Looking up from your phone provides experimentally verifiable “superpowers”—you can, for example, communicate with other Lookers Up via invisible gestures without texting them. Telepathy!
Maybe that’s a flaw in the analogy. But Valentine does claim real-world benefits, such as superhuman insight into psychology (as do other people who describe themselves as enlightened.) Maybe those aren’t “the point”, but demonstrating them convincingly would go a long way towards convincing the rest of us that there is a point and we just can’t see it.
The Buddha himself didn’t just say “trust me guys”, he supposedly did a bunch of miracles using his enlightenment-granted powers.
Looking up from your phone provides experimentally verifiable “superpowers”—you can, for example, communicate with other Lookers Up via invisible gestures without texting them. Telepathy!
Maybe that’s a flaw in the analogy. But Valentine does claim real-world benefits, such as superhuman insight into psychology (as do other people who describe themselves as enlightened.) Maybe those aren’t “the point”, but demonstrating them convincingly would go a long way towards convincing the rest of us that there is a point and we just can’t see it.
The Buddha himself didn’t just say “trust me guys”, he supposedly did a bunch of miracles using his enlightenment-granted powers.