[Erunsenef]

I might be able to help a little. What he's saying is basically a very compressed, verbally dense version of Ken Wilbur's book "No Boundary," which I read most of and really enjoyed. The book is not hard to understand at all! But when you try to compress it that much I think it gets kind of silly-sounding.

I'm not good with words but let me try. Basically when we feel "stress," a tense mind, it's not so different than a tense muscle in that a tense muscle is a muscle pulling in two directions at once - a tense mind does that too. Often when I try to solve a problem I just add another "pull" to the mental picture - more tension! When I meditate and "let go" of my attachments, judgments, etc I can actually feel the "natural intelligence" of my awareness begin to dissolve the inner knots...slowly loosening the "pull" that keeps them from unwinding. From my limited perspective it often seems that they unwind and are "alchemized" into something that isn't dual anymore, it's all one integrated experience. And that's what the article is talking about - albeit in a very overly-abstract way.

Let me give an example and then I'll try to say how this fits in to the article.

I'm unhappy with being a bit heavy and beating myself up for it. (the mind struggling with itself, mental tension, that's what I call the "pull.") I say "I'm 15 pounds heavier than I want to be, I must make myself exercise, I'm such a slob." I brutalize myself for not exercising, thinking that if I just "push" myself hard enough I will start exercising, lose 15 pounds, and make myself happy. Instead of seeing the root of the problem, I just added a third pull here! ("Push" and "pull" aren't so different here, even though their literal meanings are opposite.) And on it goes. The knot twists and intensifies.

When I meditate I can see the pain and suffering underlying all of this - the feelings of inadequacy and the lack of metta I hold for myself. And I just sit with it. And wow...when I work through that pain, exercising starts to be something I want to do - out of love for myself. And during the times that I do not exercise, I might start caring a lot less about what other people might think of my weight, because my body-image-clinging has become less. I think I can see that happening already.

So this is how I see it fitting into the article. We create all kinds of "boundaries" and "dichotomies" in this way - pulling, pushing, splitting ourselves, through our clinging and aversion. The more we include in our awareness, the more we stop clinging to "having THIS" and "avoiding THAT," the more these knots and false divisions melt away, and the better off we are. Buddhist meditation is great for this (as folks here know already.) All this splitting is basically the "law of the excluded middle" that the author talks about, I think. He just uses overly-intellectual language, and his example of "blue vs. non-blue" I didn't find particularly helpful in that it's hard to turn that into a useful tool for real-life situations. But when I read it, the parts that I could understand, it made a lot of sense. I just wonder why he didn't give more practical examples that could help people. It does seem an incredibly abstract, overly-intellectual way to present it; it doesn't engage people. Abstract examples are only helpful if you can relate them to something closer to you.

So yeah I agree with you Aloka!