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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
it's how the religion influences the social fabric that westerners have harder access to-- you can read all the confucius you want, but until you live in china and get how confucianism is embedded in all manner of social forms, you won't really "get" it.
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This is true, and I think one of the fundamental paradigm (almost) dichotomies between the so-called East and West, as since the Protestant Reformation, is that the mystical traditions of the West were subjugated under the veil of rising sentiments of authoritarianism and pre-nationalism and intellectualism which replaced the cultural fabric of spiritual pursuits in the Western Tradition. In the West, folks are far to pragmatic and materialistic (not in the moral sense) to weave a rich socio-cultural tapestry of spiritual perceptions which are quite familiar in the East. Gone were the days of Saint Francis and what replaced it is the practical religion of Sir Isaac Newton, who of all things invented calculus in
feeble but sincere attempts to decode the Gematric code of the Bible in order to determine the mathematical date of the Apocalypse (serious shit, after over a decade and dozens of notebooks filled with tables and equations he determined it to be 2060) which from the perspective of the even the most indifferently religious person from the East is
comically inept to say the least. How can you use intricate mathematics to discover mystical and spiritual understandings? To the the East, the Western theologians and philosophers since the 17th century have been WAY to left brain about things, and have in fact been too intellectually and brain oriented in the first place, since the Spiritual is not found in the mind or the brain, but rather the Heart.
The real question yet to be asked is what is the substance of the Spirit in the first place? If we must discuss spirituality, surely we must first introduce the various discussions over the meaning of "spirit" which is in itself quite a diverse topic..