you have a lot of interesting thoughts and a depth of experience in these subjects - if you could get better at the presentation aspect I think you'd have a lot

you have a lot of interesting thoughts and a depth of experience in these subjects - if you could get better at the presentation aspect I think you'd have a lot to offer people. I come from more of a taoist background, when I read the tao te ching it changed my life. I would see how he tries to present his ideas - vague, contradictory, unprecise - as I think that is a much better way to communicate these attitudes (ie the insights of meditation/awareness/secular "spirituality") to most modern cultures today. better than that, check out alan watts, he introduced much of eastern philosophy to the west and he is probably my favorite public speaker of all time, period. he makes everything sound profound and mysterious and yet a meaningless joke at the same time - just like the ideas really are. back to our "disagreement" - I think we're just working from opposite directions of the same core fundamentals (yin/yang, in other words) - your approach is very rigid, precise, and ruthlessly blunt and honest. my approach is more boiled down to essentials, focused on a roughly correct understanding that will guide most people in the right direction over time, and forgiving - flowing like water as a taoist might say. the fact is, unlike in many western cultures and ideas (unlike stoicism, which is arguably the western "version" of eastern thought and attitudes), there's no contradiction between our approaches I think - they're more like two different teachers where some personalities need your precisely rigid approach and some might benefit more from a more taoist approach. Ultimately in my life I've needed a bit of both but at different points - the strong harsh ruthlessly honest self-discipline most recently, and the relaxed, intuitively focused, flexible taoist approach when I was a stressed teenager. I hope this helps make things clearer for anyone reading this as if reading a debate.