Integral Review (Jun 2012)
Structure and Process: Integral Philosophy and the Triple Transformation
Abstract
This paper looks at the ongoing debate between perennialism and pluralism in religious studies and considers the category of the integral, as described by Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) in the context of this debate. After exploring the case for perennialism vis-à-vis pluralism, it compares the contemporary taxonomy of a perennial core to mystical experience developed by Robert K. C. Forman with the idea of the “triple transformation” developed by Sri Aurobindo as a way to the realization of an “integral consciousness.” Through this consideration, it indicates the aporetic nature of an integralism which can simultaneously uphold the concerns of perennialism and pluralism non-reductively. Such an aporetic goal challenges the epistemological assumptions of the modern knowledge academy and is shown to make sense only as an ever deferred processual ontology as against the knowledge academy’s telos of a totalistic structuralism.
