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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

I've been heavily dealing with the existential questions you are referencing but it only gets worse. What helped you in resolving those issues or come to terms with them?

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The karmic traditions developed this most completely and thoroughly. You don't need to buy into the supernatural claims to benefit from them.

A great starting point can be Shinzen Young's The Science of Enlightenment and/or Sam Harris's Waking Up.

After that, you might look into Why Buddhism is True or The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or Mindfulness in Plain English.

The Healthy Gamer Youtube channel also has great videos going into this and how they tie into psychology.

David Chapman's https://meaningness.com/ is also pretty great.

One doesn't need to distance themselves from the origins of all this literature on meditation and self-realisation. Taking only the scientific bits and discarding the rest is a very partial view.

You say “origins”, but someone who takes a more skeptical stance would say “extraordinary supernatural claims for which there’s no evidence at all.” In my case, I absolutely need to discard that stuff if I have any chance of taking what’s left seriously.

For people who chafe at anything remotely looking like "religion" or "spirituality," this is a valid way to try to get past the closed-mindedness

A Buddhist would probably say:

> Needing an answer is an attachment. Attachments causes suffering.

Not OP, but this was the book that first came to mind reading your post and the talk of Buddhist practices in the thread.

"Radical acceptance : Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha"[0] may be of interest to you. It won't answer the existential questions for you or get real deep into philosophy or Buddhism; it does have actionable exercises to try and meditation practices/instructions attached to the different concepts covered. At times it will use what I would call woo-woo language, overly fluffy "love & light" phrases--so if that bothers you, simply discard it and take the practical nuggets that are also included. It is more a book to help "come to terms" with (life, basically) and in turn helps (or may help) resolve some of the heaviness in an unexpected/indirect way.

[0] https://search.worldcat.org/title/57351231 (2004 version, version I read)

https://search.worldcat.org/title/1400088877 (2023 version)

Adyashanti helped a lot. End of your world book in specifically. I think one of the main takeaways was to instead of running away from these questions or thoughts welcome them and experience them. Don't try to distract yourself when a thought comes. Just embrace it. It will weaken the power of the thoughts or feelings. At the end of the day they are all mere appearances in awareness and not permanent. They go away.

There is also a lecture series on Advaita Vedanta on YouTube. That helped as well.

https://youtu.be/gEd22QZF_mM?si=iDIXY1oUhOC9PaHm

Meditation helped a lot.

Spending time in nature a lot helped. Camping under trees helped..

Also Jordan Peterson's biblical lectures also surprisingly helped even though I was not brought up Christian. I know he is divisive but the lectures are not political.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE4zj0nQN08ewq9dl1e8MCz3Y...

Also just praying and believing in a higher power helped.

I find that Islam has the most satisfying and complete answers about these existential questions.

I don't like idea of only one religion getting it right. There are multiple paths to truth. Pretending only one religion has it is ignorance and lying and not truthful. And truth is what we should strive for. Irrespective of which society you were brought up in.

He didn’t say that had the answer, just the most complete one. Sorta makes sense when it’s the youngest religion I suppose? They wouldn’t make the same mistakes they made 600 or 4000 years previous.

Islam contains a lot of contradictions and ambiguities within its scriptures (as does Christianity and Judaism). E.g. gender roles and justice can elicit competing interpretations among scholars of Islam. Not to mention the wide diversity within Islam - Sunni, Shia, Sufi, and other branches with differing doctrines.

Having been raised Catholic, then rejecting Christianity upon being confirmed in the Church and surveying the world's religions, I've found the Buddhist tradition to give the most satisfying and complete answers about these questions, with a minimum of contradiction. In truth Buddhism is less a religion and more a philosophy, which resonates with my 21st century sceptical self.

All that to say, I wouldn't put too much stock in 'the newest' religion, but rather consider that some group of people answered these questions when they were first considered, long ago. To my mind the Buddhists accomplished that feat.

I mean, it's still a 1400 year old religion. It's never going to be as fit for the times as it would be if it were designed right now.

I don't believe Buddhism has an equivalent to the holy book, or quite as many prescriptions in the first place, so it's much easier to adapt.

> They wouldn’t make the same mistakes they made 600 or 4000 years previous.

You would think that, except that an "extremist" Christian who only interpreted the New Testament literally would be a forgiving, loving, peaceful ascetic.

The youngest religion is probably something silly like the people who say they are jedi from Star Wars. Though I'm of the opinion the old ones are mostly silly, too.

All the books contain beautiful wisdom. For me that's what is so stirring about their lasting poetry -- you can hear the long echoes of human truth.

However, I don't know Islam very well! Do you have any suggestions for where to start? A specific translator? Thanks in advance.

The Islamic holy books have many (actually very many) passages that would not line up with Western values at all. The crazy thing is that if I cite both the good ones and the bad ones, and the list of bad ones is much longer, I would get into trouble for citing any of them at all. The most common reasoning around this is that you should not read them directly (!) and should consult an imam instead. As a rationalist, claiming that only the bad parts are no longer valid ("must be contextualized") and only the good parts still are, seems like obvious and very convenient cherry-picking. That said, the Islamic focus on community service is one that even Christians could take a lesson from. Having been raised Catholic and read chunks of the Quran and Hadiths, there IS some beauty and even some humor in there. But many of the good parts are contradicted by bad parts in the same book, and the repeated condemnation of "people of the Book" (Christians and Jews, but mostly Jews) is quite off-putting (and yes, there are other passages that contradict that, but... I'm just not a person who can tolerate contradictions in an unquestionable holy book, I guess)

Please note that if you ever leave Islam, you are considered an apostate (similar to Christianity, but to a much more severe degree I'd say) and about 10% of the Islamic population are literalists and would consider the penalty for leaving, death.

I'd look into meditation. I discovered something called "Simple Meditation" created by Babaji (the O.G. Babaji, not the copycats), and it's the only time I've ever had an experience I would call "spiritual". I have an audio I produced of it here: https://soundcloud.com/peter-marreck-fb/simple-meditation-ai...

I meditate, but thank you for sharing the link, I will listen.

My cultural background originates in the east. But I do not have any familiarity with Islam or with the Russian church, and I want to remedy that.

Some of my interest is aesthetic / intellectual - the bible and the Bhavagad Gita are beautiful! Long told poetry. But I'm also just curious, it's a blank spot in my understanding.

I don't have a problem editing out contradictions in the text, most of old religious books are mixed with that. But you're right, I wince when coming across discrimination based on group. The Bhavagad Gita dwells too much on caste.

re: bhavagad gita- Exactly. So I'm not trying to bias or give you preconceived notions, my observations are my own personal opinion. You should definitely keep your wits about you, though.

One of my favorite classes in college was actually Religious Studies 101. (Mods who are already side-eye'ing me, take note.)

I hesitate to joke that the vast majority of moderate Muslims also do not have any familiarity with Islam (similar to Catholics and the Bible!). I quoted some questionable Quran to a Muslim woman on Twitter and she said "don't be silly, only apostates, atheists and extremists quote our books back at us", which I found to be a fairly curious statement, maybe even an unintended confession...

There are Russian Orthodox folks in my extended family, the whole christian-schism thing just screams to me that when 2 people disagree on a holy book, there is no choice but to split since you cannot argue rationally about it (with the assumption that rational argument brings people into the same viewpoint, which is of course often a stretch)

Here is another curious thing I noticed- If you ask ChatGPT about the "controversial" Islamic passages, it will initially refuse to. (It will NOT treat the Old or New Testament in this way, by the way, or any other holy book.) If you press it and say that you need them for an academic or high-level discussion reason and not to (mis?)represent it, it will cave, but the conversation will get flagged and you won't be able to re-share it. Here is an example of that https://x.com/pmarreck/status/1855353599880056896 where I had to export the whole thing to PDF since sharing got disabled.

Any example of sources?

Try Surahs 2:191, 3:28, 3:85, 5:33, 8:12, 8:60, 8:65, 9:5, 9:30, 9:123, 22:19, 47:4. You can use Google or ChatGPT to cite them.

Have you actually read the Quran and Hadiths?

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