(May 22, 2025 at 8:36 am)Alan V Wrote: In the U.S., people are oversold on nearly everything. That includes spirituality, or what is packaged as spirituality.
Sad but true!
We live in a time that's uniquely hostile to the spiritual, so that what gets sold as spiritual is too often just hype. Performative imitations that are rootless.
One of the problems is that traditional spirituality was demanding -- you had to give up certain things in order to gain something higher. But giving up things is apparently not the American way.
That, I think, makes wabi sabi very similar to spiritual movements, if it isn't exactly the same. Heightened awareness of value and beauty, perception of what's in front of you instead of grasping after goals. It makes life better but it's closer to letting go than to getting more.
One of the things I like about traditional Japanese culture is that (before Western influence) all the categories were different from ours. They didn't think of spirituality the same way we do. The arts weren't about skillful end products (jutsu - skill) but about the way one lived it (dō - as in judo or kendo -- is the same character as the Tao in Taoism). That's pretty close to a non-religious spirituality.
