Talk:Next Buddha Will Be A Collective

Michel, I would respectfully suggest that you consider changing "Religious and spiritual expression is always embedded in societal structures" to something less absolute and categorical. Secular social structures are possible, in which religion and spirituality are replaced by secular ethics, morality, conscience, respect for the value and dignity of all life, appreciation of the evolutionary kinship and interdependence of everything (ecology), the values of cooperative individualism (community and p2p), human and inter-species bonding, tradition and ritual, exotic states of consciousness, mindfulness, synergy, etc. I challenge anyone to state a religious, spiritual, mystical, or supernatural concept for which I cannot describe a functional equivalent or alternative in secular/natural terms. If p2p spirituality is participatory, should ample space (including head space) not be made for participation in discussion and practice by those who have an atheist, agnostic, secular, or science orientation???--Poor Richard 12:00, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

I submit that the kind of natural/secular terminology I refer to is part of the evolution of thought and language that predicates your article, and that it may have high utility and "portability" in the kind of intellectual, academic, scholarly, technical and interdisciplinary discussions that are prevalent in the p2p and technology oriented community.--Poor Richard 12:22, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Richard, your argument is not related to what I say, so I'm assuming you misread or misinterpret its meaning. I agree with you, but if you really disagree with me, you should argue that there is a possibility for religion and spirituality NOT TO BE EMBEDDED in societal structures. I'm still enough of a materialist (though an integral one), to hold that as an disembodied impossibility. Unless you can provide me with an example?

By the way, I advocate a secular, materialist if you like, re-appropriation of the psycho-spiritual and bodymind affecting practices of the religious and spiritual traditions. Though I agree mostly with you on the conceptual level (i.e. much of the spiritual language has secular equivalents), I do hold that current secularism is not developed enough to fully replace the thousands of years of development of such psycho-spiritual techniques, and without such a re-appropriation, it's really a poor cousin of the historical accomplishments of tens of thousands of years of human development. I'm not for a clean-slate and violent approach to human history which rejects all that came before, but for a critical re-appropriation of cultural achievements.