Chapter Glimpses: Chapter 5-Monism vs Dualism

Through the two great errors, the immortality of the soul and Sunday sacredness, Satan will bring the people under his deceptions. - Ellen White, The Great Controversy, pg 588, par. 1.

I have often found this caution bizarrely inconclusive on a first glance, yet upon further investigation it astonishingly makes thorough sense. Man was created by combining two elements, matter and spirit.

(Gen 2:7) And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

The reverse happens in death

(Ecc 12:7) Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

The spirit spoken of is not the ghost-spirit as many are fond of using the word to mean, but is the breath of life and is likened to a software to your bodily hardware. It cannot function without the body. It is merely the breath of life that God gives to all living human beings. A software upon which is indelibly written, through inherited and cultivated acts of life, your character and personality. Neither can the body exist or "be alive" without your spirit.

Both matter and spirit together bring functionality and life to the human. Death is the separation of these two elements.

The belief being challenged is that of stating that a soul or spirit can exist without a body. We have affirmed that this is an impossibility based on God’s own Word. A human is alive and therefore has life capable action and ability so long as the spirit and body are united. Death occurs when these two elements are fragmented.

But say that the spirit could exist without the body. If this were so, then a man could well comfortably go to a glass shop and request a one sided glass, claiming no intention to use the inside of the glass and only needs the outside. It is impossible to have a one sided glass, for no physical object in God's reality is one dimensional. Again, the dualist is as a man that insists on minting a one sided coin. This is an impossibility. Yes, there is a distinction between both sides of the coin, but the dualist takes the distinctions too far. So far in fact that he unwittingly arrives in the realm of unreality.

The Dualist seeks to separate monistic things because they being in rebellion to God’s worldview (Monism) are thereby forced to go into the absurd and espouse a worldview that is of course opposite to that of God. The only alternative being dualism, which is fragmentation and disruption. Notice then the dualist has to begin denying evidence for him to maintain his position, and when someone gets there, they are in a place where they want to separate things that cannot be separated in actual reality. It follows that the only way these monistic things can be separated by a dualist is in unreality.

Pagan thought-forms in the East

As already examined, in God’s reality spirit and matter cannot be separated and still be in existence or of life. Something else of note emerges here too, the pagan notion that everything (every matter) has an original spirit, as Plato concluded. We won’t even get into that deeply but let us say this much, it was taught that all (human) souls - (spirits) were simply shades of the original and came from ‘the world soul’ to which each soul goes back to upon death, only later to be reincarnated. Still preserving the specific identity, except only the soul does not remember any previous life. Giving birth to a cycle of retribution, for to a pagan, the body is for retribution and suffering.

This best developed under Hinduism and partially in original Buddhism. The pagan seeks to work good works as a means of salvation and to do so, forsakes everything in order to reach “nirvana” - nothingness, which was interpreted as being one with the deity.

The (Hindu) priests employed the heathen doctrines of pantheism, nirvana, and transmigration. In pantheism they taught that the Godhead was the sum total of the universe. Material things, as one saw them, did not exist. Every visible object was an illusion, all things were but fleeting manifestations of divinity. They were without essential reality. Only one thing was real — Brahma, the Absolute, the Infinite, the Indescribable, the All. — {Benjamin Wilkinson, Truth Triumphant, P.g. 127}

How similar to western Platonism this is, they both share a spiritualism that expressed contempt against material. But, the easterners added a rather interesting step in their dualism. If being one with the deity is simultaneously being nothing, it only means that the deity is a non-entity. A nonpersonal God is first and foremost an immaterial God…the easterners destroy the personality of God by making God immaterial, the end of which is making God a nonentity.

This is an old fight, in fact it is the oldest fight in the universe. Some of my readers may relate to the context of the following statement.

The book Living Temple is an illustration of this work, the writer of which declared in its support that its teachings were the same as those found in the writings of Mrs. White. Again and again we shall be called to meet the influence of men who are studying sciences of satanic origin, through which Satan is working to make a nonentity of God and of Christ. - Ellen White, Testimonies vol 9, pg 68, par. 1

There are many places we can go to in order to demonstrate where one will very logically end in dualistic pagan thoughtforms. For the best example, let us go back to Plato, because what Plato did was not merely to introduce this thinking into the western mind, but he actually developed it further and turned it into an intellectual system. Because the body is material, it is evil and wicked and useless, it will die. Only the spirit will survive. And for those who contemplate, those who are the thinkers, those who exercise their spirit into perfection, the intellectuals (obviously the likes of Plato) they would not only survive but they shall altogether avoid reincarnation and shall be invited to be with the gods. Rather than the nirvana of the east, in the west Plato taught that these enlightened ones shall become divine….while the stupid and non-intellectual shall receive another body in order through suffering and work, endure retribution. Work is for those not intellectually competent, work is for that dumb body…I believe you can now tell where slavery came from. Slavery is an outgrowth of pagan thoughtform. In the east, this western intellectual elitism was manifested as the caste system.