>New Age hippies travel to India in the 1970s, open small yoga practices>Because they're white and white people are worshiped as being like gods in thirdie eyes (especially in those times), these hippies just assume everyone in India is welcoming and nice>this is further fed into the phenomenon of being the only white man these people have seen, so they're treated like a curious novelty>They write books praising India and Hinduism>Western hippies start naming their kids Indian names, India builds up a solid reputation as the land of deep mysticism and spirituality>That positive reputation is destroyed the second Smartphones become a widespread thing and Indians get onlineDid these 1970s new age authors lack any self awareness about how the white man is seen over there? Surely surely, they could've peered into the slums and actually seen how Indians treat one another. I'm surprised it took until the 2010s for this false image they portrayed to get shattered.
>Shangri-la brand new to me todayRead a book and don't expect the first time you hear of something to be the first time it happened
>>23981639Orientalism has been a thing since the 19th century, but it seemed like back then people were more self aware about it being romanticized.
>>23981641>Britain was more self aware about its colonies[laughs in opium]
Your narrative is missing the damage that a lot of guru and organisation scandals caused
>>23981644It was more self aware in knowing that Turkey wasn't a giant harem filled with half naked slave girls and they didn't sit on carpets in the middle of the desert.
>>23981637Read Be Here Now by Ram Dass (Richard Alpert). He was Timothy Leary's assistant at Harvard with the early 1960s LSD experiments and was fired from Harvard along with Leary.
>>23981637Why should learning from and being inspired by the best of the teachings and practices that schools like Vedanta and Yoga have to offer mean something like being a crude Indian Ultra-Nationalist or Indian Supremacist?You think in terms of classifying people into groups, and then use that to erase all nuance and erase the worth or merit of all outliers or outstanding exemplars of any culture in your own value-system. The Tao Te Ching came from China some thousands of years ago, and people still find great value and meaning in it, despite whatever shithole-country things that the CCP or even average Chinese citizens might be doing now, from their Great Firewall that they have to Chinese people eating dogs. Surely, I can’t deny that what you’re bringing up is an interesting and relevant cultural phenomenon, and I can’t reasonably claim that there really aren’t or weren’t naive hippie White Westerners exactly in line with what you’re describing, overly romanticizing what it must be like to live in the East, or what a repository of spiritual wisdom the East must be all throughout it, and what the average dweller there is like, etc. But that still doesn’t have much to do with the merits of teachings like of the various schools of Vedanta, or of Yoga as taught by someone like Patanjali. It has about as much (or as little) to do with that as the merits of Ancient Greek philosophy, from Heraclitus to Plato to Aristotle to the Neoplatonists and others, has to do with the state of Greece today (being considered a failed economy that’s in extreme debt). For instance, I might think Socrates really was some divinely inspired genius, but it doesn’t mean I think Greece today must be some paradise to live in.
>>23981637Hippies didn't discover india and hinduism, germans in the 19th century did. Plus it was implicitly assumed that when you praised anything from india you were praising the elite culture, the philosophy or the architecture rather than the peasants who were rolling around in cow dung.
>>23981644Smoke it or shut up
>>23981778the elite cultures taught the lesser ones to roll around in cow dung, though lol.
>>23981637>1970s new age authors lack any self awarenessBoomers have no self-awareness and behind jews, they are the biggest cancer on western society.
