 A favorite distinction of Western philosophers is between dualistic and monistic experiences. A dualistic experience maintains some distinction, however tenuous, between the subject and what is disclosed. Thus, theistic mystical experiences typically are dualistic, retaining, at some level, a distinction between God and the mystic. Monistic experiences are the extreme of unitive experiences in that they dissolve all duality (Merkur 1999). They are either experiences of the absolute ontological oneness of everything, free of our conceptual distinctions, or are pure consciousness experiences.