Nice! Good arguments! Yeah I was getting hints of historicism and Utopianism from Azarian as well. All very well intended, I’m sure. But it did feel like the Greater Good in that scenario reduced humanity to something like ants. I’m glad you called attention to that.

As for the comparison of monist vs dualist pantheisms, I feel your treatment was fair enough. You highlighted (one of the many) dualities that are the knives’ edge that we exist on. Are we thinking, feeling, moral, living creatures or are we unthinking, uncaring, amoral, physical and chemical lumps of matter? Are we Nature/Gaia/God or are we human?

I take the non-dualist view; we are either, both, and neither. All possibilities exist, in some way. Yet “possibility”, in the most general and abstract sense that I can fathom, can only “be possible” in the vacuum created by a duality. Therefore, if the Universe/Nature is truly infinite and pure creative potential… then inherent in its nature as infinite, it must create its opposite. In order for It to freely play Its games, it has to give itself limitations and rules.

While I guess that sort of makes me a monist, I still allow for (indeed require by definition) the dualist view in order for anything to be possible at all. I love the paradox of calling this view “non-dualist”, but pretty much everything about non-dualism is paradoxically insightful like that 😊