The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog

Sire observes that, for many in the Western world, none of the worldviews previously discussed are viable. Convinced that Western thought is stuck in an impasse, they embrace traditional worldviews of East Asia (e.g., India, China, and Japan) as an alternative. The “swing to Eastern thought” among Westerners goes back a long way (135), but the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s made this brand of thought popular in the West on a large scale.

Although Eastern thought is as rich and complex as Western thought, the Eastern worldview embraced by Westerners is most often some variant of pantheistic monism—the philosophical view underlying Hinduism and Buddhism and expressed in spiritual literature like the Upanishads.

Pantheism implies the belief that the soul (“atman”) of every human being is the Soul of the cosmos (“Brahman”); in other words, human beings are part of the entire cosmic consciousness. This implies monism, or the belief that all reality is ultimately one. For the pantheist, God is the cosmos itself—the “one, infinite-impersonal, ultimate reality” (139). God is all that exists, and nothing exists that is not God. Human individuality is maya (illusion) because we are all part of God or cosmic reality as a whole.