This is a post I started writing years ago. It is again relevant to my current theological work, so I’m going to try to finish it.

After I wrote about 1, 0, ∞ in response to something Getzel said about Buddhism, I was talking to Jason and he said, basically:

“Yeah that’s great. Only that’s not what one means.”

How upsetting.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you’ve got it right with zero and infinity. But one doesn’t fit.”

“But… sure it does…” but I was scrambling to figure out how I could prove this.

“No, because one implies other. It implies a distinction from something else. It’s not all encompassing unity, its unity of something in the face of something else.”

Then he had to go. And I was left to ponder whether I’d made a horrible (in my mind) mistake and should give up amateur philosophizing altogether and go be a farmer somewhere.

Today I read something that brought me back to the question and gives me new confidence that I might be in someway not incorrect about my understanding of the essential sameness of One, Zero and Infinity. I was reading the 4th installment of a series of lessons on daily prayers, Pray and Mean It written by Cantor Jack Chomsky of Congregation Tifereth Israel of Columbus Ohio. This installment was on the Aleinu prayer in which we, before leaving our prayer service and going out into the world, acknowledge our obligation and renew our commitment to pay homage to HaKadosh Boruch Hu, give thanks for and acknowledgment to our special relationship with The Creator, and express a hope that one day all peoples will be united in acknowledgment of The One True God. Lots of people have moral issues with the content of this prayer. I am not one of them… and I am not going to go into that right now. But the last line, which has always struck me as extraordinarily significant, struck me particularly sharply on this occasion:

“Bayom HaHu Yihieh Adonai Echad uShemo Echad”

“On that day, God will be One and God’s Name will be One.”

In this vision, on the day when everyone unites together in praise of Adonai, then the words that we say in the Shema, that God is One, will actually be true. In True Unity, when everything, everything is united, you have a ONE that is not as distinct from another. The true Echad, the ONEness of God is the ONEness of everything, ein od… there is nothing else.

To my mind, this is evokes Spinoza. As I understand it, Spinoza’s vision of God was the unity of everything, the universe itself as a unified conscious entity. This is God. Of course, Spinoza is condemned by many in the Jewish world as a pantheist and therefore an atheist. If everything is God, then nothing is God. This objection is similar to Jason’s desire to distinguish 1 from 0 and ∞, which is perhaps the root of a deep problem people have with theology. There is a strong desire to separate God from not-God, to be able to hold up God and point and identify “This, and not that, is God.” This is reflected in attitudes of both theists and non-theists alike. For theists, they are comforted by the idea of God as a discrete being. For non-theists, they are comforted by the notion that all theists are invested in this idea of a discrete being, Whose existence they can easily deny. The imaginary invisible friend named God which may just as well be the Our Noodly Master, The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

My view is a bit different from Spinoza’s, or at least differently focused. I’m less concerned with the entirety of the natural world or universe, and more concerned with the conscious aspect, the self-regarding existence part. The macro-scale principle of Being contemplating Itself, of which I believe we, as humans, are a microcosmic reflection. My sense is that the experience which we call God originates in something akin to the unification of all consciousness of SELF, which is comprised of the collective consciousness of humanity and something beyond that, some larger intentionality, pattern-maker, dot-connector, that is the consciousness of the universe.

There is a more detailed and fleshed out version of this theological vision in the works, which also includes insights into the practical elements of religion and prayer, and why this theology isn’t necessarily cold, intellectual and emotionless when approached properly… but this is not the space for it. Not yet.

Coming back to 1, to unity, this 1 doesn’t have to be distinct from, in the face of, anything else. You could try to say that it is the conscious as distinct from the non-conscious, but the distinction is irrelevant. What the 1 here signifies, rather than a demarkation, is the melding of seemingly distinct elements into a unified whole… a whole that is infinite, and at the same time empty and clear. It is SELF and it is lack of self. Boundaryless connection, radical honesty, self seeing self with nothing in the way.

This is actually going somewhere, don’t worry.