Episode 3: Getting to Know Baruch Spinoza

I was amazed that I had never heard of Spinoza. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he's "one of the most important philosophers…of the early modern period." Spinoza spent a lot of time analyzing biblical and philosophical works, and he wrote a treatise called Ethics which challenges the traditionally accepted ideas surrounding the nature of God, humans, and the universe.

According to Spinoza, God is the original Substance of the universe, and from this Substance comes all else. He details his thinking in a very logical way, and the way he describes it really clicks with me. It never really made sense to me to see God as an anthropomorphic father figure, with a host of angels and saints, answering prayers and sorting people into Heaven and Hell groups when they die. I've had the notion of God as an integral part of everything and everyone for many years, but I've never heard anyone describe that thought as well as Spinoza.

Spinoza paid for his way of thinking with his life, so to speak. He grew up in a Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam. As a young man, he became interested in the writings of René Descartes and Francis Bacon, and he soon found himself questioning the validity of the teachings of his Jewish elders. This led to him being banned from the community at the age of 24 for the rest of his life.

He moved around quite a bit after that, working as a lens grinder and publishing philosophical treatises mostly anonymously. He knew that the religious and politically ambitious would consider his writings a threat to their rule over Europe at the time, so he was very careful with what he published. Otherwise he was content, free to follow his own path of spiritual enlightenment until he died in 1677. (You can read more about Spinoza at https://thegreatthinkers.org/spinoza/biography/).

My own interpretation of Baruch Spinoza's ideas goes like this:

Although we don't know what came before, we do know that the universe we live in was created billions of years ago with a Big Bang. Flowing from that was everything that the universe contains—it cannot be otherwise. Part of that flow was the original Energy that led to the explosion. That Energy is equivalent to Baruch's Substance. It is part and parcel of every existing person, place, and thing inhabiting this universe. Everything, from a chair to a tree to a human, is composed of atoms. Atoms are composed of smaller particles, and between and among those particles is this Energy. It is what connects us to every other thing in this universe. We are all made of the original Energy and particles from that first moment of existence of the universe.

The way I see it is that there is literally nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes got that right.

But instead of that being a message of despair, I find it very uplifting. You are no different from me, and I am no different from the chair I'm sitting on. We were all born during that fiery Big Bang, and we are all connected for eternity by the stardust within us.

I find this especially comforting since I lost my mother a year ago. I can now feel her energy around and within me, like she’s never left. I’ve always been a part of her, and she’ll always be a part of me. 

Have you ever thought about that connection between yourself and the rest of the universe, how every star and every planet and every organism originated from the exact same ball of matter that created this earth and us humans? Meditate on that for a bit, and you may find that it's humbling and satisfying at the same time.