Why should we care about panentheism? Because it offers us an opportunity to think differently about the relationship between our conscious, experiential, and spiritual selves on the one hand and human beings as conceived by the reigning paradigms in cognitive science and neuroscience on the other; the reigning paradigm being just an expression of methodological and metaphysical naturalism. As we will see, panentheism also allows us to think differently about our relationship to the universe as a whole.

The reigning paradigm in cognitive science and neuroscience is mechanistic, as in computationalism or biological mechanisms—what John Searle calls biological naturalism. He asserts that given biological naturalism, the scientific study of consciousness requires two steps: first, discover the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) of the entire field of conscious experience (not just some particular subset such as visual experience), and second go from this NCC to a discovery of the actual biological causal mechanisms that give rise to conscious experience. In his 2004 article “Biological Naturalism,” this is what Searle says about the future prospects of biological naturalism among scientists and philosophers:

It is worth pointing out that practicing neurobiologists of my acquaintance, such as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman and Cristof Koch, implicitly or explicitly accept a version of what I have been calling biological naturalism. They look to the operations of the brain to find an explanation of consciousness. It will probably take a long time before Biological Naturalism is generally accepted by the academic profession because we follow a long tradition of teaching our students the mistaken view that this is a philosophical problem of impossible difficulty. But notice that we have to train our students to think there is an impossible mystery as to how neuronal processes could cause conscious states. It is not a view that follows naturally either from reflecting on one's own experiences or from studying brain operations. Once we overcome the mistakes of the tradition, I think the facts will fall naturally in to place. (Searle , 14; emphasis added)

Whether we are talking about action, cognition, or conscious experience, the idea is that cognitive neuroscience will discover mechanisms that explain the essential features of human beings. But herein we shall focus on conscious experience proper, because that is typically considered the experiential essence of what it is to be human and it provides a route to a type of panentheism, as we shall see.

Of course, nothing in either the sciences, humanities, or religious traditions necessarily commits one to any particular ontological interpretation or metaphysical commitment about the nature of self or reality, but nonetheless such metaphysical paradigms do frequently and fervently coalesce. And the reigning paradigm in the natural sciences of human beings is clear: we are sophisticated machines of one sort or another. Many coming from the humanities or spiritual traditions find this conception of human beings alienating and reductive, whereas many coming from scientific traditions find the other traditions to be something akin to myths, fairy tales, or other comforting fictions. The same holds true of course for competing conceptions of the entire universe of which we are a part.

In a world clearly suffering from an overabundance of disunity it would be nice if the scientific enterprise and the other traditions could somehow be engaged in the same project. After all, it is only relatively recently in the history of humanity that science, philosophy, theology, and religion have been rendered asunder. Some people worry that, at least in the case of human consciousness and our place in the universe, this Enlightenment‐generated split has thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Of course whether or not some degree of reunification is possible depends on exactly how we conceive of science one the hand and the humanities and religion (broadly construed) on the other. If science is just methodological naturalism plus metaphysical naturalism, and spiritual/religious traditions are defined as explorations of the supernatural realm at best constrained by scientific discoveries, then the rift between the Western intellectual engine of the Enlightenment and the heart and soul of humanity shall remain. That is, if science and religion (again broadly defined) are either in direct conflict or “non‐overlapping magisteria” then there is little hope for a renewal of vows in the great factions of the human endeavor to understand ourselves and the nature of reality.

Pantheism might argue that if God is just nature then the hope for unity has been achieved. It is trivially true that if God is defined as nature then science now becomes an exploration of God, that is, religion. There are many scientists and practitioners of the science and religion game who try to sell pantheism these days. The titles of their books say it all: Stuart Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred: A New Vision of Science, Reason and Religion (2010); Ursula Goodenough's The Sacred Depths of Nature (2000); Loyal Rue's Nature Is Enough (2012); Diamuid O'Murchu's Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics (2004).

These latest proponents of pantheism are all concerned about the alienation and anomie created by the scientific paradigm/Enlightenment and they seek to re‐enchant the world by emphasizing the “holism,” “emergence,” and “complexity” in nature. The hope is that pushing back on unwarranted reductionism and mechanistic thinking in the sciences will help re‐enchant nature and make the existentially lonely human feel “more at home in the universe,” as Kauffman puts it. Perhaps this does work for some people, but leaving aside the many uses of terms such as “holism” and leaving aside how accurate such claims are, it seems that pantheism has not become a best seller for the public at large. In short, pantheism appears not to have made a dent in the alienation, and anomie in question. After all, at the end of the day, according to pantheists, the only thing that exists is spacetime and its contents. Few of these proponents of pantheism deny the basics of metaphysical naturalism, such as that matter as traditionally conceived is fundamental. And it is important to note that very few of these “New Pantheists” deal in any detailed way with the hard problem or generation problem (GP) of conscious experience: if matter is fundamental why/how does conscious experience emerge? We will return to this question shortly, but again, humans are most identified with their conscious selves.

Perhaps you the reader do not consider yourself religious in any way or could care less about disunity, alienation, and anomie or any other psycho‐socio‐political consequences of the Enlightenment. Nonetheless there is another motivation to care about rapprochement if you have any beliefs, such as those about the nature of conscious experience, spiritual beliefs, and so on, that you worry can't be squared with methodological or metaphysical naturalism. That is, many of us hope to form worldviews that are reasonably complete and consistent. Therefore, many of us want to know where the line is between scientific investigation and scientism.

There is at least in principle one theological view that does bring science and those other traditions back together in some way. The view is called panentheism, and it is defined as follows:

Panentheism considers God and the world to be inter‐related with the world being in God and God being in the world. It offers an increasingly popular alternative to both traditional theism and pantheism. Panentheism seeks to avoid either isolating God from the world as traditional theism often does or identifying God with the world as pantheism does. (Culp, )

Given panentheism, then obviously there is some nontrivial and noneliminativist sense in which science, theology, and religion are exploring the same reality. Of course, there are going to be many different varieties of panentheism, and there is the question of why anyone should believe it. And it turns out how one answers the latter epistemic question is going to greatly constrain what type of panentheism one finds plausible. For example, suppose, for whatever reason, you are not comfortable believing in panentheism merely on the basis of faith in theism, interpretations of sacred texts, religious or theological authorities, and so on. Perhaps you are enough of a methodological or metaphysical naturalist that invoking God as a creator doesn't sit well with you, or perhaps you have purely philosophical reasons for doubting, such as “the problem of evil.” All of this speaks directly to why the Enlightenment created a rift between science and religion in the first place.

Given all this, is there another route to panentheism, one consistent with methodological and metaphysical naturalism? It will be argued there is another route, namely through the exploration of the hard or GP of conscious experience. Once we see how to properly conceptualize the relationship between mind and matter in creatures such ourselves we can see the way forward to relating them more universally and thus to “God” and the universe. It will be argued in the next section that neutral monism is the right way to relate so‐called mind and matter, and in the section after, that neutral monism in turn allows for a kind of panentheism. But the reader must be warned that the kind of panentheism defended herein yields a conception of God much more in keeping with certain strains of thought in Advaita Vedanta Hinduism than in Christian theism.

REJECTING PANPSYCHISM AND RADICAL EMERGENCE

This section will be devoted to describing the need for neutral monism and why it is plausibly the best alternative in light of the failures of its main competitors. The next section will be devoted to explicating neutral monism.

NEUTRAL MONISM TO THE RESCUE

Both radical emergence and panpsychism agree on (1) above and therefore both attempt to answer the GP directly. To deflate the GP and get around the master argument for radical emergence and panpsychism we need another alternative. As long as matter is conceived of as essentially non‐mental and experience is conceived as qualia we are stuck with these problematic views. So the alternative must reconceive matter and mind. This is exactly what, properly understood, neutral monism does. Given that the key defenders of neutral monism in the West, such as William James and Bertrand Russell, also defended panpsychism at various points in time and given that “the avowed neutrality of neutral monism tends to slide towards some kind of panpsychism or idealism” (Seager , 28), people can certainly be forgiven for thinking that neutral monism and panpsychism may not be completely distinct doctrines, but it is very important to see that they are distinct. As James saw very clearly, we need to deflate the GP, not answer it directly. We need to deny that everyday conscious experience is an entity; for example, it isn't qualia‐like, it is not intrinsic. As James notes in A Pluralistic Universe, it is “intellectualism” or rationalism that got us into this mess in the first place and that's what we must reject:

Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a thing really is, is told by its definition. Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are known whenever we know their definitions. So we first identify the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing is whatever the definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of it or the full truth about it…. Intellectualism does not stop till sensible reality lies entirely disintegrated at the feet of “reason.” (James , 218)

The mind/body problem and the hard problem of consciousness are the offspring of this “intellectualism.” Let's start with what we actually know: everyday conscious experience appears to be intimately related to embodied organisms with certain complex internal structures maneuvering an environment. As James puts it:

The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced (otherwise called the “field of consciousness”) comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is “here,” where the body acts is “now”; what the body touches is “this”; all other things are “there,” and “then” and “that.” (James , 380)

James is defending neutral monism, which holds the following:

• (1)

  Mental and material features are real, but in some specified sense reducible to or constructable from a neutral basis in a noneliminative sense of reduction.

• (2)

  The neutral basis is generally not conceived as substance.

• (3)

  Mental and material features are not separable or merely correlated, they are non‐dual, indeed, they are not essentially different and distinct aspects.

Quoting James himself, here is how Leopold Stubenberg characterizes his neutral monism:

Prior to any further categorization, pure experience is, according to James, neutral—neither mental nor material:

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the “pure” experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. (James 1904b, 23)

Mind and matter, knower and known, thought and thing, representation and represented are then interpreted as resulting from different groupings of pure experience (Stubenberg ).

Let us then adopt the neutral monism of William James and Bertrand Russell as characterized herein:

Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of the knower, or a state of mind, or “consciousness”; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective “content.” In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. (James , 21)

The whole duality of mind and matter … is a mistake; there is only one kind of stuff out of which the world is made, and this stuff is called mental in one arrangement, physical in the other. (Russell , 15)

Things and thoughts are not fundamentally heterogeneous; they are made of one and the same stuff, stuff which cannot be defined as such but only experienced; and which one can call, if one wishes, the stuff of experience in general. (James , 110)

“Subjects” knowing “things” known are “roles” played, not “ontological” facts. (James , 110)

On this view, conscious experience (subjectivity) is not an “add‐on,” it is as much a part of the fabric of the universe as so‐called matter. The GP or the hard problem is a cognitive illusion generated by the inference or projection that experience is inherently or essentially mental and the “external” world is inherently non‐mental. The claim that the world is carved at the joints à la physical/mental; inner/outer; subject/object, and so on, is not a datum, but rather an inductive projection.

One way to interpret James or at least amend his view is as follows:

• (1)

  There is no conscious experience without a subject.

• (2)

  Where there are perceptions there is a perceiver and vice versa.

• (3)

  No subject/self without an object/world and vice versa.

So experience is inherently relational in the following sense. A conceptual or projected cut is made in “the stuff of experience” between the subject and the object. In the Buddhist tradition (and in some Hindu traditions as well) it happens when the “I am” thought arises, for example, the individual thought “I am in pain now.” In keeping with the suggested amendment to James it helps to look at a possible way of understanding neutral monism that is inspired by Immanuel Kant (), Edmund Husserl (), Martin Heidegger (), Maurice Merleau‐Ponty (), Arthur Schopenhauer (), and a variety of Asian traditions such as Advaita Vedanta (Gupta ).

This is not the place for historical details, and important differences between these thinkers will be glossed over. Most of them do not necessarily self‐identify as neutral monists, but following Dan Zahavi (), who is writing about Husserl, Merleau‐Ponty and others, we can say that for all these traditions of thought the minimal subject and the external world (the minimal object) self‐consistently coexist; you cannot have one without the other. There is a self‐consistency relation such that the subject and the external world are both necessary and sufficient for the other. Following Kant's unity of apperception and Schopenhauer's will and representation, we can go a step further: It is only when the subject/object cut exists that one gets a world in space and time—the phenomenal experience of being a subject in an external world in which time is passing. So subject/object and world in space/time are both necessary and sufficient for one another. One can of course find similar ideas in the works of Husserl and Merleau‐Ponty in their respective accounts of temporal experience. One can also find excellent expressions of this idea in Advaita Vedanta as illustrated by the following passages from Gupta, which again echo neutral monism:

The goal of Advaita Vedanta is to show the ultimate non‐reality of all distinctions; reality is not constituted of parts. (Gupta , 1)

When pure consciousness individuates itself into subject and object, there results knowledge—the distinction between “knower and known.” … In talking about Brahman [pure consciousness], it is not a subject or an object, but neither and both; the distinction is not real. Because reality is nondual, the known and the knower come to be recognized as one: brahman and atman, the objective and subjective poles of experience, are nondifferent. (31)

Atman is pure distinctionless, self‐shining consciousness, which is non‐different from brahman. It is that state of being in which all subject‐object distinction is obliterated. It does not have a beginning or an end; it is eternal and timeless. Time only arises within it. (34)

If one has a certain analytic or Western philosophical bias, it is easy to be put off by the Advaita Vedanta terminology, but we urge the reader to set aside that reaction and think of such claims from a purely phenomenological perspective.

Many of the aforementioned Western thinkers, however, make a mistake that neutral monism corrects. Namely, they place the explanation for this grand self‐consistency relation between subject/world in space and time in the head of individual experiencers. For Kant it is his “categories,” for Schopenhauer it is his “representations,” and for Husserl it is his “inner representations” or presentations of temporal experience. Kant famously argues that the unity of experience in time and space requires a unity of self and vice versa, otherwise there is no manifold of successive representations. This means that the dynamical character of thought and the world are two sides of the same coin. Kant and the others are right that we do not experience things in time and space, but rather we experience them temporally and spatially. But, they are wrong to say that this is an imposition of individual minds and their categories. The mistake, in one form or another, which we find in both the analytic and continental traditions, is representationalism or internalism.

Once we take neutral monism on board, we can immediately see that there is no need for (and no sense to) representationalism and internalism to explain experience (Silberstein and Chemero ). The point here is that subject and object codependently exist as a subject‐in‐a‐world‐in‐space‐and‐time; they are two sides of the same coin, so the agent is not trapped behind “a veil of perception” but is directly part of the world, and the external world is not some external container that the subject projects a virtual reality on to. Given neutral monism, (transcendental) phenomenology ultimately cannot be and should not be divorced from natural science, and experience cannot be separated from the natural world.

In other words, we are talking about direct realism. Again, we must take the brackets off phenomenology and let it be unbound. The experience of time's passage, for example (a key focus of Husserl and perhaps the very essence of everyday conscious experience), is neither in the head (the subject) nor in the external world (the object); the experience is fundamentally relational in that it requires that a subject/object cut be made in the neutral “field of pure experience” as James calls it. It is the self‐consistency relation between subject and object that allows for the experience of time. This relation or structure is not in anything nor located anywhere; rather, it is why there are things in time and space as experienced.

Given neutral monism, self/world are two nondual sides of the same neutral coin, therefore the dynamical character of thought and the world are two sides of the same coin. Again, the conscious mind is not some utterly distinct entity that imposes or projects time and change onto a static universe as if the mind were just some virtual reality machine that we are stuck behind. No, on this view the very existence of the codependent conscious self/world‐in‐space‐and‐time unity is a self‐consistency relation; you simply cannot have one without the other.

NEUTRAL MONISM AND PaNENTHEISM

We have seen that neutral monism is an underappreciated and far more plausible view than its competitors; it is a view that resolves the hard problem by deflating it. Again, given neutral monism, so‐called mental and physical features of the world are neither essentially mental nor essentially physical, they are nondual features of a neutral ground, that get categorized as being mental or physical for various reasons. To see how neutral monism can underwrite a form of panentheism we must discuss more the nature of the neutral itself and relate that to a definition of God.

The neutral factor in neutral monism is “presence” and it is the one feature of reality that isn't relational:

On the other hand, neutral monism is a radical doctrine from the usual physicalist standpoint. It knocks the physical, as scientifically understood, from its perch of ontological preeminence. It suggests that any effort to reduce everything to the physical is fundamentally misguided. Neutral monism has to accept a notion of “presence in experience” (what James called “pure experience”). This presence is not labeled as “consciousness” by the neutral monists, since they regard consciousness, and its subject, as a very sophisticated feature of the constructed mental realm. Nonetheless, presence is, I believe, what funds the hard problem of consciousness. Presence is what constitutes the “what it is like” of conscious experience. This is quite explicit in the neutral monist's alignment of the neutral with the qualities of experience, and especially perceptual experience (the paradigm case for explaining the “what it is like” aspect of consciousness). Speaking for myself, I do not think that presence can be denied. The neutral monist claim that it forms the bedrock of reality is surprisingly powerful and fertile, and may yet help us understand reality and our place within it. (Seager , 326)

Thus, one way of interpreting James is that “being,” “pure being.” or “being thus” are nowness or presentness, what some might call presence. Presentness, that is, “being,” in the Western traditions of phenomenology and existentialism is typically thought of as either bracketed experience in the phenomenological tradition or merely a qualitative experience to ultimately be explained by neuroscience in the analytic tradition. There are important exceptions in the West such as Heidegger, Henri Bergson, James, and Merleau‐Ponty. In the traditions of existentialism, pragmatism, and phenomenology, one can find varying expressions of the idea that the “lived present,” “lived experience,” or “living present” are among the most fundamental aspects of reality. Also, as alluded to earlier, in some Hindu and Buddhist texts, presence is neither bracketed nor just a brain state, it is fundamental.

In the Advaita Vedanta tradition, when all qualitative and intentional states have ceased what remains is presence (nirvikalpa samadhi). There is also savikalpa samadhi, in which there is still a residual sense of subject and object, whereas in nirvikalpa samadhi even that relation goes, and there is only what might be called “pure presence.” Given that presence is fundamental, it cannot be defined in terms of other concepts, of either a material or mental nature, hence its neutrality:

Advaita Vedanta centrally posits the existence of a permanent “self” (atman). The self is characterized as the “witness” (saksin) of the experiences, that is as that which is conscious of them—yet not in the sense of some substantial entity that performs the witnessing, but rather as nothing but the taking place of witnessing (consciousness) itself. This chapter argues for the plausibility of this notion of a witness consciousness, interpreted as the abiding experiencing of the ever‐changing experiences. Synchronically and diachronically, manifold experiences are presented in one and the same consciousness, whose oneness is not reducible to some unifying relations between the experiences, but rather forms the dimension in which they, together with all their interrelations, have their existence in the first place. This presence‐dimension is [our emphasis] … what is called atman (qua witness) in Advaita. (Fasching , 20)

Savikalpa samadhi would be direct awareness of presence. Nirvikalpa samadhi would be pure presence. Can the latter be “known”? If it is known, it is experienced as an object. But then it is not pure presence. It can, though, be experienced. That is nirvikalpa samadhi. This is not awareness of, or consciousness of, presence; this is nowness/presence itself.

Whereas we generally experience time as an endless succession of point‐like “nows” as a result of that subject/object cut, the idea here is that presence is actually relatively fundamental, universal, unmoved, and unchanging. To ask “where is presence?” is to miss the point that presence or pure being is a precondition for all spatiotemporal experience, including the localization of objects and properties. Presence or nowness is the backdrop against which change is perceived.

The essential theological claim being made here is that the witness consciousness is a manifestation of pure presence and it is the ground of all else that exists, and thus we may call witness consciousness/pure presence God. The witness consciousness/pure presence is both one with and beyond everything else in existence, and therefore we have a kind of panentheism in the form of Avaita Vedanta Hinduism. Others have made this suggestion as well, as John Culp (2017, quoting Robert Whittemore) notes: “Although not the dominant interpretation of the Upanishads, multiple intimations of panentheism are present in the Upanishads.”

In terms of the question of how the witness consciousness/pure presence or “brahman” could ground reality when the universe allegedly existed for billions of years before individual conscious beings came along, it's important to disentangle the witness consciousness/pure presence (in the language of Advaita Vedanta) from the everyday consciousness of individual beings such as ourselves. As described above, in Western philosophical terms the witness consciousness/pure presence could be seen as the transcendental condition for the existence of any subject or object—for the world as experienced. That is, the self/world complex is not caused to emerge temporally/dynamically in a process‐like fashion; rather, it is the subject/object cut that is taken to be transcendentally prior (don't confuse this with temporally or causally prior) to the existence of a subject in a world in space and time.

Perceiver (subject) and perceived (object) coexist in a self‐consistent fashion as a single aspect of the witness consciousness/pure presence. So the point is that while subject and object are codependent and thus relational, presence alone is the only remaining intrinsic feature and it also is a neutral feature that grounds both the nondual subject/self and object/world. For this reason, one might be inclined to associate God with pure presence only and not the witness consciousness, but the point is they are both one with and transcend spacetime, but perhaps pure presence even more so. In the Advaita Vedanta tradition, everyday individual conscious beings such as ourselves can merge into the witness consciousness itself, which in turn can merge into pure being or being‐itself—pure presence. “Witness” is a relative term for pure presence inasmuch as it is related to something called “world.” However, “world” and “witness,” “object and subject,” are really just pure presence aware of itself.

The point is, the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Hinduism provides us with another alternative for what the neutral might be. In this tradition, while brahman is often equated with the witness consciousness (sakshi), there are varying degrees of subtlety of the witness consciousness. The blanket term for the experience of such states is samadhi (absorption). In savikalpa samadhi, there remains some residual sense of a distinction between witness and witnessed. But in nirvikalpa samadhi that slips away, so there is nothing but the witness. It is no longer really “witnessing” itself, it is simply being itself (Deutsch , 62–63). This being itself is beyond all description, concepts, and predication, “free from distinctions of all kinds.” The claim is that brahman is nirguna, that is, without qualities. It is hard to imagine anything more neutral, which again is why one might want to equate God with pure presence only. In the Advaita Vedanta texts it is often said therefore that brahman is one with yet beyond the world of space and time. Brahman is beyond the world, but it also is the world. In the words of the twentieth‐century Hindu Saint Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj in his book I Am That:

The witness who stands aloof, unmoved and untouched, is the watch‐tower of the real, the point at which awareness, inherent in the unmanifested [pure presence], contacts the manifested. There can be no universe without the witness, there can be no witness without the universe, (1973, 53)

The English word “witness” (especially if followed by the English word “consciousness”) implies something observing something else. That concept of observation clearly implies something like consciousness (in the conventional sense); so asserting it is fundamental sounds like idealism. However, if we take seriously the phenomenology of meditative states, the shift from savikalpa samadhi to nirvikalpa samadhi entails that the sense of “observer‐hood” passes away, and one is not so much “witnessing” as “being.” Think of this state as a kind of coalescence of mentality and materiality—and hence as “neutral” in this sense. Here the claim is that “being,” “pure being,” or “being thus” are nowness or presentness, what some might call pure presence. Again, when all qualitative and intentional states have ceased, what remains is pure presence (nirvikalpa samadhi).

Given that presence is fundamental, it cannot be defined in terms of other concepts, of either a material or mental nature. Again, this is not awareness of, or consciousness of presence, this is nowness/presence itself. Perceiver (subject) and perceived (object) co‐arise in a self‐consistent fashion from presence. And again, do not think of this co‐arising as a causal process in time. From the perspectiveless (and experienceless experience) “perspective” of pure being, there is no subject, nor a world in space and time, only being itself.

As for the specific relationship between the world and God (i.e., brahman) there is the Sanskrit word lila, typically translated as “God at play.” In the Advaita Vedanta tradition this is often characterized as analogous with the way human beings dream up entire worlds in the dream state of sleep. Here is a beautiful expression of this from the Westerner Jorge Luis Borges in his Avatars of the Tortoise:

The greatest sorcerer [writes Novalis memorably] would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions. Would not this be true of us? I believe that it is. We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time, but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice in its structure so we may know that it is false. (Borges , 101)

However, it must be stressed that this is only an analogy, because in the Advaita Vedanta tradition there is no dreamer conceived as a self‐existing entity or being—brahman is not a thing, agent or being, but the ground of all those. Again, in the words of Nisargadatta Maharaj:

Why do you bring an outer doer [God]? The world recreates itself out of itself. It is an endless process, the transitory begetting the transitory. It is your ego that makes you think that there must be a doer. You create God to your own image, however dismal the image. (1973, 54)

Given all of this, it is certainly understandable why those who have a craving for traditional forms of Christian theism with an anthropomorphized creator God will not find this brand of panentheism very palatable. Likewise, those who lean towards old‐fashioned conceptions of methodological and metaphysical naturalism will also find all this unpalatable. Though nothing in it is conceived as supernatural as such, brahman transcends spacetime and that is probably enough to put off most naturalists. Whatever your gut reaction, it is humbly submitted that this is another live possibility for panentheism, one that provides a unified account of reality.