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Comment by jamescostian | Hacker News Reader

Was that your first hallucination? Sorry if it's too personal, I'm just curious because I thought hallucinations were more common for meth users.

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Don't worry, it wasn't a hallucination. ;)

Yes the functionality of eyeballs was instead proven a meaningless evolutionary sidestory

It's not like I was sharing my experience and thinking at the back of my mind, "Oh boy! HN will love this hocus pocus talk!".

Does that make sense? Because otherwise, you're calling me an idiot/someone incapable of sharing his experience. And that's not nice, is it?

That's pretty condescending to what gp clearly believes to have been a religious experience, don't you think?

They mentioned religion but when describing the experience they called it "OBE or Out of Body Experience", which my friends use interchangeably with "hallucination". Drugs that are less harmful can cause hallucinations (even weed), and I know meth can lead to sleep deprivation which can cause even more hallucinations. I do realize that for some people drugs are a religious experience (e.g. I have a friend who claims she sees and speaks with Jesus every time she gets really high, and she believes it's real and not a hallucination). But "Out of Body Experience" seems to me like it doesn't have a religious connotation, and I didn't see any further details about the OBE like "and then God said ____". If you still feel I was being condescending, consider that Wikipedia agrees that both of our interpretations of "OBE" are valid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_experience

But it seems your interpretation (that OBE == religious experience) was actually what they meant and my interpretation was not, based on this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19588813

So, sorry for my misinterpretation.

I think not challenging a notion because it may be religious in nature is the actual condescending stance. Why is asking questions about a religious experience different from asking about any other? Can they not handle an iota of push back?

While it seems we agree about religion, I disagree about questioning this person's religion. This person is talking about writing a book about their experience which they believe to be a divine intervention that changed their life and got them off of meth. Clearly, this is a very big deal to them and something that matters to them a whole lot, and they believe the story is so good that they won't even post the details of the divine intervention on HN because they want to save it for their book.

Pushing them on this topic is mean because it's such a big deal to them, and it's counterproductive because you'll never be able to prove it to them. Even if you say something like "go through some sleep deprivation and see if you hallucinate" and then they do, you won't have proven that their previous experience was a hallucination. Instead, all you'll be doing is telling them that things they hold very deeply are all stupid, and never changing their mind. There is no positive effect from this, it's all just negative.

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