I think we get too caught up in the terms and appearances of the discussion. If you don’t know whether there is any depth behind a statement, why not probe rath

I think we get too caught up in the terms and appearances of the discussion. If you don’t know whether there is any depth behind a statement, why not probe rather than reject out of hand? As it is, you’re literally saying “I don’t know what you’re actually trying to say but it is superficially reminiscent of something I find disagreeable.” Just because someone is using terms and abstractions outside of your background does not mean they’re meaningless. The fact that scam artists and charlatans peddling pseudoscience try to co-opt scientific terms and outward appearances does not mean that science itself is nonsense, though someone with no background in science might be unable or unwilling to distinguish between them. And likewise the fact that many scientific models and abstractions that were popular in the past were later shown to be inaccurate or to be carrying fallacious baggage along with them does not mean that they weren’t useful steps toward a more refined model and a deeper understanding. Instead of rejecting discussion on the basis of superficial differences, why not look for the similarities between your abstractions and try to use that to build understanding? You may be surprised at how well your models map to each other, and in what you can learn (or teach) from the places where they don’t. Eastern traditions had thoroughly developed the basis for a safe and effective method for coping with mental disorders (which we now refer to as mindfulness) long before psychologists in the West were jamming ice picks into people’s eye sockets and calling it treatment. Just because someone’s terms and abstractions don’t easily mesh with your own does not mean that they cannot describe the same reality with varying levels of fidelity, and just because some parts of a tradition are found to amount to spurious (or even actively harmful) nonsense does not mean there’s no value to be found in it (early psychologists produced a huge amount of unscientific drivel and ruined a lot of people’s lives, but the application of rigor to understanding human behavior was a virtue in itself that ultimately led us to deeper understanding).