The document discusses different religious and spiritual approaches, arguing that: 1) While many approaches can provide salvation, some may help people progress more quickly along the path. 2) Nondual and dualistic perspectives are present in all traditions, and refer more to epistemic or practical stances rather than ontological claims. 3) Claims that consciousness is a "primal reality" are questionable and not supported by evidence, which suggests consciousness emerges from physical realities in an integrative way. 4) Optimal human development requires an integration of nondual and dualistic perspectives through a full "hermeneutical spiral" over time, incorporating different ways of knowing.

1. 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
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2. rinse, wash and spin cycles (however they may be conceived, epistemically-
axiologically, 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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