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user-inactivated  ·  3406 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Does Mindfulness Mean Anything?

    I dislike sort of grouping them up in such broad labels - as a historian I'm a bit averse to it for a few reasons.

I definitely understand where you're coming from. Personally though, I don't think there is much harm in saying "Here are some overarching similarities between these cultures, but please refer to the footnotes for statistical outliers."

While it's not something that either you or I touched on, I do think it's important to point out that we in the west tend to over romanticize eastern cultures and practices. To us, their ideas and beliefs seem exotic and compelling. To them though, it's every day life and they probably don't give much of it a second thought the way we don't give a lot of our beliefs a second thought.