This was a great read! Your idea of threading different monisms together really worked for me: (1) getting a better grasp of monism from different thinkers’ perspectives; (2) showing it’s still a “living question” after millennia; and (3) going beyond solving dualism to show that monism can start to explain free will and causality.

To play devil’s advocate, it seems one has two choices when it comes to explaining being, consciousness, etc: (1) accept not being able to explain it; and (2) try to explain it. We grasp/accept/receive the truth of being and consciousness through the “cogito.” There is not a “cogito” for monism. Not to say monism is false, just to say that a “cogito” is a key threshold. Without a “cogito” monism is one of many speculations, although it is for sure more coherent than most!

Monism sounds like the idea you mentioned of “underlying reality.” I worry about a shell game or musical chairs in which we can keep trying to explain Being with other concepts that are equally ungraspable, begging the Wittgensteinian question “what can we possibly mean by an underlying reality?” He might have said the only language games in which “underlying reality” means anything are games of speculation. There is no point of reference for it in James’ “plain, unqualified actuality, or existence” (great phrase!)

Not that I’m against speculation! Just that I see speculation serving better as regular exercise than as making it a striving for the summit of some Mt. Everest. Those characterizations relate to trying to escape from prison (Plato’s cave? Shawshank?) by figuring out how to levitate, versus slowly digging a tunnel out (which arguably science is doing for us). If one renounces science, perhaps Berkeley’s God-based metaphysics stands up to Occam’s razor best?