Pantheism: God is all, and all is God

"The mind's intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love by which God loves himself." 
-- BENEDICT DE SPINOZA

By Alex P. Vidal 

NEW YORK CITY -- Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza came from a Jewish family who had fled to Holland from Portugal to escape the oppression of the Catholic Church. 
His whole life was to be subject to religious persecution.
He believed that Christianity and Judaism were kept alive by rigid dogma and ritual. 

He denied that the Bible was inspired by God down to the last letter, saying that when we read the Bible we must continually bear in mind the period in which it was written.
He proposed "critical" reading, which revealed a number of inconsistencies in the texts.


NATURE

Spinoza said that everything is nature. He identified nature with God, saying that God is all, and all is God. This is called pantheism. To Spinoza, God did not create the world in order to stand outside it. God is the world. 
So it follows that all our thoughts are also God's or nature's thoughts. There is only one God, one nature, or one Substance.
His philosophy is notoriously hard to understand. He was influenced by Rene Descartes but rejected his distinction of thought and matter as two separate substances, believing there was only one.
Everything that exists can be reduced to one single reality which he simply called Substance.

PASSIONS

Spinoza said that it was our passions--such as ambition and lust--which prevent us from achieving true happiness and harmony, but that if we recognize that everything happens from necessity, we can achieve an intuitive understanding of nature as a whole.
We can come to realize with crystal clarity that everything is One.
The goal is to comprehend everything that exists in an all-embracing perception. Only then will we achieve true happiness and contentment. 
This was what Spinoza called seeing everything "sub specie aeternitatis," which means to see everything from the perspective of eternity.