Saturday, December 01, 2012

Why Does the World Exist?

In his book Why Does the World Exist?, Jim Holt explores the ideas of the great 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. 
“Of all the possible resolutions to the mystery of existence,” Holt writes, “perhaps the most exhilarating would be the discovery that, contrary to all appearances, the world is causa sui: the cause of itself.” For Spinoza, all mental and physical existents were temporally modified expressions of a single substance, an infinite substance that he called God or Nature. Albert Einstein embraced Spinoza’s idea that the world was divine and self-causing, as more recently have other “metaphysically inclined physicists” like Sir Roger Penrose and the late John Archibald Wheeler.


read more: the american scholar
According to Advaita (Non-dual) philosophy, the Self and the world are one. The Self is uncreated, ever existing, and the cause of itself. 

Because the world is inseparable from the Self, it too is uncreated, ever existing and the cause of itself.

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