The meta-integral experiment of drawing the Integral Theory, Critical Realism, and Complex Thought communities into generative dialogue and collaborative exchange is one, I believe, which turns on – and will be empowered by deeper appreciation for – our perichoretic co-presence, our integral being-with/in-one-another. In practicing prepositional onto-choreography, for instance, or Integral Trialectics, we are attempting to follow – and to translate – the mysterious songlines of differential relations across our varied landscapes. Such tracing may help us to find ourselves in another’s Dreaming; or to find traces of the Other in our own. In the co-presence of in-dwelling, we do not only “converse toward convergent principles” (Burkey, 2010), although that is essential; we learn also to dwell among strangers, to be graciously hosted by differences that can be trusted to illumine what is neglected, undeveloped, or differently held in ourselves.

Put differently, a practice founded on the recognition of co-presence, of being inseparably with and in, is a practice which invites us also to put ourselves in between, in the thick midst of our co-becoming. The ‘meta’ in meta-integral means not only beyond, but between. For in any of our projects of becoming, as Desmond (1995) reminds us, we are always delimited and sustained by an overdetermined excess -- the ontological excess which is our milieu, an overflowing betweenness which always escapes final dialectical synthesis in our individual projects of self-determination (or integral theory-building). This excess of the between, I would argue, is inseparable from our being-with/in-one-another. The “/” of with/in is never finally erased. And as Desmond (1995) observes, this excess has the capacity to startle us into agapeic astonishment -- into the primal innocence of appreciative wonder at and for the other as other. In practice, this is a call to gelassenheit, to a hermeneutics of care (Levin, 1989) and the exercise of the imparative method (Panikkar, 2015): a knowing which doesn't take co-presence to mean that our interpretive categories fully exhaust or capture the being of another, or that our light leaves no shadows, and yet which trusts its assurance that mutual illumination, mutual incandescence, is possible.

Because CIR is inherently multiple – it is a community of views, not a monolithic system – we are afforded the opportunity to first practice amongst ourselves what we would preach: an ethic of co-presence or perichoretic relation. We must practice towards and from strong relation, towards convergence and the mutual disclosure of our heteronomies; we must locate ourselves, as Sloterdijk (2011) says, “in such a way that [we] illuminate and pervade and surround one another, without being harmed by the clarity of difference” (p. 607).

From such practice, we can trust a fully robust CIR theology of religions to eventually emerge. For now, my minimal recommendation is that this approach turn on the concept – and practice – of an integral co-presence, a perichoretic model of relations which affords, in a single gesture, maximal relatedness and differentiation – a nondual entanglement – without compromising developmental and other differentiations that are essential to integral metatheorizing. As we have seen from the discussion above, each model embraces, with different degrees of intensity or subtlety, the prepositional structure I’ve designated as with/in:

—For meta-Reality, co-presence is the primary ‘mechanism’ of nonduality, which is a defining feature of Bhaskar’s ontology since the metaRealist turn;

—For Complex Thought, the hologrammatic principle is the second of its three key organizing concepts (the other two being dialogic and recursion); and

—For Integral Theory, nonduality is at the heart of its (post)metaphysical model and its spiritual praxis (and the holographic metaphor is accepted as identifying a partial expression of non-dual relation)