this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
43 points (84.1% liked)
Asklemmy
47341 readers
379 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because I feel like the Buddha had some pretty good ideas. Like I get that suffering comes from desire, I can vibe with the cycle of rebirth and renewal, etc. I just.. I never got to the point where I was like 'This is the one for me.' Maybe because I didn't investigate it all that deeply back when I was investigating lots of other religions around the world, I was always pulled away by other ideas in Hinduism or Gnostic Christianity, or Sufism.
I get this a lot! :) I think it has to be more than just reading but physically experiencing it. Meditation and university classes did it for me.
What about those ideas draws you?
Yeah, that's probably true. I fell pretty hard out of Christianity as a teenager and was extremely not interested in more organized religion. That didn't keep me from being fascinated by the ideas held within various religions, but didn't set foot inside another place of worship for at least a decade after, so all I had was books. Tried meditation and it was one of those 'this is hard so I'm gonna quit' things, unfortunately.
For Hinduism I like polytheism in general, I like the idea that divinity is not a monolith (and not a stern, judging father-figure), and I was pretty into karma and reincarnation for a while. From Gnosticism I really liked the idea that the world is a prison and that the enlightenment everyone is seeking has a practical purpose, to escape it and rejoin the divine. I hated the world and most people in it as a young man, so the idea that it was all bullshit suited me quite well. My current beliefs (which are very syncretic and come from all over the place) are rooted in a similar idea, but these days I think of the world more as an illusion than a prison. Sufism.. man, what's not to like? It's kinda weird, most of Islam doesn't do much for me, but I craved that ecstatic religious joy, that utter dedication and purity of purpose, for a long time, and I have long leaned more into the mystical aspects of religious experience and that's hard to find in organized religion in general and Abrahamic faiths in specific.