You have it... Thank you moridinamael.
When you entitled this post "Why did you...?", were you more interested in being validated by someone else's agreement with your own perspective than in finding out the actual answers people would provide to the question?
If so, all I can suggest is: don't believe everything you think.
This is another call for respectful dialog on the topic. Takers?
A brief word on credentials. I am a 23/24-year "veteran" of the software industry. I have worked on many types of software at Microsoft, and on simulation and optimization at Electronic Arts. I am an information scientist first, and an "armchair" theoretical physicist (with a pet TOE), and a hands-on consciousness researcher.
Thank you for the civil dialog.
Imagine if Einstein posted to a forum to say "It's all relative guys, isn't it obvious! Gravitation and speed of light and everything!" and then people downvoted him and he responded with "I don't understand why you guys don't see what I mean, it's all perfectly clear". Even if he is literally Einstein and his theories of relativity are completely well developed, that kind of post isn't going to convey them.
You are saying a bunch of vague bullshit sounding phrases that even if they are TRUE are not MEANINGFUL to anyone but yourself. Yo...
So you automatically think that being downvoted means that people were closeminded to what you had to say.
I downvoted it because it's pseudo-mystical crap, happily wallowing in its pseudo-mysticality, and like all pseudomystical crap it says nothing of importance though it attempts to pat itself on the back for how important the nothing it says is.
I'm, 'gratified' I guess, to see other comments here about autism. As I read through the post, I immediately began having the impression that "rationalist community" was being used like a euphemism for "community with high rate of autism". I know it isn't, literally, but there are aspects of rationalism and this type of explicit communication that I have always thought of as 'gifts' that people on the autism spectrum bring to humanity.
At the risk of sounding naive, I'll come right out and say it. It completely baffles me that so many people speak of this game as having an emotional toll. How is it possible for words, in a chat window, in the context of a fictional role-play, to have this kind of effect on people? What in god's name are you people saying to each other in there? I consider myself to be emotionally normal, a fairly empathetic person, etc. I can imagine experiencing disgust at, say, very graphic textual descriptions. There was that one post a few years back that scared some...
In my experience, it is possible to bring parts of the experience back and subject it to analytical and critical thinking, but it is very challenging. The trip does tend to defy comprehension by the normal mode of consciousness, which is why descriptions have the quality you call "vagueness". In short, distilling more than "irreducibly spiritual nonsense" from the trip takes work, not unlike the work of organizing thoughts into a term paper. It can be done, and the more analytical your habits of thought to begin with, the more success I think you could expect.
Turns out it was extremely slow, then fast, then suddenly asymptotic. I'm sure you mathletes must know the name for that type of curve.