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Comment by explaininjs | Hacker News Reader

Been there, done that. Have the postcard. I got to experience the even more fun version where you feel like your death is imminent, you watch your surroundings stop rendering chunk by chunk, and your long term friend is telling you it is indeed all a simulation that everyone but me knew about, and I really was dying (more accurately: going "offline" for an upgrade, and my "spirit" wouldn't be persisted across versions).

She later apologized and said she thought I was joking. We don't talk anymore.

As for recovery, Jesus saved me. He can save your friend too, if she lets Him.

It is interesting to observe, retrospectively, how the brain can adopt a new set of axioms and coerce every one of the "senses" into supporting those axioms - no matter how detached from "our typical understanding of reality" (whatever that means) they are.

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We detached this subthread, which went offtopic and flameward, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37995044.

> As for recovery, Jesus saved me. He can save your friend too, if she lets Him.

It's best not to proselytize on HN. It's ok to talk about your own experience of course, but when it starts to move into standard religious tropes, that's already a kind of flamebait and discussion quality plummets, and boy did that happen in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Would you have preferred I left out that second sentence? The parent seemed to be asking for help and that seemed to be on-topic. Though I suppose it could be inferred from the first sentence... but I think even the first sentence alone would have been likely to instigate the same response. Which then makes me wonder if it really is "ok to talk about [my] own experience" in an entirely on-topic discussion?

It would have been better, yes, and it would also have been better if you hadn't fed the offensive replies by replying to them.

> It is interesting to observe, retrospectively, how the brain can adopt a new set of axioms and coerce every one of the "senses" into supporting those axioms - no matter how detached from "our typical understanding of reality" (whatever that means) they are.

Brainwashing is real. Just make people really emotionally unstable and then hit them with an onslaught of social pressure with a vision.

a more general take on the subject

https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neu...

Yeah KGB, CIA, FSB et al. had that figured out some time ago.

What does it mean when you say "Jesus saved me"? This is an earnest question, not instigative.

You're asking me to summarize years of reflection and several near-death experiences into an internet message board comment, but I'll try to scrape the surface.

In short, I had lost all faith in the "official narrative" of creation/existence/whatever as taught in schools/society/etc. that I had grown up believing (growing up I'd have called myself atheist, then agnostic). You might call this an anti-science view, but I'd counter it is more scientific to reject a theory when it does not match observations than to keep it just because it's "the standard". Anyways, this put me on a path of not knowing anything to believe, which is to say any seemingly small flashback/thought/whatever could shatter whatever worldview I had been temporarily existing in and send me into a seizure.

This continued for some time until I began to be touched by what christians would call the Holy Spirit, which guided me towards preachers of the Gospels (aka "The Word", aka "Jesus Christ" (see John 1)). I began to see the innate truth presented by The Word, as I saw how my lived experiences were consistently in agreement with it. For one, I embraced prayer and observed the Father respond to it.

Basically, I built up a new worldview around The Word (Jesus Christ) and it has been unshakable, in stark contrast to all the attempts I had made to do the same without Jesus (Matthew 7:24-27 summarizes this well).

Sounds to me like you're still hallucinating.

Get behind me, hellweaver! For it is written: Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.

(For those following along, this is a cute and fun example of Scripture being used to rebuke attempts to shake the foundation. The forces that be typically aren't so overt.)

Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Could you explain what about my comment you consider to be a "flamewar"? As far as I was aware we were simply acting out the Parable of the Sower as an example of my prior narrative.

It was responding to a religious battle comment with a religious battle comment. We don't want that here.

Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Can you expound your experience(s) with the Holy Spirit? What does/did it feel like? Was it auditory or a feeling, or was it a series of life experiences? Was the communication one-way or two-way? Were you ever wrong in attributing something to the Holy Spirit, and you found out later?

A general feeling of guidance to do a certain thing, followed by a full-body feeling of euphoria when doing that thing. Sometimes accompanied by "coincidental" positive interactions surrounding that thing.

Ephesians 5:18 instructs us to "not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit". And it is indeed accurate that the feeling is a higher high than wine or weed will take you. I suppose molly or heroin might be superior but I have no experience with those. And there's something psychologically nice about feeling good because you are doing the God-ordained right-thing, versus simply hijacking chemical receptors. And the Holy Spirit has no "come-down", which is nice.

> A general feeling of guidance to do a certain thing, followed by a full-body feeling of euphoria when doing that thing.

Do you have Scriptural support for that? It seems like the Holy Spirit often communicated with words (e.g., "the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.”"), unless you think that is simply the way it is recorded

Sure: Luke 4, Hebrews 9, Acts 20, and John 14 all are very relatable, and 2 Peter 1 touches on my experience as well.

(In addition to the more verbal guidance you mention.)

Many people who struggle with things like mental health, addiction, and general life dysfunction find religion grounding. Religions answer questions about ethics, foundational reality, and other aspects of life that are riddled with ambiguity.

Yes, God may have created psychedelics for a reason, but why not cut out the middleman and just “go to the source.” What many in AA learn, the higher power is the only way. Everything else is a treadmill.

The line between faith and delusion is tenuous at best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_delusion

No religious flamewar on HN please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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