Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher who layed the intellectual groundwork for the modern conceptions of the self and the universe. Spinoza lived an outwardly simple life, turning down rewards and honors throughout his life, including prestigious teaching positions.

Spinoza argued that God exists and is abstract and impersonal. He contended that everything that exists in the universe is one reality, and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality. He believed God or Nature to be a single, fundamental substance; and that this is the basis of the universe; and all lesser entities’ are actually modes or modifications of this basis. Further, he believed that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is understood only in part.

Spinoza held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, humans have no free will. They believe, however, that their will is free. This illusionary perception of freedom stems from our human consciousness, experience and indifference to prior natural causes. Humans think they are free but they ‘dream with their eyes open’. For Spinoza, our actions are guided entirely by natural impulses. He famously stated, Men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which their desires are determined.’ Spinoza’s determinism is ever more illuminated in his famous quote in Ethics:

“The infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid … All believe that they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak.”

For Spinoza, ‘blame’ and ‘praise’ are non-existent human ideals existing only in the mind, because we are so acclimatized to human consciousness interlinking with our experience that we have a false ideal of choice predicated upon this. In the universe, anything that happens comes from the essential nature of objects, or of God/Nature. According to Spinoza, reality is perfection. If circumstances are seen as unfortunate, it is only because of our inadequate conception of reality.

Given Spinoza’s insistence on a completely ordered world where ‘necessity’ reigns, good and evil have no absolute meaning. The world as it exists looks imperfect only because of our limited perception.

The attraction of Spinoza’s philosophy to late eighteenth-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative to materialism, atheism, and deism; it engendered believing in the existence of God on purely rational grounds. Three of Spinoza’s ideas strongly appealed to them:

  1. the unity of all that exists;
  2. the regularity of all that happens;
  3. the identity of spirit and nature.

The nineteenth- century German Sanskritist Theodor Goldstiicker noticed the similarities between Spinoza’s religious conceptions and the Vedanta tradition of India, writing that Spinoza’s thought was:

…a western system of philosophy  which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus. … We mean the philosophy of Spinoza, a man whose very life is a picture of that moral purity and intellectual indifference to the transitory charms of this world, which is the constant longing of the true Vedanta philosopher

Baruch Spinoza was a master integrator of science and spirituality. He wrote:

Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God. In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way. Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced.