Great post man!

In this environment where there are a huge amount of differences in perspective, understanding, and in many cases the actual felt experience of reality itself, it's important to seek out what we can understand, identify with and positively interact with in communicating with others, rather than putting our effort into what sticks out as disagreeable to us.

In this way, we simply gloss over the semantic irregularities that cause meaningless or unproductive conflict and put forth everything we have into the common truth between us. It's this universal truth that we're looking for in all matters here, whether it be strictly macroscopic and materialistic, or deeply "spiritual" (or however you'd call it).

...Speaking of which, there's no reason why the materialistic view and the spiritual view can't coincide. It seems to me that the the materialistic viewpoint strives to bring many divine or alchemical elements into its scope of understanding, and in the same way the spiritual experience seeks to realize the divine, cosmic, etc aspects of reality in the experience of the eternal present moment, which includes material reality. There's no need to pick sides, because in the end of the day, we're just taking two paths to the same goal... and we're all on the same team.

[/schpeel]

Hg