/lit/ - Literature

>>9310575
>>9310800

Wow, this is really thought-provoking. Thanks for sharing!

>like in most monumental cultural divides, the slow aggregate process of bridging a gap one stone at a time will outperform the most incisive and expressive intellect trying to force broadcast understanding to his contemporaries at home who have not made the pilgrimage themselves.

Totally true. I've spent quite a lot of time looking for totalizing and universal theories. It's been a frustrating exercise. Forcing the truth in general usually results in getting dumped on one's ear, playing fun linguistic games or forcing reality to fit the model.

>Eastern philosophical thought also suffers from issues of deeply rooted and explicit cultural predisposition to orthodoxy that impede progress in a way that is most unsavoury to me.

In the West also! How else can you explain the chanting mobs that surround Peterson? The orthodox position today is overidentification with the victim...and all of these victims victimize each other...who's to blame? Who's at fault? How are things to be fixed? It's not pleasant to take a close look at oneself, to see how much one's own desires play a role in one's painful, difficult or embarrassing circumstances...

>The most common misinterpretation / misrepresentation in the East-West dynamic is the conflation of the yin/yang concept with dualism, which draws my ire without exception.

Yes, absolutely. There are no neat and easy distinctions...and the more we talk, the more we write, the more confusion multiplies...to be able to see things, grasp them immediately and in this un-theoretical sense, this workmanlike or craftsmanlike sense is preferable...

>Your confusion about "good" things only appearing when the Tao is lost confuses me in turn.

Of course, negative things also appear as well. But the part I find fascinating is how both the good *and* the bad manifest out of a forgetting - perhaps the same 'forgetting of Being' Heidegger describes. Etiquette, for example, is preferable to crudeness, but inferior to naturalness. Everything manifests through a process of forgetfulness, or departure, from what which is natural, though inhuman; we can do all of the psychological acrobatics we wish or feel compelled to perform, but the Tao reminds us that, prior to this, there is always a more enigmatic process at work.

>Reality as the full multiplicity of possibility and context.
Yes. And perhaps, for the sage, without the constant anxiety w/r/t how to act, what to choose - as Confucius says (the Stoics also), being able to follow these things and not have one's own desires be other than the desires of Nature. To be able to *listen* to creation and not always be mucking it up with one's infinitely desiring, bewildered ego...