IS NONDUALITY A STATE?

(a) YES, the general appearance of nonduality in human experience takes the form of a temporary access to an experiential condition that cannot be reduced to material, subtle or causal realities.  This "state" means access by embodied consciousness to an everpresent ontological factor that is approximated by the terms "prior happiness", "being-becoming", "trans-infinite" and "generative samedifference".

(b) NO, the very concept of nonduality is that of transcendence itself.  It is unconditional and cannot be located in a particular condition, moment or form of experience.  It is not a state but an "interstate".  It is part of the architecture which permits states to be both differentiated and combined and therefore must be classed as distinct from them.

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To answer NO requires that we explain how the phenomenology of YES is created.

To answer YES requires that we explain how the philosophy of NO is accounted for.

Integrative models of development tend to present the progressive stabilization of reality-modes unfolding in a sequence that looks roughly like gross, subtle, causal & nondual. 

We are asked to understand that primitive, pre-rational and childish experiences of these states are NOT more spiritual merely because they have access to different qualities -- so there is no going "back" to essence. 

But we are also asked to remember that the included characteristics of the emergent phases does NOT mean that their basic attributes are suddenly appearing for the first time -- for the subtle, causal and nondual are not missing prior to their integration.

Yet the drift of emergence tends to move a subset of the gross psychology toward interest in subtle realities... and a subset of successful investigators also find a rational stabilization of infinite/essential/pure realities... and of those a subset starts to be able to think clearing and actively embody nondual realities.  Why are nondual realities the last to be integrated in this manner when they existed all along?  Especially when they are necessarily active in the differentiation and integration at every stage?

It is precisely because the nondual is implicated in every integration that it must be the last to be integrated -- or the beginning of a new echelon of integrations.  Even though we may enter (I wish it for all!) repeated into states of Prior Happiness and Impossibly Okay Trans-Infinity we cannot fully start to establish this as a form of embodied identity until its structural elements have been sifted out from their role in all other affairs.  And since those affairs include the relationships among all the other states we find that they tend to be clarified only after a sufficient experience of the other states, in various combinations, has been assimilated.

All experience requires at least four ontological registers.  I have argued this both in my Bible of Metatheory and in my essay on ontology (Does Anybody Hear?).  That means that any enacted experience that we might call a "nondual state" involves the other three basic ontological domains.

An embodied substantial psychology (gross) experiences the qualitative flowing form (subtle) of an indefinite particular differential (causal) which has the distinct flavor of unbound generative indistinction (nonduality).

Thus there is in this sense a Nondual State Experience but it cannot be isolated mystically from the other domains.  Yet no State experience can be perfectly isolated, all four elements are necessary for any occurrence, so this does not pose a limitation on our ability to accurately speak of a nondual state event.

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