When most people in the West think about Africa, is their first thought about the game reserves and who's chasing gazelles, or are they looking at Africans as people who are equally equipped to do great things, as in the West?
Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.
The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge.
Many Western officials are comfortable with confrontation, and discount or ignore the rising risks and costs of continued arms modernization. They would be intellectually and programmatically bereft without the focal point of a major "enemy".... Can the West get over its need to have an enemy?
The western mindset erroneously equates a political system of multi-party democracy with high-quality institutions... the two are not synonymous.
A Westerner is someone who is aware of tomorrow, of it being definitely different from yesterday and accepts not knowing what the future will bring
Once the Western mind was disconnected from its sense of divine responsibility and genuine reverence towards nature, all hell broke loose. And that’s where we are now.
For so long, Arab culture has been misconceived by the western mindset as exotic, or more recently, as dangerous, so spaces like Mathaf are vital for asserting a sense of connectedness.
I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies... What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are.
I think the Westerner approaches his path through his mind. I think the Easterner approaches, largely, although not exclusively, his path through his heart.
I think this is often misunderstood in the West, where people feel that there can be no justice unless everything is the same. This is part of why I feel we have to relearn how we think about love, because we think about love so much in terms of the self.
It is because you have the typical American habit of seeing everything as a test. You see the mountain as your enemy and you set out to defeat it. So, naturally, the mountain fights back and it is stronger than you are. We do not see the mountain as our enemy to be conquered. The purpose of our climb is to become one with the mountain and so it lifts us up and carries us along.
The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
