ABSTRACT
It is now time to restate the main thesis presented in this work. This is that modern Western civilization is increasingly dominated by a worldview that is essentially Eastern in character, the traditional Western values and beliefs having been demoted to a secondary position. The essential features of these two logically contrasting worldviews were set out in chapter 3, with Western dualistic materialism opposed by Eastern metaphysical monism, while the evidence for the claim that the latter has now come to dominate over the former was advanced in chapters 4 and 5. This mainly took three forms. First, there was the evidence that showed how quintessentially Eastern forms of beliefs and practices-such as reincarnation, yoga, and feng shui-have successfully penetrated Europe and North America since the 1960s. Second, it was shown how, over approximately the same time period, a variety of movements have come to prominence that effectively served to “rehabilitate the natural.” These include the whole food and vegetarian movements; the holistic health, environmental, and animal rights movements; and the human potential and astrology movements. Third, it was demonstrated how the New Age and neopagan movements could be seen to provide an emergent meaning system that served to both subsume and embrace these attempts to rehabilitate and reenchant nature within and without, whilst also being, in essence, Eastern in character. Then, in turning attention to the difficult question of explaining how this dramatic sea change in the history of the West came to pass, it was noted that an Eastern worldview had been a minority or deviant component of Western civilization since the earliest times. Indeed, acting as a kind of underground stream in the cultural history of the West, it had periodically become manifest in movements that had posed a significant challenge to the dominant and orthodox tradition.
