[MD] Intellectual Level

[MarshaV]

This book is comparing the nondualistsic experience presented in Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism.  The quote suggests that the East's nondualism is not the norm, but transcends "conceptual thought processes," which are dualistic in nature.    

    "In all the Asian systems that incorporate this claim, the nondual nature of reality is indubitably revealed only in what they term enlightenment or liberation (nirvana, moksa, satori, etc.), which is the experience of nonduality.  That experience is the hinge upon which each metaphysics turns, despite the fact that such enlightenment has different names in various systems and is often described in very different ways. Unlike Western philosophy, which prefers to reflect on the dualistic experience accessible to all, these systems make far-reaching epistemological and ontological claims on the basis of counterintuitive experience accessible to very few---if we accept their accounts, only to those who are willing to follow the necessarily rigorous path, who are very few.  It is not that these claims are not empirical, but if they are true, they are grounded on evidence not readily available.  This is the source of the difficulty in evaluating them.  Plotinus has already drawn our attention to another characteristic of the nondual experience, which fully accords with Asian descriptions of enlightenment:  the experience cannot be attained or even understood conceptually.  We shall see that this is because our usual conceptual knowledge is dualist in at least two senses:  it is knowledge _about_ something, which a subject _has_; and such knowledge must discriminate one thing from another in order to assert some _attribute about some _thing_.  Later I reflect on the isomorphism between our conceptual thought-processes and the subject---predicate structure of language.  What is important at the moment is that the dualistic nature of conceptual knowledge means the nondual experience, if genuine, must transcend philosophy itself and all its ontological claims.  And that brings our suspicions to a head: are these different philosophies based upon, and trying to point to, the same nondual experience?  During the experience itself there is no philosophizing, but if and when one "steps back" and attempts to describe what has been experienced, perhaps a variety of descriptions are possible.  Maybe even contradictory ontologies can be erected on the same phenomenological ground..." 
     (Loy, David, 'Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy',pp.4-5)
 

 
___