JB Sylvest November 29, 2011 at 3:17 pm # I resonated with Matthew’s thoughts on many levels, in many ways and will explain why. In a context of inter-religious dialogue, Matthew uses terms and phrases like lack of nuance, simple misrepresentation, tainted, serious error, dangerous error, spiritual pathology, pitfall, danger, egoism and spiritual laziness. He also discusses insight, meaning, seeing, awakening, journey, encounter, realization, corrective, development, states, stages, striving and practice. One take-away might be that the first list is associated with either improperly dualistic or short-circuited nondual approaches while the next reflects the properly nondual (often involving the strategic use of a “thirdness” of some type). Implicit in these diagnoses and therapies are answers to such questions as 1) What and who is wo/man? 2) What is reality’s basic stuff? 3) What do we value? 4) How do we get what we value? and 5) What and who is God? One could think of these questions in a manufacturing metaphor which would include, respectively, 1) the end user 2) raw materials 3) end products, by-products & waste products 4) processes and 5) the producer. Alternatively, one could employ these categories: 1) people or anthropology 2) relationships or phenomenology/ontology 3) values or axiology 4) methods or epistemology and 5) hermeneutics or theology. In Matthew’s excellent essay as well as his recommended nondual reading, I would challenge the reader to further disambiguate each use of the term, nondual, because, in jumping from one category to the next, it can take on very distinct meanings. — When talking about people, it can refer to theories of consciousness: Is consciousness another primitive alongside space, time, mass and energy or somehow emergent therefrom? It could also refer to our conceptions of the soul: Is the soul physical or nonphysical, temporal or immortal? — When talking about ontology or metaphysics, it can refer to the nature of reality: Is all of reality natural, physical, material? Does reality also include the supernatural and immaterial? Does reality include one, two or even more kinds of thing, substance or stuff? — In axiology, what are the categories of value? What about disvalue and evil? — In terms of epistemology, is there more than one way of knowing reality? How does science differ from culture, philosophy and religion? — And, theologically, what might be dual or nondual about God? 1
Another reason we don’t simply use Oneness in the place of nondual is that, in addition to the different categories where it can take on distinct meanings, there is also more than one way, by strict definition, to be nondual: Threeness, for example, works, as well as an infinity of other numerical approaches. A nondual way of playing jacks, then, would be to only skip “twosies” and nothing else! One needn’t play only “onesies.” At the same time, who would want to abandon the dualisms of axiology as if true & false, beautiful & ugly, good & evil, free & bound were simple illusions? However much anything “belongs” does not negate the need for either its transcendence or transformation? In my view, to realize reality’s values, one needn’t get to the bottom of all of these non/dual riddles anthropologically, ontologically or even theologically.* note below. We already know enough from evolutionary epistemology and our, more or less, universal human values to live in relative abundance! So, in that regard, I believe we can seriously overstate the perils, dangers and pitfalls that might result from our metaphysical errors and ignorance. (As I see it, our problems more so result, rather, from epistemological mistakes or what it is that we erroneously imagine that we just positively know, thus frustrating our journeys from “is to ought,” the given to the normative, the descriptive to the prescriptive.) What is at stake, rather, is our possible realization of superabundance, which is to suggest that the onus is on religious practitioners to demonstrate that they can journey toward transformation (human authenticity) much more swiftly and with much less hindrance precisely because of their formative spiritualities. Finally, a sufficiently nuanced universalism, in my view, need not be heterodox. One can embrace it, theologically, as a “for all practical purposes, eventuality” without affirming it as an “in-principle, theoretical necessity.” Deep peace! johnboy * note – Not to be coy, my survey of the inter-religious landscape does lead me to a tripartite anthropology, triadic phenomenology, trialectical axiology, trialogical epistemology and trinitarian theology (panSEMIOentheism), which is beyond our present scope.
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