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Comment by _xnmw | Hacker News Reader

Ghazali and Ibn al-Arabi asserted a related concept known as "wahdat al-Wujud" in Sufi literature. Often translated as "unity of Being" and confused with pantheism (which it is not), it could encompass what Aquinas said, "the sheer act of 'to be' itself", but with the additional restrictive clause that "nothing else 'is' itself". Which is a significantly more precise predicate than "God is a verb".

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There is a similar thought in the Dao De Jing

There are similar thoughts in many spiritual traditions...find your mystic or gnostic vein in any religion and you're not far away from this concept.

"God likes to play hide-n-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with!" http://educateinspirechange.org/spirituality/concept-great-p...

Interesting. In my reading of the Dao De Jing and other Taoist texts I've only seen the affirmative side "the unity of being" which has sometimes been dismissed as "monism", but not necessarily the negative side: "nothing else truly 'is'". These might sound like logically equivalent statements but there is a subtle rhetorical and practical difference.

Monism: https://meaningness.com/monism

There's the idea that everything is defined in relation to something else, except the Dao, which is itself. As a corollary, anything you can name, i.e. define, isn't the Dao. In the ddj it's not said explicitly like this but it's something that can be pieced together from various chapters.

Might you need both? From what I've seen, dig deep enough in a particular hole, be it theoretical physics, statements about God, etc. and you get the paradox that two different things imply each other mutually. You can't have one without the concept of none, and you can't have none without the concept of one. See Godel's incompleteness theorem, the particle vs. wave situation, etc.

Are you saying that this concept is mostly absent from the Taoist texts you've read?

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