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Comment by mnky9800n | Hacker News Reader

Maybe their friend is simply uninterested in having the liability as opposed to some millennia long conspiracy by the Catholic church making her do it.

And anyways, your statements ignore that there's plenty of hippies on Instagram peddling their mushrooms and Ayahuasca in intense spiritual experiences for only 1500$ a pop. Does the Catholic church control them too?

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I believe you have misread my post. Powers that be continue to want me to not have mind altering experiences. I continue to have them anyway. So it goes.

But why call them spiritual experiences when hallucinations will do even better?

Potato tomato.

"Do people have ideas or do ideas have people?" might have something to do with the phenomenon of different humans preferring different labels for the same thing.

This is from Jung right? I've always been fascinated by his teachings, especially the collective unconscious. I'm just gonna leave a couple related quotes and ideas down here cause I want to.

Dostoevsky made observations like this, too.

"It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you"

"Men need to bow down to something; whether another man or an idea.”

I think Ernest Becker explored similar ideas in The Denial of Death, though through a different context.

Yep...the problem with humans has been pretty well understood for ages, hopefully we can get over this all science and only science phase and utilize some of this valuable knowledge before we kill ourselves.

There are different implications though. One implies there's some meaning while the other does not.

They both have meaning, a distinction is the degree to which free will (or, System 2 in Thinking Fast and Slow) is in play. But now we have two problems!

I believe this comment minimized the structure of spiritual experience in a hyperrational way, which is exactly as the GP comment warned against.

If your views in having a spiritual experience are exclusive to consuming psychedelic substances then you are minimizing what is available across the human experience in terms of spiritual explorations.

"If your views on crossing a river are exclusive to the usage of canoes then you are minimizing what is available across the human experience in terms of river crossings."

Somehow you turned someone's subjective spiritual exploration into them limiting themselves...

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