He cannot relinquish anything in this whole, not the most painful, not the hardest to bear, and yet the expression for this fight, for this acquisition is... repentance. He repents himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God.

Søren Kierkegaard

Monism, the belief "that reality is a unified whole and that all existing things can be ascribed to or described by a single concept or system," is best understood in everyday terms as a refutation of dualism. Dualism, the basis of most Western thought since at least Aristotle, defines existence in terms of dichotomies, poles of spectra, opposites: good and evil; life and death; sacred and profane; eternal and temporal; mind and body; thought and emotion; matter and energy; real and abstract; and on and on. According to monism, those distinctions, while perhaps meaningful in some limited sense, aren't real. They exist not in themselves, but are imposed in our attempt to understand. They exist only in the eye of the beholder, and they stand between that beholder and reality.

The most striking intellectual developments of the last couple of centuries--from Freud's materialist explanation of behavior to Einstein's unifications of both energy and matter and time and space--have tended toward monism. And that tendency continues through, for example, Ken Wilber's efforts to integrate religion, psychology, and science or Christopher Alexander's efforts to achieve a scientific understanding of beauty as the basis of life, not to mention physicists' attempts to discover a unified field theory. This tendency is gaining momentum against the trend toward specialization that had prevailed for centuries. There was a time when a philosopher was a scientist, a theologian, an ethicist, a psychologist, and an artist. Now, anyone trying to master such a broad range of knowledge would be assumed not to know much about any of it. But as the specialists have come against the limits imposed by their specialties, more and more of them are looking beyond those narrow specialties.

The English Freudian D. W. Winnicott saw parallels to this trend toward specialization in the development of our psyche. At inception, our psyche makes no distinction between our self and our environment. As we discover our will and seek to exercise it, we also discover limits on our ability to do so. The outline of our self develops in response to those limits (and, according to Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought, our emotions develop at the same time to manage the disparity between what's subject to our will--what's our self--and what's important to our self's well-being). But we may come to see this definition of self, made in the name of expedience, as arbitrary. Like the specialist finding his or her efforts limited by the definition of his or her specialty, we may find our development limited by our definition of self.

Do all subsequent distinctions grow out of the first distinction between self and other? Are those subsequent distinctions similarly pragmatic in origin? Will they ultimately outlive their usefulness?

Those questions are meant only to be suggestive. I can't answer them, and, as this is a description of dogma, I don't feel the need to try. This is how I understand the development of my self, and this is how I'm seeking to overcome the limits imposed by that development. Distinctions define limits, and limits cause suffering. Yes, limits (boundaries in the current therapeutic parlance) seek to keep me from imposing my will on others, but it's only by first drawing a distinction between myself and others that I might seek to impose my will on them to their detriment and/or my benefit--if there's no distinction between them and me, why would I seek my betterment at their expense? This may be what Christ meant in his "Sermon on the Mount."