TL;DR: Our experiences aren't as unified as we might think. Introspection might create a false sense of unity between concurrent experiences. Basically, we might not be as "conscious" as we believe in our day-to-day lives.
99.99% of the human population is in sleep mode. Zoning out constantly. Once you became awake, everyday experiences starts to become beautiful and a bit magical. Also you start to ponder more on your awareness and topics like eternity, god, death etc come to your focus than make believe stuff like careers, identity, nationality, opinions shared in tweets, the story you have about your life etc. Also a once atheist you starts to immediately understand the religious teachings.
It's hard to understand this statement if you are not awake. I would have down voted this before the shift happened for me :)
I second the G.I. Gurdjieff recommendation, but maybe start with any one of the books of "Psychological commentaries" by Nicoll, or "In search of the miraculous" by Ouspensky.
It happened to me by chance. But I was seeking it. I think the journey has just started for me. It has its own challenges. But waking up with Sam Harris is probably a good place to start. I don't think it's also for everyone. Life became easy day to day but became more challenging in terms of purpose etc as ego dies.
Unfortunately, maintaining a career remains necessary to prevent the local authorities who are in charge of money distribution and tax collecting from causing harm to my person and family. And the 99.99% of the other people who surround me, who seem to have a general dissatisfaction with identities, nationalities, and tweets, whether theirs or other peoples, are the ones who keep empowering the various authorities that keep this silly conflict based system running. It's really quite an undesirable situation.
RA Wilson says the only options after visiting Chapel Perilous are to become a paranoid, or an agnostic, and that there is no third way. I'd argue one could also become an atheist. The paranoid thinks there's always a force out there trying to get them. The atheist is convinced there's never a force out there trying to get them. I try to remain agnostic as I am not sure all the evidence is in yet to be able to make an accurate assessment of the situation which we all find ourselves dropped into.
I take modified Sturgeon's Law view of various religious teachings. Sturgeon says 90% of everything is crap. I think it's closer to 99%. But the 1% that's left over is pretty interesting.
Anyway I gave you a deserved upvote, but I'm sure your karma that matters is not as negative as your HN karma. :)
> Also a once atheist you starts to immediately understand the religious teachings
I ponder the topics you mention and at no point did I feel compelled to radically retool my life around 2000 year old religious documents which themselves have clear lineage to even older, less-informed belief systems.
That's okay. I didn't decide to ponder the religious teachings. After the shift I immediately started to understand the teachings that I once thought was primitive and irrelevant. They all point to the same thing. It's hard to understand what they are pointing to without knowing or experiencing it. Read a bit about perennial philosophy. But it's a bit like telling to blind person what colors are. It will not make sense till you see.
Less abstractly and more concretely: What do they point to? What are you claiming is the unifying deep truth beneath the surface of all religious texts? What heuristic is used to differentiate a text as religious versus the babblings of a schizophrenic?
I was raised Catholic, by a deacon, and have a deep understanding of Judeo-Christian religions, and have studied to a lesser extent several world religions. What am I missing?
I am just a student of these things myself so take everything I say with a grain of salt. But based on your question and my own experience, it seems that you are approaching religion in the same way I was doing -- intellectually.
That is natural, but the problem is that our intellect is quite limited. You would like to have a description of "the unifying deep truth". But even very simple experience, like how strawberry tastes like, cannot be transmitted by words and comprehended by the intellect. How could we transmit something vastly more complex even if we knew it -- and I am not claiming I do.
So I would say what you are missing is the direct experience of something higher. Seek and you will find.
Your statement is hard to understand because it claims nothing and is extremely pretentious, of course it gets downvoted.
What you describe is akin to Camus's Absurd, but you chose to fill in the weirdness of existence with some kind of spirituality. That's your choice. Please don't go around claiming to be morally superior to "99.99%" of all humans on earth.
When did I make the claim I am morally superior? I just said most humans are in sleep mode. Even if I said that it's pointless. It's just a belief and not truth.
Also as I said in other comments till you experience a shift none of this makes sense to you. That's okay.
