Quote:
Nicholas Eschenbruch wrote:
My point was only, and I think Demetrio made it too, if more precisely, that there may not have been a distinction between the religious and the practical in the first place - for the "ancients", whoever they were, it was a seamless whole.
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Oh, I agree. The anecdote about Ueshiba by Tohei is pretty telling along those lines
In the West we're used to their being some sort of disconnect between 'religious belief' and the day-to-day world. If this thesis about some practical inceptions to the Yin-Yang cosmology holds up, it might easily have gotten past westerners because they conceive of religious/metaphysical belief as divorced from day-to-day reality and their inclination, as Phi points out, would be to take "become one with your opponent" metaphorically instead of as a practical description.
FWIW
Mike