Giotto: Judas Kiss
The Monadology of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz fascinated me. My own interpretation of it came to be that the Supreme Monad, the Greatest Being, was God; all other beings, all monads, of which there are many, channeled that Being as adequately as they were able. Leibnitz was a panpsychist who held that everything possessed some form of consciousness. Humans were the highest form of being after God. As such, the creations of humans: art, science, literature, monuments to God, all embodied what emanates from the Supreme Being. Plato's Forms of Beauty, Truth, Justice, likewise come from God. Our world flows from Godhead; hence, this is the best of all possible worlds.
Let us consider the humans who became Gods. Jesus comes to mind, as do Quetzalcoatl, Ganymede, Siddhartha-Buddha, and a host of holy men. Monads become the Supreme Monad, Yes? Yet each of their stories are tainted with suffering, violence, betrayal. Think of Saint Peter cutting off the ear of a Roman Soldier as Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss. Are the Greek philosophers correct that evil is no more than the absence of good?
Hasn't History proven Leibnitz wrong.? Ten thousand years of war, torture, starvation, violence, rape, and murder; but not one century of Peace, how can this be?
Despite the life long efforts of pacifists, bodhisattvas, activists for civil disobedience, missionaries, humanists, philanthropists, of all the monads who have worked for Peace and prosperity, the Supreme Being, hasn't The Great Monad failed? Or more truthfully, there is no Supremely Good Monad, just as there is no Supreme Evil. There are only flawed, limited monads whose confusion, whose inaction, like that of Hamlet, causes more violence and death. As Hamlet mouthed it, Nothing is either right or wrong, but thinking makes it so. We are all Hamlet 's ghosts.
The world today is as confused as ever, violence and cruelty in every dark gathering of compass-less monads. Today, I stand on a balcony, viewing the fog as the mountains and world beyond fade into seeming non-existence.
Humans are mostly windowless monads (to use the Leibnitz term), unable to see or feel beyond their private needs, their private desires. Empathy and compassion escape us as does the universal harmony Leibnitz or even Pythagoras dreamed of. Ours is not the best possible world; and we are destroying what exists with our greed and lack of vision. People, monads, would rather cut off their ears, blind themselves like Oedipus, cut out their own tongues, than face the truth of our undying original sin, indifference. Our pretense of caring falls far short of action. We crucify our entire planet rather than admit the truth of what we are doing.
The fog, the light rain, the stillness have their own beauty. Think of what nature there is, of the art, literature and music we create as a vast mandala, such as Buddhist monks make. We shall brush it all away. Yet how divine, how sublime, that such beauty ever existed at all.
