Comment by WaxedChewbacca | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WaxedChewbacca | Hacker News Reader

I think it's easy to see that psychedelics, while valuable, aren't exactly a direct key to world peace. Why? Because we won't have peace in the world until we have peace in people. And psychedelics, whatever they do, and I think they do something very useful, do not make people peaceful. Even if a person has many psychedelic experiences over a long period of time, they will most likely still be afflicted to some degree by greed, envy, anger, resentment, fear, etc.

When we say we want peace in the world, we really mean we want peace in the human world. And the human world is made of humans. But each person wants peace to be achieved by all other humans making themselves peaceful -- very few people have any practice to make themselves more peaceful.

If you want to make yourself more peaceful, this is the way I recommend: https://library.dhammasukha.org/uploads/1/2/8/6/12865490/the...

I thought of this in a very similar way, but couldn't articulate it as well as you did. To add my two cents, peace is not simply lack of war, it's an active way of being. Psychedelics are a passive form of being, essentially a form of consumption. Historically, I believe the real peace movement which originated in the 60s was co-opted. Drugs and sexual liberation were inserted as substitutes for peace in order to divert the movement from achieving anything meaningful; the beliefs of the movement became dominated by desire, rather than the other way around. Being dominated by desires is ultimately a form of slavery, not liberation nor peace.

> To add my two cents, peace is not simply lack of war, it's an active way of being.

Reminds me of the Hebrew word "shalom":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shalom

You appear to be shadow-banned, FYI. Other than this comment, most of your other ones show up dead.

As a previously strongly practising Buddhist, I can say, Buddhism is a total scam. Some of the absolute worst and most deluded people I've known are devout Buddhists. I even had a formal teacher and even he could do nothing to help me develop compassion. Perhaps the Dharma is dead in this world or something, but it seems to not actually work anymore.

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