepting another religion... (http://www.jmanjackal.net/eng/engyoga.htm)

Yet, the Monastery of the Holy Spirit offers a special Fundamentals of Yoga and Christianity Retreat. (http://www.trappist.net/newweb/enews_03_18_05.html)

The Carmelite Spiritual Center in Darien, Illinois offered a Living Your Light Yoga Retreat. (http://www.carmelitespiritualcenter.org/living-light.asp?a=retreats)

The Catholic Ecclesia Center in Girard, Pennsylvania which is approved by the Diocese in which it resides, as I personally confirmed includes on its staff a Yoga instructor!

Michael Plasha is a credentialed Yoga Therapist and a Yoga Alliance registered teacher He has also trained in Zen and Vipassana meditation. Since 1980 Michael has taught over 3,000 classes in yoga and meditation Yoga is a non-dogmatic approach to union with the Divine presence within everyone. (http://www.ecclesiacenter.org/staff.htm)

Notice that the Ecclesia Center admits that Yoga is an approach to the Divine presence within everyone, thus proving that its rooted in and directed toward Pantheism and the occult. The website also states that Ecclesia Center provides spiritual renewal to persons of all faiths. (http://www.ecclesiacenter.org/index.htm) This is total apostasy, fully approved by the Diocese.

Other examples could be given, but the evil practice of Yoga is so rampant at Catholic monasteries that Budget Travel Online actually advertises for it!

More than 2,000 monasteries, abbeys, and spiritual retreat centers are scattered throughout the United States and Canada. About 80 percent are linked to a religious order. But most take a more ecumenical, interfaith approach to accommodate this increased interest. In the old days if you were a Catholic retreat center, you advertised yourself that way. Now most of them want everybody to come, Stone says. Many places offer yoga, Buddhist thought, prayers of all sorts. (http://www.budgettravelonline.com/bt-dyn/content/article/2005/06/04/AR2005060400391.html)

All of this is more proof of the Great Apostasy. As even the Novus Ordo priest said: this is the religion of antichrist

Read the original here:
What Is Wrong With Yoga? - Catholic Church