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Philosophy of Nature

Chapter Ten of Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life

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Contrary to popular belief, Americans are not materialists, as I have said before. We are not people who love material, and by and large our culture is devoted to the transformation of material into junk as rapidly as possible. God's own junkyard! Therefore, it's a very important lesson for a wealthy nation - and all Americans are colossally wealthy by the standards of the rest of the world - to see what happens to material in the hands of people who love it. You might say that in Japan, and in China to a certain extent, the underlying philosophy of life is a sort of spiritual materialism. In the East, there is not the divorce between soul and body, between spirit and matter, between God and nature, that there is in the West. Therefore, there is not the same kind of contempt for material things. We regard matter as something that gets in our way, something with limitations that are to be abolished as quickly as possible.

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