Why a Monad Manifesto?

In many ways, this website and my books on the Monad (The Monad Manifesto: Merging Science and Spirituality, 2022, and In the Mind of the Universe: The Monad and You! 2024) are a response to the computer science classic “The Monad Manifesto,” a technical tome written by software engineer Jeffrey Snover in 2002.

Snover was trying to reconcile the Unix operating system (based on editing text files) with Microsoft’s Windows API system (based on manipulating files of data known as “objects”), so that the two applications could talk to each other. Technically, he needed to find a piping system to merge several steps in Unix into one step without having to parse hundreds of lines of text to get the desired results.

Snover found his solution in a 300-year-old book called Monadology, written by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In that book, Leibniz defined the “Monad” as the fundamental source of reality which joins lesser monads together to complete tasks in the physical universe. Snover recognized Leibniz’ cosmological model in the Unix format and developed a new system he called “Monad” (renamed “Windows Power Shell” by Microsoft). 
Snover’s Monad consists of thousands of lesser monads or “cmdlets” (“command applets”) arranged in a pipeline that joins multiple cmdlets to accomplish specific tasks. By using monad pipelines rather than parsing endless lines of text, programmers could create software much more efficiently.

But Snover’s “Monad Manifesto” was not the first attempt to apply monad cosmology to computers. In 1967, Konrad Zuse, who is considered the “Father of Automation,” proposed that the entire universe is a “Cellular Automaton” running on an evolving array of monad cells, each of which can store digital information. In 1978, computer scientist Edward Fredkin expanded Zuze’s work into a virtual cosmology known as “Digital Physics.” The very idea that there might be a “digital physics” at work in the universe spawned scores of far-out ideas—everything from Digimon to the Matrix.

But the dramatic theories of Digital Physics made Leibniz’ dry Monadology come alive for me. On re-reading the text, new ideas and relationships popped out on every page, and I came to appreciate what an amazingly powerful cosmology the Monad represents. I found out that the Monad concept was at the center of philosophical debate for over two thousand years before Leibniz even uttered his first sentence. I discovered that the Monad is not just an archetype; it is the source of all archetypes possible in consciousness. In other words, the Monad is the singular “mind” embedded in Nature that runs everything. Or as Snover might put it: the Monad is the single cosmic pipeline of all conceivable “cmdlets.”

After nearly a decade of research, I feel strongly that the Monad viewpoint is a vital clue to the nature of reality that is gradually revealing itself—not only in our sciences and philosophy but also emerging psychologically in individuals who report experiencing unitary consciousness in mystical states or meditation. At the same time, quantum scientists are discovering irrefutable evidence that consciousness is the primary agent of creation on the subatomic level, and leading scientists and philosophers are adopting a monistic panpsychic viewpoint in which One Mind is present everywhere in the universe.

Obviously, a new Monad Manifesto was necessary—one that more fully reflected the primordial pattern of the monadic Mind embedded in the universe and advocated a deeper appreciation of this powerful idea. The Monad is the indivisible single source of reality. In science, it’s the Big Bang singularity from which the universe emerged. In mathematics, the Monad is defined as zero (0), the single point source of all numbers. For theologians, the Monad is the logos or Word of God. In philosophy, it’s the basic Substance at the root of both mind and matter.

In your life, the Monad is the singularity in your own consciousness, the point of awareness from which you experience the world. You are conscious because the whole universe is conscious, and the commonplace experience of being a single point of awareness in your own mind—of living in your own little world—is a reflection of the Monad in you. The focus of my work is on our relationship to the greater Monad. Whatever the ultimate truth of the universe, that is not going to change. What changes is our piece of the puzzle—the singularity of consciousness in our personal space around which we’ve built our entire lives. No matter how corrupt or chaotic the world around us, the part we can control is inside us.

- Dennis William Hauck, October 2022.