Eastern philosophy is best understood as a tool for clearing the mind, not as a complete operating system for modern life. It excels at reducing unnecessary suffering, loosening rigid identities, and creating moments of insight, such as kensho or satori. What it generally does not provide is a comprehensive framework for navigating careers, institutions, economics, or the long-term responsibilities of ordinary life.
Satori is valuable precisely because it is momentary. It can sharpen focus, quiet mental noise, improve performance under pressure, and restore perspective when the mind becomes consumed by fear, ego, or distraction. Used this way, it functions like resetting a compass rather than replacing the map.
The insights themselves may be genuine. The illusion arises when those moments of clarity are mistaken for a sustainable default way of living. A moment of awakening can reveal something profound, but trying to inhabit that perspective continuously can become its own form of attachment.
The Problem With Losing the Self
Eastern philosophy often teaches loosening attachment to the self. In practice, this concept can be misunderstood as abandoning the self entirely. But a person cannot transcend what they refuse to integrate.
Eastern philosophy tends to get trampled, too. You need to be able to stand your ground. Protecting your future self from exploitation means defending your present self's peace and honoring your past self's resilience. "A peaceful man must still know violence, or his peace belongs to whoever threatens it." — Miyamoto Musashi
When you dissolve your individual identity and boundaries, you do not become a floating entity of pure peace. You become perfectly porous to whatever system or authority is standing closest to you.
Imperial Japan is the ultimate historical example of this vulnerability. The bravery, discipline, and dedication of the Japanese people were genuinely profound. But the state twisted elements of samurai tradition and selectively interpreted ideas of selflessness and "no-mind" to absorb the individual entirely. If you have no self, you have no grounds to question the authority demanding your life. There were tribes before this, where loyalty was rooted in real, local relationships. But as those ideals were dragged out of small communities and applied to a massive populace, personal identity was erased, and individual agency vanished with it. It is the same reason purely communal systems work in a small, voluntary tribe but invariably require the barrel of a gun when scaled to millions. When an ideal is forced across a massive populace, the individual must be erased for the system to survive.
You cannot transcend yourself by abandoning the person who got you here. Growth is not escape. It is integration. A person becomes stronger by taking ownership of every version of themselves rather than trying to kill the parts that are inconvenient. Only then can you genuinely evolve while fully living your life and carrying its responsibilities.
Enlightenment is loving your past self, current self, and future self equally all at once.