I agree with you... I'm just saying that sometimes it seems like banging your head against a brick wall.
However! if even one lurker thinks to themselves "hmm... let me look into this further", then it's indeed worth it.
People will see things through the set of lenses they are conditioned to look through. And those lenses may be exactly what they need for where they are at. But at a certain point, other lenses become more appropriate. But if there is no other perspectives to consider, it makes it hard to take off the old glasses and put one the new one. The transition becomes more challenging, as there are no other voices to hear but the faint whispers of your own newly emerging one. I've learned, somewhat, to not be frustrated when someone doesn't get what is being said (not just disagreeing, but not seeing it at all), because we are only able to see what fits our current general framework of reality. As Emerson said so perfectly, "What we are, that only can we see". And that's not a criticism, but just an understanding of how these things work.
The analogy I like to use best is that of the mountain of the world. We are all living on that mountain on different sides of it, and at different elevations. Villages and social orders and customs and religious practices all are developed to adapt to that environment and its unique cultures. They help translate the experience of that world to the people who participate in it. To directly compare one village to another on the other side of this world-mountain, you will see vastly different adaptations and subsequent customs and languages and symbols used.
But as someone is drawn by an attraction to the Summit looming above them, they will launch off alone, or with a small group of other Summit lovers on a path up the side of the mountain and away from the normalized customs and traditions of their village. They find a new environment along the way, with new terrain and a new atmosphere. And they learn to adapt to living there, bringing with them what they learned in their village earlier, to a new way of integrating the new environment, at a new altitude.
Then in time, they are pulled upward further to know what that Summit is that has called to them and drawn them all their lives. They go up to a new altitude, and a new adaptation, and new understanding, and a new perspective of the world from that vantage point, seeing their home village with warm thoughts from the heights they are now at in mainly solitude.
And again, they move upward. And as they scale the Summit, they see other fellow travelers coming up from the other sides of the world-mountain, from their villages, with their customs and symbols in tow. And they see each other. And they recognize in each other that same deep desire that has brought them together at the Summit, and they understand it is not the clothing and the customs and the traditions they carry with them on their assent up the mountain, but it is that same energy that radiates in them that makes them on that same path, and on the same mountain.
And then they scale together from opposite sides, and stand together at its peak, seeing each other face to face, and all looking up together and gazing at the Single Bright Moon above them, glowing together in its Radiance.
See my signature below.
Those who see only differences, are in the village on their path. And there is Truth and value in that for them.
