Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Bhaskar's and Wilber's metaphysical nonduality

Continuing from this post, to further comment on the Bhaskar quote on p. 212 of Meta-Reality, he goes further and equates this state of consciousness not only as the non-dual ground of all other states but is "derived from the cosmic envelope, the ground state of the universe." Yes, this is in keeping with Wilber and the shentong Buddhists, but it certainly does fall prey to the metaphysics of presence and conflating epistemology with ontology, the epistemic fallacy by another name. Interestingly, in the footnote he equates this non-dual state with akasha, a Hindu holdover carried into shentog Tibetan notions of alayavijnana with the same implications (The Two Truths Debate, p. 118).


Also of interest, on pp. 211-12 Bhaskar talks about the difference between mindless and mindful transcendent states, the former of pure form and the latter involved with content. The former is contentless and the ground of all other states including mindfulness. It is again quite similar to Thakchoe's discussion of shentong Buddhist notions of a transcendent state of causal nothingness distinct from a rangtong co-dependent emptiness (119 and following pages.)

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