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It's interesting to me how Daoism from China and Hermeticism from Greco-Egyptian culture erose from very separate places with very similar themes. Both traditio

by jadbox 3y ago

It's interesting to me how Daoism from China and Hermeticism from Greco-Egyptian culture erose from very separate places with very similar themes. Both traditions emphasize the idea of a universal force or principle governing the cosmos (the Tao in Daoism and the All or the 0ne in Hermeticism).

FollowingTheDao 3y ago
Hermeticism was influenced by Daoism and Daoism was around way before Hermeticism as a folk religion and shamanistic practice. Daosim was centrifuged as early as 500BCE, a good 200 years before Hermeticism. It is most likely there was some cultural interactions, ie, the Dayuan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayuan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayuan
smokel 3y ago
This is probably due to a built-in preference in our minds for something we later started calling Occam's razor. Obviously there must have been something that started it all, and if there were n+1 things at some time, there might have been n things before, leading to the conclusion that there must once have been 1 thing. These philosophies arise multiple times per evening in any pub where alcohol is served. It's just that most don't stick around for long enough, possibly due to bad marketing.
- morelisp 3y ago
  Is it an in-built preference? I think a robust monism is still a fairly radical position, especially among religious views. For example even the branches of Christianity which tack more materially tend to draw a rigid boundary between creator/created, God/the universe, etc. (and if you interrogate lay views they tend to skew even more dualistically).
  - smokel 3y ago
    The thinking starts with the beer, then progresses towards one entity, then backpedals because one needs a second to offset against, and from two comes three, and we have come full circle. I see a similar pattern in the advent of abstract art. People have independently settled upon primary colors, primary shapes, and primary compositions, only to then get stuck in a rather limited playing field, from which people started again to create the total utter chaos that is called post-modernism. My personal conviction is that neither religion not abstract art have found the key to understanding the universe. They merely reflect our limited way of thinking.
  - memling 3y ago
    > Is it an in-built preference? I think a robust monism is still a fairly radical position, especially among religious views. For example even the branches of Christianity which tack more materially tend to draw a rigid boundary between creator/created, God/the universe, etc. (and if you interrogate lay views they tend to skew even more dualistically). Can you expand on this a bit? I have an intuition about what you're saying, but I confess that the definitions can be a little slippery.

by jadbox 3y ago

FollowingTheDao 3y ago

Hermeticism was influenced by Daoism and Daoism was around way before Hermeticism as a folk religion and shamanistic practice. Daosim was centrifuged as early as 500BCE, a good 200 years before Hermeticism. It is most likely there was some cultural interactions, ie, the Dayuan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayuan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayuan

smokel 3y ago

This is probably due to a built-in preference in our minds for something we later started calling Occam's razor. Obviously there must have been something that started it all, and if there were n+1 things at some time, there might have been n things before, leading to the conclusion that there must once have been 1 thing. These philosophies arise multiple times per evening in any pub where alcohol is served. It's just that most don't stick around for long enough, possibly due to bad marketing.

morelisp 3y ago
Is it an in-built preference? I think a robust monism is still a fairly radical position, especially among religious views. For example even the branches of Christianity which tack more materially tend to draw a rigid boundary between creator/created, God/the universe, etc. (and if you interrogate lay views they tend to skew even more dualistically).
- smokel 3y ago
  The thinking starts with the beer, then progresses towards one entity, then backpedals because one needs a second to offset against, and from two comes three, and we have come full circle. I see a similar pattern in the advent of abstract art. People have independently settled upon primary colors, primary shapes, and primary compositions, only to then get stuck in a rather limited playing field, from which people started again to create the total utter chaos that is called post-modernism. My personal conviction is that neither religion not abstract art have found the key to understanding the universe. They merely reflect our limited way of thinking.
- memling 3y ago
  > Is it an in-built preference? I think a robust monism is still a fairly radical position, especially among religious views. For example even the branches of Christianity which tack more materially tend to draw a rigid boundary between creator/created, God/the universe, etc. (and if you interrogate lay views they tend to skew even more dualistically). Can you expand on this a bit? I have an intuition about what you're saying, but I confess that the definitions can be a little slippery.