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Comment by apparent | Hacker News Reader

> if you need to be sold on it it’s probably not going to help you much

This seems like a red flag because it can be used to justify anything, even being in a cult. I think there probably are benefits to some of these things, but we shouldn't shut down when someone asks what the mechanism is. Perhaps they want to get some of those benefits, but want to go about it a different way, and therefore want to know how they might go about doing that.

Telling them that someone who wants to be "sold" on it isn't going to benefit just makes the whole thing seem less legit, IMO.

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Well, disclaimer — I am a practicing zen buddhist, but it’s something I came to myself, we aren’t recruiting like religions, and there is no dogma or origin myth to believe in.

You’re unlikely to see a buddhist missionary asking if you’ve heard to truth about emptiness on a street corner ;)

My point was simply that, at least in my personal experience, if i had found zen as a tool to achieve something, e.g it was sold to me as having some effect other, it would not have worked.

>You’re unlikely to see a buddhist missionary asking if you’ve heard to truth about emptiness on a street corner ;)

And if you do, kill him! ;)

> You’re unlikely to see a buddhist missionary asking if you’ve heard to truth about emptiness on a street corner ;)

That made me lol, because yes I've never experienced that. But then I remembered that SGI had a lot of controversy due to their aggressive proselytizing in Japan in the 20th century. [1]

Also, we do have to bear witness to Theravadin monks in Myanmar advocating for (and participating in) genocide against the Rohingya due to their religious beliefs. Similarly in Sri Lanka against Tamils and Muslim populations there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dsei_Toda#Aggressive_pro...

I think the problem is that when you look at a brain from the inside, a lot of it looks irrational. Someone explaining a feeling or a mechanism based on thoughts to someone looking at that brain from the outside will have to bridge billions of neurons standing in between them. Nobody, not even a neuroscientist can do that, with any scientific rigor.

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