4 ms·

I don't practice religion anymore, but understand 100% of your experience and fully agree (before my experience, this would have been some sort of "ridiculous n

I don't practice religion anymore, but understand 100% of your experience and fully agree (before my experience, this would have been some sort of "ridiculous new age blah blah" to me).

jwdunne 11y ago
That is exactly why I don't share it. It's next to impossible to understand without the experience and deep thought and resserch, before and after. Although I'm in no way religious, I do have an interest in studying them as a intellectual activity, even before my experience, so I had seen ideas from many religions from history.
- nota_bene 11y ago
  > That is exactly why I don't share it. I think the best way to handle this dilemma is to try to sense which of your friends and family members are most open-minded and to start with those. (Personally, I feel like once you've experienced it, it becomes some sort of responsibility to create awareness about it, because the benefit for everybody is just to big to keep quiet.)
  - jwdunne 11y ago
    This is something I do amongst very close friends and family. It's still difficult without making their eyes gloss over but I do think that this insight could bring major positive changes to them and even the world as a whole.
    - selimthegrim 11y ago
      What would it fix about the world?
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - jwdunne 11y ago
        If every one truly believed that what affects others is actually affecting themselves, I couldn't describe the all of benefits. One is a massive reduction of wars, violence and suffering. It is a process though. I get angry, upset and do, on occasion, cause suffering in response to those emotions. What I am able to do is realise that I can observe this emotions as I do the universe, as it's all the same. By disconnecting from thoughts and emotions and observing them, they have much less effect. I can then use my thoughts as tool to analyse the situation and choose the appropriate path that will lead to a peaceful, beneficial resolution for me and others. This does not happen every time, I still fall and slip. With repeated application, it will become a solid habit. It's obvious and 'trivial' that negatively responding to negative emotional states will produce a negative outcome for myself, increasing my own suffering. This obvious fact fits within my insights, which is most important to me.
        benevol 11y ago
        > One is a massive reduction of wars, violence and suffering. My experience and thoughts exactly. Now remember the fact that the US military budget is bigger that the sum of the budgets of the 10 next biggest nations, then look up what "military industrial complex" means and you know why LSD was wiped under the carpet. If you take away so much cash flow, you take away extreme amounts of power. And those in power have no interest whatsoever to ever see that happen.
- Retra 11y ago
  The objection is, for all those experiences, you can't actually do anything that you couldn't have done without them. The things you are saying are not untrue, but they're fairly trivial, and your emotional attachment to them doesn't actually change how important they are. To others, it comes off as another kind of immature selfishness. Like obsessively doting on a lover. It's not a bad thing, but it's not going to transfer to others, and you can't expect others to tolerate it when there are important things to do.
  - jwdunne 11y ago
    I think that is quite a negative response to a benign comment. Your response sums up why I don't share it often - I simply do not wish to preach. I also think you have assumed a bit too much about me and how I treat other people. I said I don't share it. That does not mean I have tried and failed. I have shared my experiences with close family members. I have never preached and never will. The emotional connection and understanding connected to these ideas are exactly what makes them important. To dismiss emotional insights as unimportant is to make emotion a second-class citizen in a world that is actually driven in a big way by emotion. For example, the phrase "the dog is running across the main road" is a trivial fact when you see a dog run across a main road. If you're the owner, the emotions are what differentiate it from mere triviality. For the owner, the panic of their dog running across a road off leash is not emotionally trivial. Back to my comment, I merely stated that the emotional value of these ideas is hard to convey without such experiences. I'd beg to differ about the abilities enabled by my experiences. For one, I can relate to them ok an emotional level, which I cannot have done before. Second, it is clear to me that this particular journey has encouraged exploration and insight into my thoughts and emotions on a deep level. Before hand, I would not have bothered. Could I have achieved this with a different set of experiences? It's probably. Does that discount the emotional value of those experiences to me? No. What you are doing is trying to discount the emotional value I place on my own experiences, which is all I have talked about plus the difficulty of discussing the emotional insights from my experiences with those who haven't had them. There isn't really anything to object there.
    - Retra 11y ago

I don't practice religion anymore, but understand 100% of your experience and fully agree (before my experience, this would have been some sort of "ridiculous new age blah blah" to me).

jwdunne 11y ago

That is exactly why I don't share it. It's next to impossible to understand without the experience and deep thought and resserch, before and after. Although I'm in no way religious, I do have an interest in studying them as a intellectual activity, even before my experience, so I had seen ideas from many religions from history.

nota_bene 11y ago
> That is exactly why I don't share it. I think the best way to handle this dilemma is to try to sense which of your friends and family members are most open-minded and to start with those. (Personally, I feel like once you've experienced it, it becomes some sort of responsibility to create awareness about it, because the benefit for everybody is just to big to keep quiet.)
- jwdunne 11y ago
  This is something I do amongst very close friends and family. It's still difficult without making their eyes gloss over but I do think that this insight could bring major positive changes to them and even the world as a whole.
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    What would it fix about the world?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - jwdunne 11y ago
      If every one truly believed that what affects others is actually affecting themselves, I couldn't describe the all of benefits. One is a massive reduction of wars, violence and suffering. It is a process though. I get angry, upset and do, on occasion, cause suffering in response to those emotions. What I am able to do is realise that I can observe this emotions as I do the universe, as it's all the same. By disconnecting from thoughts and emotions and observing them, they have much less effect. I can then use my thoughts as tool to analyse the situation and choose the appropriate path that will lead to a peaceful, beneficial resolution for me and others. This does not happen every time, I still fall and slip. With repeated application, it will become a solid habit. It's obvious and 'trivial' that negatively responding to negative emotional states will produce a negative outcome for myself, increasing my own suffering. This obvious fact fits within my insights, which is most important to me.
      - benevol 11y ago
        > One is a massive reduction of wars, violence and suffering. My experience and thoughts exactly. Now remember the fact that the US military budget is bigger that the sum of the budgets of the 10 next biggest nations, then look up what "military industrial complex" means and you know why LSD was wiped under the carpet. If you take away so much cash flow, you take away extreme amounts of power. And those in power have no interest whatsoever to ever see that happen.
Retra 11y ago
The objection is, for all those experiences, you can't actually do anything that you couldn't have done without them. The things you are saying are not untrue, but they're fairly trivial, and your emotional attachment to them doesn't actually change how important they are. To others, it comes off as another kind of immature selfishness. Like obsessively doting on a lover. It's not a bad thing, but it's not going to transfer to others, and you can't expect others to tolerate it when there are important things to do.
- jwdunne 11y ago
  I think that is quite a negative response to a benign comment. Your response sums up why I don't share it often - I simply do not wish to preach. I also think you have assumed a bit too much about me and how I treat other people. I said I don't share it. That does not mean I have tried and failed. I have shared my experiences with close family members. I have never preached and never will. The emotional connection and understanding connected to these ideas are exactly what makes them important. To dismiss emotional insights as unimportant is to make emotion a second-class citizen in a world that is actually driven in a big way by emotion. For example, the phrase "the dog is running across the main road" is a trivial fact when you see a dog run across a main road. If you're the owner, the emotions are what differentiate it from mere triviality. For the owner, the panic of their dog running across a road off leash is not emotionally trivial. Back to my comment, I merely stated that the emotional value of these ideas is hard to convey without such experiences. I'd beg to differ about the abilities enabled by my experiences. For one, I can relate to them ok an emotional level, which I cannot have done before. Second, it is clear to me that this particular journey has encouraged exploration and insight into my thoughts and emotions on a deep level. Before hand, I would not have bothered. Could I have achieved this with a different set of experiences? It's probably. Does that discount the emotional value of those experiences to me? No. What you are doing is trying to discount the emotional value I place on my own experiences, which is all I have talked about plus the difficulty of discussing the emotional insights from my experiences with those who haven't had them. There isn't really anything to object there.
  - Retra 11y ago