@SerpentQueen, nice to have you aboard as a reader!
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Originally Posted by SerpentQueen
Are you advocating a more "yang" approach with less "yin"? By that I mean more evidence/rational thinking, less "flashes of intuitive insight"? If so, I would argue we need a more balanced approach.
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No that is not what I'm advocating at
all! Insight is of huge importance, and yang and yin in spiritual terms should be balanced.
When you are talking about 'the breakthrough' as a gift, you have to ask,
what breakthrough? Take Einstein -- General Relativity was a breakthrough in
physics, that is, the area it claimed to be a breakthrough
in was about how the physical cosmos functions. In order to know if it really
was a breakthrough with any value, one needs to check if the cosmos
really does work that way. Because however great the breakthrough might feel to the person having it, if it has no actual value in describing the physical world, it is not good or useful physics!
When it comes to understanding culture, the same thing has to apply. You can have a moment of seeing a lot of symbols and saying, well these look like widespread kundalini to me, a moment of sudden vision... but then you need to see, are you right? As humans we tend to hold onto our precious inspirations, but they become so much more valuable if they are subjected to the test of the real world, and the real world causes us to think, to have to be
more creative, to have
more flashes of insight, as a result of having to take it into account.
I don't know where you got this thing about dismissing the 'just do it approach'? (Maybe that initial quote from Karajan in my current post?) If so that 'approach' is not the Nike 'just do it', it's the 'just do
what I tell you' approach! Which is a different thing. The point of that particular blog post was that
unquestioning obedience to a set of spiritual instructions may not be the best way to encourage human spiritual creativity, which is actually what gives us so much good stuff. I'm not a fan of being told what to think for no good reason, I simply can't seem to follow even the best ideas for spiritual training, for example, without seeing why they ought to do me good. I'm not the 'faith' type! And again, I'd have to say that a good deal of the spiritual stuff I value most came exactly from that continually-probing mindset.
I also haven't studied the Sufis so I can't comment on their relevance to that...