Just goes to show his honesty :-)
"One is not to trust my teachings implicitly but to test them oneself and evaluate their effects." — Buddha (thus making Buddhism perhaps the only "religion" not plagued by faith and dogma, and kind of disseminating the scientific method)
Buddhism is not the only religion not plagued by faith and dogma.
Faith and dogma exist wherever people have outsourced their ability to think. 'Buddhists' do this too, just as some adherents to other faiths do too.
On a side note, the intellectual portions of Vedic literature often emphasise the need for viveka (knowledge, discrimination) and prashnena (questioning) which are requisite qualities of a shisya (student). Arguably, much of Buddhist metaphysics is based on these Upanishadic texts (Vedanta).
Buddha himself was clearly against faith and dogma, and also considered metaphysics irrelevant to the human condition. If you consider Buddhism to be the original teachings, then it's obvious dogma has no place in it, and a person afflicted by dogma could always be pointed to the original teachings. More religious branches of Buddhism exist, but they are blatant bastardizations of the original teachings. This is very different from the situation in other religions, where the original scriptures are the main sources of dogma galore.
Related topic: I just finished reading "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" by Sam Harris and it has become my book recommendation for people that don't understand psychedelics or meditation. Sam talks about both in the most lucid way possible. Highly recommended!
IMHO religion has little to do with spirituality. I'm not necessarily saying it's all bad, just that it's all about politics, philosophy, enforcing a certain set of norms to allow cooperation, etc. The relationship of religion to spiritual experience is along the lines of the relationship between space themed fiction like Star Trek to actual space flight.
I would rephrase this as that religious practices of unfamiliar religions can have very little relationship to an individuals spirituality. Obviously some people are very strongly tuned to the religious practices of their religion.
Large organizations such as churches all have politics and structure beyond the "core service" they provide. And as social groups they evoke tribalism, cliques, etc, etc. The religious services are one aspect of these organizations that are designed to offer spiritual experiences to the congregation. The organization specifies the framework for these events. The fact that the organization has other aspects as well does not mean it would not fulfill this core service. Does it fulfill it, and to whom, is another question entirely.
We probably still lack proper psychological vocabulary to discuss spirituality as a phenomenon of human psyche in disconnect from the metaphysical frameworks that religions offer.
As an atheist, I feel "spirituality" - in this context it means perhaps most of all a certain mood and a state of mind - is very important to me. I just don't connect it to any religious framework. I understand that you mean that organized religion does not necessarily have anything to do with spiritual experience but I still think it's quite incorrect to make this into a generalization.
Religion is a classifying term for a variety of cultural languages in which the vast majority of spirituality has been framed throughout history. Saying they have little to do with one another is, at best, uninformed.
One does not necessitate the other, but that does not mean they are anywhere near as dissociated as you suggest.
> The relationship of religion to spiritual experience is along the lines of the relationship between space themed fiction like Star Trek to actual space flight.
If you look at actual definitions of the word 'religion' used by academics who study religion, there is actually a pretty tight relationship. E.g.
You don't seem to know what you're talking about... the chance of bad tripping with DMT is about the same as with other psychedelics. It's just waaay more intense and has a shorter duration. And actually, most people argue that Ayahuasca is more likely to give you an easy ride than pure DMT, which can be "just too crazy".
Absolutely agree. I've taken ayahuasca dozens of times, and am pretty comfortable with it (not to say I don't still experience at least a momentary frisson just before drinking most every night), but I still have tremendous trepidation about straight DMT.
As a friend who's done both described the latter, "Load universe into cannon, aim at head, and fire."
Arguably the short duration helps quite a bit... bad trips don't start instantly....they are more of a gradual building of anxiety that builds to a sort of panic attack.
If you smoke DMT and don't have a breakthrough you may feel a lot of discomfort, which may cause anxiety. That's exactly what happened the first time I tried DMT, and I was already pretty experienced with other psychedelics...
You are absolutely right and I should had said a proper or significant dose. A small dosage of DMT can be very uncomfortable and cause anxiety. But if you take 3-4 hits, or otherwise get a proper dosage, I have never experienced a negative result.
And, as I said in my original comment, drinking DMT in Ayahuasca can take you through a hellish experience.
corroborating the grandparent's post. I've personally done DMT more than 10 times, and haven't experienced a bad trip yet. I've had bad trips on mushrooms, several, in fact. Not a single bad trip on DMT.
Well, I have the exact opposite experience. I've always had pleasant trips with shrooms (over 10 trips) but at my first DMT trip I experienced some anxiety (didn't break through)... nothing traumatic but I could imagine it going much worse. Because of that I went on to read "The Psychedelic Experience" as it contains lots of advice on ego death trips, and if you read it you'll realize bad trips on DMT are just normal.
Psychedelics make you learn stuff that you cannot easily "unlearn", like any major life experience. It expands your awareness in ways that sometimes are not pleasant (very often, "ignorance is bliss"). That's the reason most psychedelics are not recreational, but rather "spiritual" drugs. They are self-development tools, and like any tool you must know how to use them.
It's totally possible to be enlightened by a bad trip, rather than traumatised. It all depends on your outlook on life, how you instinctively react to adversity. You should see everything under the self-development lens, where everything is an opportunity for growth, and never feel victimised. Your goal after a bad trip should not be just "to recover", but rather to become your best yet. Much like a muscle that grows stronger after you strain it at the gym, psychedelics exercise the mind, and can make you mentally stronger. However, like in the gym, the recovery periods are essential, and over-exercising is detrimental.
In answer to the people who always bring up the subject of psychosis: any extremely stressful event can trigger psychosis in people who are prone to have it (for example a divorce, or any big loss). As a rule of thumb, if you're close to 30 and you've been through tough times and feel fine, you're safe. I personally believe that if you're a lucid, clear minded person, looking for self-development, psychedelics are for you. If you're an easily scared person not interested in self-development, psychedelics are definitely not for you.
"It's totally possible to be enlightened by a bad trip, rather than traumatised."
One of the most enlightening experiences of my life was a horrendously frightening trip on salvia divinorum. I took it by tincture. I later learned that I'd done a much bigger dose than I'd thought I had. Anyhow, the experience was akin to madness. I felt detached. I lapsed into fugue state. I saw, heard, and "felt" things. Above all else, I maintained just enough lucidity to retain meta-cognition: I was sane enough to know that I'd become crazy. That is an awful feeling. I thought I was losing my mind, and that I'd never return to normalcy.
Well, ridiculous as it sounds, the idea of becoming permanently schizophrenic frightened me into a very deep, very fast-paced analysis of my life to date. With whatever scrap of sanity I had left, I scrawled down my hopes, my dreams, and my goals for the future. Goals I'd need my wits about me in order to achieve. Some of these goals I'd had for years, and I'd made virtually no progress towards them. In this brief period of paranoia -- this fear of never again being able to pursue my dreams -- I strengthened my resolve to try.
Oh, and I also wrote a bunch of sappy, ridiculous emails to all of my closest friends. They still pull those emails out, from time to time, for shits and giggles. They're pretty loopy. And yet, there's a real heart and honesty to them.
I'm glad I had the experience. I'll never do it again, though. (I've tried other psychedelics, fwiw, but this was my only honest-to-goodness "bad trip").
Yes, I share your belief in collective consciousness. I think there's little doubt we'll find they do exist, once we find a testable definition of consciousness.
BTW one doesn't even need to take acid to realize this. Humans have thought this for thousands of years. It's a common belief of ancient eastern philosophies (metaphysics) such as Taoism and Buddhism, that "we're one consciousness". Our egos just don't think about it, much like a cell of your body operates in another (lower) level of consciousness, where it thinks it's "independent of you".
Even though capnproto would be our first choice, the lack of support for Windows/CMake is kind of a party killer. FlatBuffers doesn't offer everything we need either, but its codebase is simpler to grasp and hack, so it may end up being the safer choice... which is unfortunate
I'm trying to get basic MSVC support into version 0.5.0, which is planned for release in late November. The reflection and dynamic APIs probably won't be supported initially because too much would have to be rewritten to work around missing C++11 features in MSVC -- they'll come online as soon as MSVC adds support. But, most common use cases don't need them anyway.
0.5.0 will also feature cmake support (this is already in git).
Just because money isn't a priority for you, it doesn't mean you'll refuse it. He got the best of both worlds by letting other people run the business to focus on what he really wanted (indie dev). Believe me, it's MUCH easier to be creative and work on indie projects when you don't have to worry about your bills and your future...
