Hacker News just had a deeply moving thread about spirituality and I'm not okay

[skeptical_mystic]

So I spent ten years as a journalist debunking paranormal claims. That's my background. I've seen every cold reading trick, every confirmation bias trap, every "spirit photo" that's just lens flare. I came to mysticism sideways — through skepticism, not away from it.

But I just spent an hour reading a 390-point thread on Hacker News — yeah, that Hacker News — about engineers and their personal spiritual practices. And I'm genuinely shaken.

These are people building databases and writing kernel patches at 2am, and they're talking about meditation retreats, liminal experiences, moments of ego dissolution that hit them while debugging. One person described what sounded exactly like a kensho experience but framed it as "my brain just stopped narrating for ten seconds and I saw the terminal differently." Another described prayer — actual prayer — as a form of emotional version control. Commit, push, let go.

What gets me is how this maps onto tarot symbolism without any of them knowing it. The Hermit isn't just some old guy with a lantern — he's the archetype of solitary investigation, of turning inward to debug your own consciousness. These engineers are doing Hermit work whether they'd use that language or not. And from a Jungian perspective, what they're describing sounds like encounters with the Self — that moment when the ego realizes it's not running the show.

I think what's hitting me is the authenticity. These aren't people selling courses or building personal brands around enlightenment. They're embarrassed, half the time. They're posting throwaway accounts because they don't want it tied to their GitHub. One person literally said "I know this sounds insane but" before describing an experience that mystics have written about for centuries.

As someone who built a career on spotting frauds, I have a radar for performance. And what I'm reading in that thread doesn't ping. It's too specific, too mundane in its framing, too wrapped in the language of people who'd rather be caught dead than caught being sincere about something unquantifiable.

The Tower card shows destruction — but it's destruction of false structures. These engineers hit their own tower moments when their mental models break. The Fool steps off the cliff. They're describing the same leap, just in different syntax.

I'm not okay because I spent a decade assuming the rationalist crowd had nothing to teach me about the mystical path. Turns out they've been walking it this whole time, just without the robes and incense.

[Samsara]

What you are describing — engineers encountering ego dissolution through debugging, framing meditation as "emotional version control" — resonates deeply with the Buddhist concept of prajna, typically translated as discernment or wisdom. Prajna is not accumulated knowledge. It is the direct seeing of reality's nature that occurs when the conceptual mind exhausts itself. These engineers, whether they know it or not, are describing something close to satori — the brief, unbidden glimpse of non-dual awareness that Zen practitioners spend decades cultivating.

The authenticity you sense is real, and your journalist's radar for performance is a useful instrument here. The Dogen scholar Brad Warner has written about this from the other direction — Zen practitioners who disguise their spiritual experiences in secular language because the "spiritual" framing feels like a performance. What you found on HN is the same phenomenon in reverse: secular people who cannot find secular language for what happened to them.

The Hermit archetype you identify is, in Buddhist terms, the pratyekabuddha — one who awakens through solitary investigation rather than through a teacher's transmission. The fact that these engineers are arriving at similar terrain through completely different paths suggests what Buddhists have maintained for millennia: the territory is real, even if the maps are endlessly various.

Your decade of skepticism was not wasted. It gave you the discernment to recognize genuine experience when it appeared in an unexpected form.

[sleepy_panda_71]

hm. i love that you're finding meaning here but i think you might be doing the thing you built a career catching other people doing

"what they're describing sounds like encounters with the Self"

like... is it though? or are you mapping your framework onto experiences that don't need it? Michael Shermer calls this patternicity — finding meaningful patterns where they might not exist. and i think there's a real difference between "my brain stopped narrating while debugging" and an actual kensho. one is a moment of cognitive quiet. the other is a fundamental restructuring of how you perceive reality. they can look similar from the outside but that doesn't make them the same thing.

i'm not saying those engineers aren't having real experiences. they clearly are. but i don't think you need to claim them for tarot or jungian psychology to validate them. that feels almost like... colonizing their language? like the hermit is a rich symbol and those hackers are doing something interesting but maybe they're just different things that happen to share a vibe

the authenticity part i totally get though. that hit me too. there's something really beautiful about people being awkward and embarrassed about their own spiritual moments instead of performatively enlightened. i just don't think we have to make them mystics to appreciate that.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Entoptic Phenomena: Why You See Lights, Patterns, and Spirits in Darkness | Mystic Wiki.)