Monism and dualism Is the world made of many things or only one thing that can be fashioned into different shapes or appearances? This can be called the problem of one or two (or many).   Monism views everything as one even if things appear different. Philosophers define different types of monism. Here we will be mostly concerned with substance monism which asserts that everything is made of one basic substance or priority monism which states that everything is derived from a

T he world makes no sense, so why are we here? The world we are in makes no sense. We live in impermanent bodies that are destined to fail. The impermanence itself makes it an imperfect existence. However, on top of that we have our fabricated existences, with the made-up self-identities that we cling to. All this produces a world that while it may have some nice things in it to distract us is imperfect to the core and not on balance a nice place. One can accept these as just

The world as an illusion We are ignorant of certain fundamental characteristics of the world as it is. These can be broken down into the...