Here’s something from the new Integral Review (2006:3, 118-152) that will provide much food for thought and discussion: http://integral-review.org/current_issue/index.asp
A Process Model of Integral Theory by Bonnitta Roy
Abstract: In this article I introduce a Process Model of integral theory, combining Dzogchen ideas and Western works on process philosophy. I make a distinction between Wilber’s notion of perspective and the Dzogchen notion of view. I make the further distinction between Wilber’s use of process in his writings from what I consider to be a process view. I distinguish epistemological categories of knowing from ontological ways of understanding and propose ways to integrate the epistemological field with the ontological dimension by contextualizing both the ways they are related, and the characteristics that distinguish them. This article outlines the conditions of structural enfoldment and shows how they can help contextualize the limits of structural frameworks. I introduce how process models of cognition, conceptualization and value can be integrated into the Process Model.
Bonnie’s solution to the state/stage problem is that states are posited on an anterior/posterior dimension in the usual 4 quadrant depiction. It’s tangential to the interior-exterior, one-many dimensions. This is because states are ontological and stages within the usual matrix are epistemological. The latter exist within complementary and polar duality whereas the former do not adhere to these distinctions; anterior and posterior are “entangled.â€Â
Entanglement “entails omni-directionality, coherence (unity) of event histories and the like….The anterior is related to the posterior not as a ‘before’ and an after,’ but as a single simultaneity; a resonant and coherent temporal unity…The states are experienced as both higher and more fundamentalâ€â€they stack up in both directions at the same time.â€Â
Hence there is no pre or trans with states as there is with stages. This could be an explanation as to why the meditative traditions, which were good at states but not at stages, “equated†dreaming and sleep with subtle and causal, because they are “experienced†as both higher and more fundamental “at the same time†and not involved in the dualistic pre-trans arrow of time involved in the epistemological field of stages.
Bonnie describes the ontological nondual experience as an “open dimension†that “is also something experienced as a dynamic opening-up-to what is absent, what is be-comingâ€â€a kind of clearing that allows the presencing of Being.†This sounds similar to what Ken describes as consciousness per se. But Ken sees it is the empty openness in which phenomenon arise. Ken uses this CPS as an “objective†or a priori measurement for the stages in the epistemological field, but the ontological does not appear to be related to the epistemological in this way. Bonnie says that to see them related as cause-effect, interior-exterior, before-after or whole-part are strictly interpretations from the epistemological field of dualism. Whereas the nondual ontological is simultaneously both/and. It cannot be a “measure†for something relative because measurement itself is, well, relative.