INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST http://www.integralworld.net Newsletter Nr. 631 Amsterdam, December 1st, 2016 NONDUALITY, THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN? - Reflections on the long-due rebalancing of integral thinking - OLIVER GRIEBEL What is this alternative, more precisely? First of all, I think that everybody in integralism agrees that there has to be some ultimate frame or background or medium for everything that lives and happens. All agree that this Ultimate Reality has to be all-encompassing, and therefore cannot be part of a further duality transcending it. In this sense, the Ultimate has to be nondual, I think. But that doesn't mean that this Ultimate One can't be a dual-plural in itself, can't be the Many-One (as John Heron calls it), that is, the duality between the multitude/variety of things and their all-encompassing unity. Is there anything wrong with this kind of “dialectic/dualistic monism” (to use a related philosophical term)? For many there is. There is an almost commonplace in Eastern spiritual thinking as well as in modern and postmodern thinking, that I'd like to call “transcendentalism”. Immanuel Kant, who coined the notion of “transcendental”, claimed that the “thing in itself” is beyond all reason, and it's impossible to know how it “affects” us. Why should that be? Basically, according to Kant, because the concepts of our mind structure what is “given” to it by our senses, because we can't know how right or wrong our concepts are, and because especially the Last Things like world, soul and God are too big for our minds to grasp: Whenever we try to, we become enmeshed in paradoxes. Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/griebel4.html