After all, this forum emphasizes respect for all the different religions.
Yeah but it also mostly outright bans the discussion or debate thereof.
Admittedly though, for logical reasons.
It's a never-ending debate of sorts. AND a highly sensitive and touchy subject with people.
I remember a couple years back, I saw a guy mention in a video on cultural anthropology that Buddhist mentality is sort of like Proto-Psychology once the religious layers of it are properly peeled back. The thing is, that it just developed during a time period wherein religious context was kind of the norm and the historical Buddha often used that as metaphor to get his point across.
Due to the political system of the time period and how Caste was interwoven into it with Hindu religious overtones , though Buddha himself was a Hindu he was also a controversial figure in in Hinduism at the time period BECAUSE of the challenges he put forth towards the local political status quo of the time.
There's a lot of metaphor and tongue-in-cheek to the wording of it. That's part of why it's so difficult to dissect for people these days. It was very revolutionary and expansive for its time period, and still is just as complex and just as revolutionary today.
The evolution of Buddhist history is literally its own study. Just as is the evolution of the Big Three.
However I think that within proper and original contextual studies, that of monasticism is kind of a given in that it sort of goes with the territory of studying the internal workings of the Self and the No Self.
How people can and do do this can entirely vary and is a broad subject of its own ranging from that of homebody hermeticism in the traditional "where does the village shaman live?" type of an essence, to the small community of just a local monastery community of sorts, to that of well, much larger communities such as those of Tibet and Bhutan in regards to how their own countries work in terms of socio-political diplomacy with the rest of the entire world.
So when I think of Buddhism, I usually think of it from the psychological perspective of the experiences of the practices themselves, rather than in the way that a Western approach of direct connection to a religious congregation or a higher power type of an approach. Because in frame, it was more spiritual than it was religious, in that there is and should be a distinction between a spirituality and a religion. A spirituality is a personal relationship more than it is a communal relationship, whereas due to Western orthodoxy, religion tends to be the other way around, being a communal organization and relationship first and a personal relationship secondarily.
I don't wanna piss off the staff of the forum by accident, so I'm just going to shut up about it now, but basically that's my understanding of monastic, spiritual and religious cultures and how these things tend to tie into psychology and the way that people live their lives and understand the experiences that they have in their lives, which is according to these different types of lenses.
I would however, like to experience a communal connection through a monastery for Buddhism. Although there are none to my local area, nor am I aware of how I could make a lifestyle shift into something like that given where I live and what I understand about where I live on a socio-economic and socio-political level. However, it does deeply interest me for my own spiritual experience and I do find it to be rather helpful. It's helped me learn to rebalance myself when I've been frustrated in my life. I feel like it's very much similar to trying to play Jenga, or building a card house in that failure is inevitable, eventually everyone will break their peaceful protocol and become imbalanced, but the more that we try to practice maintaining that, the more that we learn from reflective study of our errors about ourselves later, which in turn thus helps us along the way. It's a bit like finding out the reason you aren't able to dig your hole in the ground the way that everyone else seems to be able to do is is because someone helpfully walked up to you and told you that you've been holding your shovel upside down your whole life. And then you're just like "Oh! That's why."
