from Carol P. Christ’s Rebirth of the Goddess:

To transform the way we think we must find alternatives to dualistic and hierarchial habits of thought. Philosopher and thealogian Mara Keller proposes three foundations on which a nondualistic or holistic philosophy can be built. The first is the intuition of the unity of being and the interdependence of life; the second is recognition of the tendency of the human mind to think in pairs or dualities that are “interactive and interdependent” and “together are part of a larger whole”; and the third is appreciation of “endless plurality [or] infinite diversity, . . . [which is itself] part of a larger whole.” I would add that thinking in dualities is a simplification of an ultimately unified and plural reality. Simplified thinking can be useful in some contexts but deceptive and dangerous in others.

In holistic and embodied thinking, spirit and nature, mind and body, rationality and nonrationality, are not distinct entities or absolute categories that stand in hierarchical opposition to each other. They are not even poles within a horizontal continuum because this would imply that the poles–e.g., “pure mind,” “pure spirit,” “pure rationality,” and their antitheses–exist. Spirit and nature, mind and body, rationality and irrationality, are artificial distinctions we have created: It is more accurate to say that these are different ways of looking at the same reality.(100)