if i wasn't typing on my i-phone with two thumbs, i would've better said: why take one path vs another unless one believed, as we do, that a particular explicit faith enjoys & provides a superabundance, ortho-doxically ( suggesting we believe that there is a master cosmic metanarrative, even if we fallibly apprehend it and don't fully comprehend it ), even from an otherwise poly-doxic ( each tradition perhaps better emphasizes one aspect of the God-encounter, which is multi-form ), poly-praxic ( many different practices, in many traditions, efficaciously orient, sanctify, empower, heal/nurture & save us ) and/or poly-pathic ( manifold & multiform affective attunements efficaciously align our self-ego axes with ground, other-people/God & cosmos ) stance, which is put more simply as, while many approaches participate in salvific efficacies, imparting what is both necessary & sufficient for salvation (temporally, proleptically & eschatologically), some help us move more swiftly and with less hindrance along the way (although it makes little sense for any of us to insist on this a priori vis a vis our chosen stance and it is otherwise incumbent on us to not just see the path ahead but to get underway and manifest our claims that others may validate them a posteriori)
nondual and dualistic approaches are part & parcel of all the traditions and they mostly entail epistemic stances, or practical/methodological approaches, not ontological conclusions
those who do speak of the nondual, ontologically, are typically treating consciousness as a primitive, as some primal reality of which we are all ultimately constituted, and this sounds wrong-headed to me anthropologically, which is to suggest that such a stance is not some theological tautology immune to critique but, even if a philosophy of mind/metaphysical position, has some scientific/positivistic significance, which means it is subject to probabilistic falsification; the preponderance of the evidence is that consciousness is an emergent, not a primal, reality; and that it is not emergent in the sense of being emancipated from physical constraints or illusions but in the sense of arising thermodynamically and morphodynamically as a physical reality but with teleodynamic (think downward causation) properties that are not reducible (fully explainable) in terms of those physical properties of which it is constituted and from which it emerged
human value-realizations, then, are not optimized when the nondual is divorced from the dualistic but, instead, are effected when the nondual and dualistic are happily married ; they comprise, then, a kairos movement not a chronos moment, which is to say that a full hermeneutical spiral of pre-rational, non-rational, rational and supra-rational moments must be completed through time for an optimal value-realization movement to be afforded; in other words, we haven't properly taken care of our hermeneutical clothes until they've gone through 1
rinse, wash and spin cycles (however they may be conceived, epistemicallyaxiologically, see these different ways of describing the spectra of human experience: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9054...d-Nondual-Approaches ) and also put outside on the line ( sensus fidelium) or in the dryer (community of inquiry) , prior to folding, hanging, shelving or wearing (expand the metaphor as you see fit)!
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