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.
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.
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
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