As a Dualist, listening to these next Monistic explanations, I keep in mind my two questions: How can non-material thinking relate to something material? How can my spiritual activity have any effect in the physical world?

I picked a beautiful sunny afternoon to practice my Materialistic Monism, and in my unschooled way contemplated natural evolution, starting with the simplest hydrogen atom and leading all the way to human consciousness and thought. I walked through a green and sunlit landscape, feeling in love with the miracle of material existence, how every time a certain critical mass was worked on by certain forces something new happened: new atomic elements forming as electrons combined and recombined, molecules, the condensation of vapor into liquid, then solid existence; the lifelike growth of crystals; the virus-like existence approaching life, and so on, until it really was life, from the first single cell to the more complex organism, confined to the water at first, branching off into plants and animals, the first tentative colonization of dry land, etc., etc., all the way to us and our complex technological society.

No God, no spiritual world was necessary in this vision. Physical forces such as pressure and magnetic attraction could explain how the planet came into being, and a real scientist could no doubt explain how chemical and electrical forces caused life to arise, how life forces brought about the first dim consciousness, how natural selection housed it in organs and how these organs grew. Repulsion and attraction grew into feelings, came to be expressed in cries, which themselves articulated and formed the brain. The cries gradually turned into words, then long strings of words, carried in our big brains as we walked around upright grasping tools with our opposable thumbs.

This is no puppet play, with hierarchies of spiritual beings standing behind the scenes, pulling Nature's strings according to some ultimate purpose carefully plotted out. This is the miracle of life, and thinking is just a part of it. And yes, I could say that in a way the brain secretes thoughts, perhaps in a vaporous sort of way. There's a bit of a stumble in explaining how this thought-vapor could hold concepts and ideas. And why matter should want to rise up into consciousness, or want anything whatsoever, is also a tricky question. But surely no trickier than why life should arise at all! The scientists are working on these problems, and surely they will solve them someday.

The stumble doesn't bother me as much as Steiner seems to think that it should. My opponent the Dualist asks, If thinking has no material part, how can it sieze hold of anything in the material world to understand it? My answer is: Airy as it is, thinking arises out of the material brain (try thinking without it!) and can therefore grasp the material world it arose from. Thinking is like the invisible opposable thumb of the brain! It's only a continuation of the magnificent processes that everywhere trend toward higher organization in the material world, starting with that hydrogen atom.

The Dualist, with his double vision, still asks: Where are the concepts and ideas in all this? How do you connect the immaterial ideas generated by this supposed material process, with the trees, rocks and stars that you are thinking about? My answer is: Well, I suppose the ideas are like a kind of a vapory emanation given off by the trees, rocks and stars, that our thinking grabs hold of. True, the vapory substance of ideas can't be detected by scientific instruments (yet!) but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

The Dualist asks, How does this vapory substance travel from the stars through outer space to become a thought that you think? And what about thoughts themselves? You can think about your own thoughts. Can vapory thoughts give off their own thought-vapors so your vapory thinking can catch hold of them? And I must confess, I can't think of any good answer for that, yet. But I'm working on it!

Within the materialists mode of thinking all thinking begins with and remains within the material world and its laws. Those are the set boundary's that all inquiry takes place within. Any theories outside this realm are considered unconfirmed speculation unless verified in the material world. Maintaining this sharp focus on the workings of the material world has brought about the incredible scientific advances of our age. It has demonstrated the power of thinking when it is sharply focused. The engineering and scientific professions have the confidence that if they have the time and money, by holding to this mode of thinking, they can solve all the problems of humanity. Whether it takes a new drug, a machine to invent, a gene to splice, or a vitamin to isolate everything has a cure.

If only that kind of attention, effort, and resources could be applied to projects employing the other modes of thinking I wonder what miraculous results would be obtained? Just think if a billion dollar government contract was awarded to see if Rudolf Steiner's world-outlook theories held promise for improving the State Departments diplomatic efforts.

What makes materialism so popular might just be what makes it so limiting: it's crudeness. It is so much easier to identify and figure out how to blow up another countries tank than it is to identify and understand cultural differences deeply embedded in the mind. But then it turns out your problem wasn't with the tank, it was with the people behind the tank.

(As the Dualist, I was unimpressed by the Material Monist's attempt to describe thought as a kind of super-skinny substance. What does my second opponent, the Spiritual Monist, have to offer?)

I had no trouble finding my Spiritual-Monistic shoes. They were right there in the bottom of my closet where I'd left them.

It's not hard to conceive, in an abstract way, that the spiritual world is the real one, and the material world a kind of bastard offspring. Nothing but an illusion; like a dream, but with more rules.

But what about using this theory, as Steiner suggests, to solve the riddle of my own human nature?

First off, what is this riddle? I seem to have a body that ignores the fact that the material world is an illusion! Furthermore, at a certain point, and probably after a fair amount of suffering, this body will die. It'll turn to slop and sink down, but my spirit will rise on metaphoric wings.

So why must I inhabit this obstinate body? Why did God, who never makes a mistake, put something that only rises into something that only sinks?

One answer I've heard in many different forms is that he didn't, really. We only think we inhabit a physical body, and thinking that, we dig ourselves into a pit.

Our wrong thinking is, by that theory, the source of all the suffering in the world. But what wrong thinking has caused, right thinking can fix.

These thoughts and others like them went through my head as I contemplated the two questions of my arch-rival, the Dualist:

How can the spiritual process of thinking grasp the material world?

How can a spiritual being pick up a hammer and build a barn?

She is always such a pest, this Dualist. Always at my shoulder and a little to the left, like a bad angel. Always with the sarcasm and the jibes.

"How is it," she asks sweetly, "that eyes meant to behold only God and the angels wind up looking at all this junk on your desk, the dirty barn window and that broken bicycle beyond?"

"My eyes are erroneous," I answer, "and they see errors."

"But the window is really dirty, and the bike is really broken. Your eyes tell you this and you know it's true. You sit here looking at them every day!"

"Well, yes," I admit. "But all that knowledge is true only within the error, or the dream, if you prefer it. Outside those borders, in the magnificent and blissful Real World, the World of Spirit, none of this stuff signifies."

"Is that why you don't clean the window or fix the bike?"

"The truth is, I'm rather busy. It takes a lot of energy to keep my vision uplifted to the spiritual world all the time. Eyes on the prize and all that."

"Let me see if I've got this straight, then. The spiritual world gives birth to the material world, only to abandon it to entropy and decay? As if it were not its offspring, but more like its feces?"

"Well now, there's no need to raise your voice--"

"Then I hate the spiritual world! All this time I thought it was nature that made us suffer, but now I see it's not nature at all, and it's not even our own thinking either! It's the blasted spiritual world, jailing us all in material bodies it doesn't care a fig about!"

"But God is love," I protest weakly.

"Not with your Spiritual Monism, he's not!" And now the stare-down, hands clenched at sides, that I can never win with her.

As a Spiritual Monist, I just can't afford to be thinking these kinds of thoughts. Or is it that, thinking these kinds of thoughts, I can't adequately champion Spiritual Monism?

Time to take the old shoes off, I guess, and let them find their level in the closet heap. Surprising how comfortable and stylish they once seemed, how cramped and ugly now. Or maybe it's just my feet that have changed.

If the Materialist has confined themselves to forming thoughts only about the material world, an obvious one-sidedness occurs. Rather than a human being consisting of body, soul, and spirit-mind, the human being is only a physical body. How can this not but lead to dissatisfaction with life? People who have had a near death experience give inspiring stories about the experience of seeing a wonderfully brilliant light which they move toward feeling peace and love. I remember reading a scientist who had a physical explanation of how a phenomena occurs in a dying brain to create the glow of light. The material scientist would ignore all other explanations until a physical theory could be presented. When this scientist dies and sees a brilliant white light will he say,"How beautiful the chemical reaction of my dying brain."

Many scientists abandon religious faith to maintain a consistent view. Other scientists live a life of duality. In the lab they are hard nosed materialists accepting nothing but proven facts. Then they show up in church as a faith based believer accepting miracles.
Chapter 1 looked at how our thinking can be compelled by subjective elements within ourselves such as natural urges and social conditioning. In Chapter 2 there are thoughts beyond being merely subjective. The Materialist needs to turn their attention away from their own subjective "I" to learn about the world. Science can't be successful by pursuing superstitions or have outcomes be determined by our own personal wants. That is why there is such an uproar about the Bush administration editing government science reports to meet political wants. Scientific thinking involves training in removing personal opinions.

If this turning away from the "I" becomes an imbalanced approach to life then all that is subjectively individual lacks value. So we end up with the split between art and science. Do you find any scientists today who are equally skilled in art?

The problem I have with the material world is entropy. Matter is always degrading and running down. Such it is with my body, my house and my car. They all need upkeep and repair. For myself a distinction can be made when I need to look for the spirit within myself to overcome the entropy pulling me down, such as fatigue and a long list of repairs. At this point a shift is made into another mode of thinking when I look to my spiritual nature for an energy boost. It is a totally different world that operates with different laws.

Whereas the Materialist directs their attention away from the "I", the Spiritist is inwardly directed to the spiritual nature of their "I". This results in a new and different perspective of the world. From this perspective of spirit-mind is discovered the heights described in the opening chapter verse,

"The other strongly rises from the gloom
To lofty fields of ancient heritage."

The lure of these lofty heights of spirit lead many to renounce the material as being a crude manifestation of the higher truths experienced by reaching up, inwardly, to the spirit. Monks, basking in their spiritual nature, have gone as far as to even give up the wearing of cloths as being too materialistic. Naked, they walk around in prayer surviving on the effort of others to hand feed them as you would a baby.

There are other stories of a monk being given a broom and told to sweep the floor immediately after having a profound mystical experience as a lesson in seeking balance between the spiritual and material. But in both these examples a duality exists between two different worlds. The spiritual experience is separated from the material experience of life. Listeners of spiritualistic lectures often go home to a pile of bills and look else where for advise for building wealth.

The denial of the world in the sake of the spirit can lead to blissful moments but this effort at separation seems to also intensify worldly lust. It seems the Christian fundamentalist preachers who are the strongest condemners of lust are continuously being caught in lust scandals. They need to develop a secret identity and live a dual life as their spiritual approach can not reconcile with their physical body.

One thing that surprised me after trying to spend time thinking like a Materialistic Monist and a Spiritualistic one, was how much better I liked the Materialist in me. This is because as a Materialist I cherish the world, while as a Spiritualist I turn my back on it.

There are undoubtedly versions of these two points of view that don't rest on emotional attachment or detachment to the world, but they weren't what I found in myself at this time.

As a Spiritualistic Monist, I was surprised to discover that at the root of my flight from Nature was a violent rejection of everything in Nature that goes against the sentimental image of her as our loving mother. Seagulls pecking the eyes out of baby seals, the terrifying fecundity of flies, Nanook starving to death in the Canadian Interior before he could even see the movie that made him famous. These and a thousand other portraits of Nature red in tooth and claw seem to form a fitting natural backdrop for all the horrible things that we humans do to each other and to the world.

For the first time I realized that there was in me something that could identify with Faust when one of his two souls "strongly rises from the gloom/ To lofty fields of ancient heritage." In short,the world is just too much to take.

Nevertheless, I much prefer my other, more robust soul, the one that "holds fast, in sturdy lust for love,/ With clutching organs clinging to the world." If you don't love the material world, how can you do your part to take care of it?

But when it comes to opening up the mind to other points of view, as a Materialist I had a harder time of it. My vision of the evolution of Nature blinded me with its beauty, and the little problem I had of being unable to explain thinking seemed inconsequential, just as thinking itself seemed inconsequential compared to the rest of Nature's grand pageant.

On the other hand, as a Spiritualistic Monist, I could look back at the material world I was trying to escape, and grasp just how selfish and empty of love was my escape attempt. I could repent, and open my eyes to other possibilities. This I could not easily do, in the materialistic mode.