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one thing that comes up for me about the christian stuff owen talks about is that it's frustrating how much of my childhood exposure to christianity amounted to extremely braindead "hurr durr christians / conservatives don't believe in evolution or gay marriage" memes

i was never exposed to even a single serious believer growing up, all of my nominally christian friends pretty much just went to church and otherwise had beliefs indistinguishable from mine as far as i could tell (and i was raised with no religious beliefs whatsoever)

reading c.s. lewis and the chesterton quotes scott loves and a few other things have at least broadened my perspective there, i know there are real serious christians now, that there is actual spiritual substance here worth grappling with, so that's something at least

it does seem like, at a bare minimum, serious psychedelic use (or extensive meditation etc) can reveal deep-seated christian beliefs that were not at all visible before, probably even in people who were never nominally christian. it's deeply in the cultural water

i am increasingly sold on the possibility that entities exist in some sense and that some of them are malevolent. thinking of christianity specifically as (among other things) a spiritual defense against malevolent entities makes the whole thing make a lot more sense to me

one thing that surprises me about this thread is that owen describes getting into tibetan buddhism but he never mentions emptiness, even though the thread is very concerned with what i see as psychedelics causing people to conflate experiences of emptiness with moral nihilism

when people have experiences of emptiness that they describe as something like "there's no such thing as good and evil, man" i think they are at least sometimes referring to the dissolution of *specific fixed concepts* of good and evil, inherited from e.g. their parents etc.

The emotional dynamics of nihilism | Meaningness

which is not at all the same thing as saying that good and evil *don't exist*. but it would be easy to make that conceptual error and i imagine many people do so.

@Meaningness

's stuff on nihilism and eternalism was very helpful for me here

meaningness.com

Nihilism relies on three emotional strategies to deny meaning: rage, intellectualization, and depression. It also causes anxiety.

this bit from a previous discussion of owen's thread feels like an important thing owen misses,

@RomeoStevens76

also mentioned sending metta to demons. seems intuitively right to me although i haven't really done it unless you count

@harlequinean

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