Monism

The last post doesn't do justice to Husserl. Of course. First, the epoche is, in so many words, a deliberate refrain from distinguishing between 'real' and 'unreal'. We do that so we can look at the cloud of consciousness (rather than stream of consciousness) as a whole.

It's monism, in a sense, but a monism achieved not by clumping everything together under one category, but actually refraining from applying any one, highest-level category at all.

When I do that - refrain from applying a top-level category and branching off from that - I take what 'appears' to me as a whole, without making judgments about cause and effect, for instance, or 'real' and 'unreal', 'waking' and 'sleeping', 'sensual' and 'mental'.

What I then do is describe what I 'see' - what is present to me. This is the kernel of phenomenology, so far as I'm concerned.

Husserl went beyond this, though, and many after him, by focusing on what consciousness IS, by studying the structure of experience, and inferring the structure or nature of consciousness.

Steiner, on the other hand, went beyond this epoche, to find himself in a world of spirit.

Simple as that, I guess.