EAST & WEST: A SYNTHESIS, sort-of

As we've discovered, East and West points of view can seem worlds a part: like Christianity and Buddism, a chesseburger and a california roll, a visit to your primary care physician and your favorite acupunturist, or an hour of seated meditation and a Sunday at a Pentacostal church service. All of these coupled things are very different from each other, it's true, but just as an Eastern minded person would say: within every Yin there is a bit of Yang, and in every Yang a bit of Yin," a Western physicist operates under the Law that for every particle there must be some form of an anti-particle. Both Christianity and Buddism teach to respect your body as a temple of God (Universe) and to treat your neighbor as you would want to be treated. A cheeseburger, while hot and greasy, and a california roll, cold and delicate, both provide sustinence and are complimented by something of their opostie Nature: a milkshake (cold) for the burger, and ginger (warming) for the sushi. Your family doc may listen to your physical ailments and send you over to a psychiatrist to prescribe something for your anxiety which is unrelated to your irritable bowel syndrome, while your acupuncturist will inquire about your emotional state as well as your physical before determining the pattern that is tied up in both. But, they both make their diagnosis by first looking at your symptoms with the intention of removing them through treatment. Both a seated meditation and a Sunday church service are participated in to conjure a sense of the Spirit that surrounds us and the connection we have to it.
Basically, I think now more than ever before there is a synthesis of the East and the West (catch-terms for all of the various Nature-based and Technology-based points of view), as travel and communication ALL over the place is more accesible than ever. As we are finding in our studies of Chinese Medicine, it is absolutely impossible to keep our minds and our practices seperate from Western thinking and descriptions of the "Western body," because they are one in the same. You can't have a full-specturm point of view if you are ignoring what's right in front of you. Difference and oppoistion always exist and it's in these spaces that things can become clearer. Ok, maybe easier said than done.