I would say that what I got from my dabbling in New Age, etc, is what you seem to dismiss. The polarities, the yin and the yang.
Western thinking is largely based on the search for the ideal, be it religious, moral/ethical, mathematical, pleasure, happiness, wealth, etc. The pot of gold at the end of the narrative arc.
Yet having grown up on a farm, my inherent sense is the circularity of reality. The feedback, the seasons, the karma.
Even “matter” is largely the polarity of positive and negative, rather than any singular substance.
The essential dichotomy I see is between energy and form. Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system to sort through the form/information precipitating out, as well as referee the emotions bubbling up.
Society is that relationship between the organic energies bubbling up, versus the civil and cultural forms coalescing in. Youth and age, liberal and conservative.
A related issue is the nature of time. As mobile, intentional organisms, with a narrative based culture, we assume time to be the point of the present flowing past to future, but it is change turning future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. aka, causality and conservation of energy. So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc.
Energy, being “conserved, is always and only present, as there is no physical past for it to recede into, or future from which it arrives, as it is the changing configuration of this state which creates time.
So the process churns along, past to future, while the patterns generated rise and fall, like so many waves, future to past.
Consciousness goes past to future, as thoughts go future to past. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
The feedback is the patterns define and direct the process. Motor and steering.
Yet because the Western paradigm is linear goal seeking, we assume there is some ideal state toward which we must be going.
Yet the fallacy of monotheism, for instance, is that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the new born, than the wise old man. Consciousness seeking knowledge, than any form or brand of it. The light shining through the film than the images on it.
There isn’t even a moral ideal, as good and bad are not some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological and emotional binary of beneficial and detrimental. The real tension is between the head and the heart. the mutitudes of desires and the need to judge among them. As this is only resolved by death, the flatline between the ups and owns, there is no ideal morality.
Idealism is a form of reductionism, but the total thought process is a cycling between reductionism and contextualization. Nodes and networks.
When we assume our ideals to be absolute, it does produce a cultural narcissism, as we assume our particular social forms to be universal, rather than unique expressions of our situation. It is the energy which spreads universally, while form coalesces locally. Liberalism versus conservatism. This might be why New Age systems don’t tend to cohere into clear cut disciplines.
The opposite of the absolute is the infinite. So with the coalescing reductionism of form, where positive and negative ultimately cancel out, the result is the equilibrium of the absolute. The flatline.
While energy radiates to the infinite, where all forms fade to insignificance.
We fluctuate somewhere in the middle.
I guess I will cut this short, as I don’t know whether you go back to old posts, but just another point of view to offer.
