There's an old saying — the word is a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. Stare at the finger long enough and you miss what it was gesturing at.
I notice this on the forum sometimes. Someone describes something that genuinely happened to them — a feeling, a timing, an encounter that stopped them cold — and within a few posts we're arguing about whether God exists, or whether coincidence is a sufficient explanation, or what "the universe" even means. The experience itself quietly leaves the room.
What I'm curious about: would we learn more if we agreed, just provisionally, to swap experiences before we swap labels? Describe what you noticed. What it felt like. What happened next. Hold the explanation loosely for a bit.
I'm not suggesting labels don't matter — they do, eventually. But I wonder which comes first for most people: the experience, or the framework they were handed to make sense of it?