• she/her

Principal investigator at an undeserving midwestern university. I am ill-tempered and well-endowed. Beware.


I have a Cohost for art and writing!
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profile pic by Xīn Jīn Mèng!
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sociohat
@sociohat

sorry for bringing in both twitter AND reddit here but I wanna talk about it.

A lot of Soulful White Boys, and really any person who hasn't really "lived" a religion (or is dissatisfied by the one they were born with), seek Enlightenment in a way that I think is actually quite hedonistic: they want to experience Enlightenment, and they want it to to be so euphoric and cathartic that it utterly changes them.

Obviously that isn't really how it works. That kind of intense emotion is something that only a cult would promise you. Religion is mundane, and enlightenment won't hit you like a truck.


Zen
@Zen

Hey! Tao Zen Buddhist here, I can confirm the tags here pinpoint the issue pretty succinctly, and AS a Tao Zen Buddhist I can firmly recommend no greater way to seek enlightenment- in fact no shortage of satori experiences are directly related to ruinous prostate rearrangement.

I could also talk at length about the penchant of white boys being Weird about foreign culture and religions and bringing more than their weight in expectations to things, let alone the problems of any large organized efforts which are consistently Shitheads and general human fallibility.


fwankie
@fwankie

imo if there wasn't bodily fluids coming out of you it wasn't that big a revelation. usually tears or puke personally but others work


doctorwednesday
@doctorwednesday

so I go over to Italy and it's just, like, NUDES, just nudes, guys with their junk out and wrestling with snakes, and all these fucking churches and shit like apparently popes and rich dudes paid for a lot of this stuff, I thought the Renaissance was about free expression


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in reply to @sociohat's post:

based on what i've read, it's very probable that "enlightenment" is a real thing, more likely to happen if you meditate a lot, that is more of a type of (sometimes chronic) depersonalization or even derealization. it can feel peaceful, but there are accounts from people who have ended up stuck in this state, feeling as if they have ascended above the concerns of the world affecting "themselves" while others around them notice them showing all physiological and behavioral signs of being less in control of their stress and emotions. More like they are less in tune with it and therefore less able to manage it than they are actually unaffected, because the scope of their "self" has altered.

https://psychcentral.com/lib/is-depersonalization-disorder-a-form-of-enlightenment
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176239

pretty sure it's the kind of thing where it just sounds really profound and epic but is closer to a disordered mental state.

in reply to @Zen's post:

I think a lot of these Guys would benefit from cracking open a history book and learning that Buddhists have also gone to war with each other. That's like, the smallest factual tidbit I can think of that obliterates the whole "more enlightened" stereotype. They think it's just dudes in robes walking around on mountaintops.