Energyism
The world is a creation of your consciousness. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
Energyism posits that physicality is ultimately a mirage, created in the mind. This monism has flavors. Whereas subjective idealism states that the appearance of physicality is a mental construction, neutral monism postulates that existence is ultimately neither mental nor material. These 2 schools of thought are congruent. Indeed, combining the 2 provides a coherent explanation of the nature of psychological reality.
Idealism
The mind is everything. ~ Indian guru Buddha
Idealism posits that physicality is the product of the mind. Under idealism, the ostensible outside world is a fabrication of perception, moment by moment, given continuity by memory.
Your body is your subconscious mind. ~ Candace Pert
In rendering Nature a mental construct, idealism dissolves the mind-body problem. Idealism instead raises the conundrum of how we can see the same world if it’s all in our minds.
Neutral Monism
Some subset of these elements form individual minds: the subset of just the experiences that you have for the day, which are accordingly just so many neutral elements that follow upon one another, is your mind as it exists for that day. The neutral elements exist, and our minds are constituted by some subset of them, and that subset can also be seen to constitute a set of empirical observations of the objects in the world. All of this, however, is just a matter of grouping the neutral elements in one way or another, according to a physical or a psychological (mental) perspective. ~ William James
Neutral monism (aka neumonism) is the metaphysical view that the Nature is neither physical nor mental, but instead consists of one kind of non-physical stuff with its own independent existence.
Plato was a proponent of neumonism, believing the empirical world an ersatz, fleeting manifestation of pure forms (ideas), which have an independent, eternal existence.
These absolute ideas exist as simple, self-existent, and unchanging forms. ~ Plato
German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz envisioned the universe as having a hierarchy of 4 different types of souls, which he termed monads. Unsurprisingly, Leibniz’s supreme monad was God: a mythical figure who seldom escapes being in the mix of philosophical musings in the history of Western thought since medieval times.
Neumonism not only sidesteps the mind-body problem, it sidesteps psychology altogether. Nonetheless, neumonism is a philosophy with serious scientific implications.
Animism, the oldest spiritual belief, is a neutral monism. Eastern philosophic traditions and religions also embrace neumonism, whereby a substrate of noumenon (nonexistence) invokes phenomena as an expression.
Modern physics instructs that the essence of existence is energy. This is neutral monism, with energy as the medium.
The residual conundrum of neumonism is that energy is only relative, not absolute. Energy as the essential medium suggests a deeper foundation to reality, which harkens back to Platonic forms.
