I don't even actually know what's "ontic" and what's not. What I know as an experiential fact is that in every instance of conscious experience there is a non-changing/non-emergent aspect (beingness/awareness) and changing/emergent aspect - the specific appearance of each form, but all these aspects are inseparable, because each specific form always has a property/aspect of existence (beingness) and a property/aspect of being consciously experienced (=awareness), and they are mysteriously inseparable from the oneness/wholeness of this space of conscious experience. There is also an experience of an absence of any forms where the beingness and awareness still persist. These are experiential facts. Now, we can call the non-changing aspects as "fundamental" and changing ones as "non-fundamental" (or "ontic" and "non-ontic"), but these are just linguistic terms and they don't explain anything, and besides these are actually all Western philosophical terms, we never find those in the generic Eastern idealistic philosophies, I just used them so that we can speak the same Western language, but I admit that it might cause only more confusion. Buddha actually used different terms to describe the difference in these aspects:AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 1:10 am Except in your version of "dual-aspect monism", one aspect has a shared essence which maintains at ontic level (awareness) and another aspect has no shared essence and does not maintain at ontic level. That is dualism... there is no way around that. Although you keep going back and forth between whether Thinking maintains at the ontic level or not.
"There is, monks, an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated. If there were not that unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, there would not be the case that emancipation from the born — become — made — fabricated would be discerned. But precisely because there is an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, emancipation from the born — become — made — fabricated is thus discerned." (Iti. 2.16)