David Chapman's philosophy blog

http://meaningness.com/metablog/sbnr-spiritual-but-not-religious/comments#comment-74

[here's an excerpt to pique your interest]

"But
the "less bullsh*t more results"-approach has its own challenges. When
people want to strip things to their bare essentials baby is sometimes
thrown out of the bathwater. (Like Daniel Ingram's "Simplified Four Path
Model" of the process of enlightenment. I was initially much inspired
by it before becoming familiar with Aro gTér, but for me in the end,
that model was more detrimental than useful. When I threw that model out
of the window, I started to make sudden progress - though the problem
could just be that the model may be very much at odds with the Dzogchen
Sem-de.)"

-- I should clarify that that is someone else's reply to David's commentary on Eckhart Tolle's most recent book. I find the whole thread very interesting.

DC:
"Monism sees all religions as having some value—but only to the
extent that they agree with monism.
Monism sees all other religions as
distorted versions of monism, which is the One Faith."

and

"Monism is highly intolerant of anyone who says "no, actually, my religion/philosophy is not
the same as yours."
Because monism presents itself as nice and
inclusive, it is impossible to say "no, I disagree"—however
politely—without being painted as aggressive and narrow yourself."

Aha, I think this may be the key to what I've been trying to articulate to myself about the problematic nature of Ken Wilber's orthodox Integral Theory. There is a very hegemonic, violent-if-passive-aggressive sort of quality to perrenialism, which has always bothered me. But I've never considered a critique from the point of view of the Four Extremes teaching.

In fact this critique oo monism/dualism, eternalism/nihilism always seems to turn up in Vajrayana teachers to whom I'm attracted, like the Aro teachers or Ole Nydhal for instance. It's a really profound teaching, because it helps me see the automatic limits of the basic representational strategies available to conceptual modeling.

The need for balancing conceptual modeling with poetic evocation or pointing out when trying to help myself or someone else connect with the unstructured sheer meaningfulness of Being makes such a teaching helpful, since every attempt to communicate with language as a medium seems to involve conceptuality which indeed seems to be limited to variations on these four extremes. So it seems necessary to be able to engage language with the specific, not just general, awareness of its limits vis-a-vis these four extremes. That way these limits can be played with, or played-out into an epiphanic touching of the sheer meaningfulness beyond concepts and imagination.