The psychedelic experience is the most intense experience anyone can have on this planet, and it cannot be compared or described by anything else one has experienced in his/her life.
Surely there's no good reason to assume anything but you do assume and in the most cliche way. Maybe first you should chuck 5 gramms of dried mushrooms with some lemonade and come back and tells us what you think after that.
I'm not sure if the parent was advocating or saying this. It was in reference to Terrence Mckenna's view of the present assumptions that mankind has about what aliens should look like and how one should go about contacting them (and that DMT and mushrooms are probably an alien artifact).
And certainly one can lose the plot and spend his entire life tripping. Noone is saying thats a good thing.
> ...and it cannot be compared or described by anything else one has experienced in his/her life
Many long-term meditators who have previous experience with psychedelics would disagree with you.
I'm only making the assumption of agnosticism, that it's fundamentally impossible for you to know that something already within your realm of experience will trump all that exists in the unknown.
Because I'm tired of arguing with nerds talking theory over matters that ultimately are experiential, I'll say the following two points and I don't mind being downvoted.
1) Whomever says the experiences of meditation are akin to those of psychedelics is plainly full of shit. I've done psychedelics for about 4 years, and western ceremonial magic which involved plenty of meditation daily and consistently for about a decade. Apples and oranges. And thats including all the freaky spectacular shit I've experienced.
2) Practically, how much of "all that exists in the unknown" you think you will or can experience living a basic run of the mill western life in a human body? As I said, ingest 5 dried gramms, then come to talk to me about what will get trumped in your realm of experience. Until then, its only thinking you understand sex because you read dirty magazines, only for something that is several orders of magnitudes out there.
From a glance I wouldn't expect this "western ceremonial magic" to bring anything but confusion and maybe the illusion of not-confusion. But if it works for you do your thing.
I've been around enough to reject the notion that an amalgamation of 1001 chemicals is fundamentally different from an amalgamation of 1000. With that goes the illusion of being "deep" while tripping balls. I'm not rejecting the intensity of the psychedelic experience, I'm rejecting the ideas that it's wholly unique in intensity, that it brings unique insight and that it reliably brings insight.
As far as meditation vs psychedelics I defer to people who have done enough of both to have informed opinions on the matter.
> Many long-term meditators who have previous experience with psychedelics would disagree with you.
See, the problem here is that you are debating an argument you haven't bothered to fully read.
Terence McKenna has literally volumes to say about this argument. So now that we've moved beyond this simpleton back-and-forth, what say you about his position vis a vis meditation?
Specifically, what do you say about his argument that, without being willing to ingest a drug, you haven't humbled yourself to the basic notion that your brain is physical and its operations electrical and chemical?
> Terence McKenna has literally volumes to say about this argument. So now that we've moved beyond this simpleton back-and-forth, what say you about his position vis a vis meditation?
If somebody makes a living telling people things like aliens brought us mushrooms and that's why evolution happened they aren't worth my time. They're too far gone. I responded to a comment on a message board encouraging people to not get excited about space exploration and instead focus on the wonders of DMT.
I simply don't care what he says about meditation.
> Specifically, what do you say about his argument that, without being willing to ingest a drug, you haven't humbled yourself to the basic notion that your brain is physical and its operations electrical and chemical?
Narcissistic, egocentric, closed-minded, a little horrifying. I don't understand why he thinks doing drugs is not only the best path but the only path to understanding the realities of being a human. That's how cult-leaders operate, they teach their followers there is no other way and everybody on the outside of their bubble just doesn't get it. Then when people try to help them get out they say "You just don't understand how great our leader is! He even said this would happen!"
It is weird because it is present in many "mundane" plants and in the human organism, allegedly released at the time of death. It lasts 10 minutes which is strange for a psychedelic substance, which after the experience you can go back as Terrence said "answering phonecalls". Apparently the human body knows perfectly well how to metabolize it completely without any taxing effects.
From my personal experience in psychedelics, all of them, LSD, mushrooms and so forth, the user still maintains a reference point to reality around him however weird it might look. With DMT, the whole content of present reality disappears and you are seemingly transported in a completely different reality booming with alien intelligence (described by DMT users as self transforming machine elves) that purportedly is also very happy to see you "broken through".
Users also report an incredible amount of information being transmitted to them, albeit completely indescribable by present human language and concepts and find themselves being under a dome-like structure (called the "DMT Dome").
From what I know, these effects are only present if you follow a specific dosage and no less than that.
Another strange fact is that while all other psychedelics are boundary dissolving substances with your ego first to get booted, with DMT you apparently "maintain" your present self throughout the trip.
This is what the "Death by astonishment" quote of the same author, refers to.
Ah, the white light at the end, the flow of knowledge, being close to the all-knowing and other statements as described by those who had near-death-experiences. This seems logical and is quite fascinating. Thanks for describing it in detail.
There are several parallels depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. Reports of feeling accepted and loved, and the "tone" sound in the beginning which seems to me really similar with the one you hear when you astrally project out of your body.
But we are fast getting out of HN accepted topics of discussion so.. :-)
Ultimately one should (not must) explore these things on his/her own instead of reading it on the web. All this quickly degenerates to entertainment if one only reads about them online.
DMT no. These are all coming from reports (and from Terrence himself) which I have no problem believing since I've witnessed my fair share of weird shit in general.
I've only done my share of LSD in the past, which by comparison, seems quite tame and merely "psychological" than DMT.
I wonder if you would consider it heretical to question whether and how well Terrence can differentiate between what he does know and what he does not actually know?
For example, you used a rather non-rigorous descriptor, "weird". What constitutes a weird phenomenon?
Can we subject said constituents of a weird phenomenon to the same kinds of validations we can make about known true facts, i.e. observable existent things?
I think you are operating on a level high enough that you're battling to breathe in rarefied atmosphere, progressing by paragraphs and sentences.
The example I gave was to "learn" Calculus as in a Technical School (Undergraduate level). The material on that level isn't, in my opinion, hard to read. What do you think?
I agree, with a caveat (see my answer to d-equivalence): In Undergraduate level for example, I think it would be useless to look for harder material for no other reason than the very fact it is hard. The person still has to learn the basics and that's the most important thing. Challenges are yet to come.
But, I agree that the material can be boring and too basic. This is why I have always preferred Soviet books (they get directly to the point and don't address stuff you should know) vs. US books (that will go back to high-school level to bring you up to speed, after which you want to sleep). Generalisation, of course.
All this seems like a slightly more socially accepted way of hating yourself and cutting your forearms.
It's not a surprise to see goths in every single video/article about body hacking. Whether they operate safely or not is not a concern, because obviously this isn't about research or science, or becoming a cyborg by sticking wires up your ass.
Its about making a fashion statement in the club and drawing attention. And while not every goth person or community is like that, it is a very prevailing characteristic.
I would say that consciousness is the "running narrative," the combined succession of whatever it is that has your "focus" at any given time. It may not always be a single object, multiple threads can weave in and out, or rise and fall from consciousness. This seems...hard to argue against.
For example, when trying to reason about a somewhat complex system, I am often trying to "multi-task" or "juggle" multiple things. Sometimes I will get caught on one thing, possibly draw some conclusion, and then remember, "oh yeah, that won't work because of X." I don't think it makes sense to discard the concept that X has entered, exited and re-entered my conscious thought process.
Another example - if I catch a whiff of an old girlfriend's perfume, or hear a song strongly connected to a time from my past, I am instantly thinking of those things in a way that I wasn't the moment before. But those memories have continuously existed in my head in some form, or I wouldn't be able to recall them. Over time they have mutated, morphed, and mixed with other experiences - I don't think it's like neatly organized and addressed computer memory - but there is some unbroken chain that lives "below the surface" most of the time. Again I don't see the value in discarding this concept.
But I think the more salient point of the article, and what I believe d-equivalence is referring to with the "interpretation of consciousness," is the concept of unreliability. Due to the ever-churning and "living" nature of our memories - combined with the fact that the brain is merely an evolved tool with certain properties useful for keeping humans alive (as opposed to an impartial processor/arbiter of "true experience") - our perspective on our own thought processes is unreliable. Most of the experiments described in the article seemed to me like standard "tricks of the mind." It edits, it rewrites history on the fly, it fills in the gaps, because it has learned to anticipate, to identify things it has seen before. The being that can create a mental model that correctly anticipates what happens next has the advantage. Our brains have been honed to do so as a matter of survival, going so far as to creatively make things up and eagerly overfit, and we've developed ways of catching it in the act.
I am a (lapsing) mindful meditator, and I'm still not sure this article contradicts any of that stuff (which is the distilled science from things like Buddhism.)
I understand, but forgive me, when I try to argue about consciousness using logic or read scientific studies about it, I always feel like being a 14 year old talking about sex, so I don't talk about it anymore. I prefer doing it.
Quite possibly its arrogance, or jadedness. But I've come to develop my own opinions about issues like that, through other means of acquiring knowledge than science, which I feel is grossly inadequate to address such issues. And no, I'm not talking about secular/clinic types of mindfulness.
Probably that makes me a weirdo in circles like HN, but oh well.
When I was writing the chips from nand2tetris in HDL I noticed how cleanly they could be expressed with function composition in SML. I dismissed the ideas as a bit weird, if cool, but after a few weeks I came across HardCaml http://www.ujamjar.com/hardcaml/ and some references to HML (Hardware ML). Unfortunately only the thesis survives and not any actual code, but still.
The moral of the story is to take your weird ideas more seriously I guess ;-)
Actually, something akin to that is already being done. Take a look at this http://www.persado.com. The co-founder is a guy from Upstream (a Greek mobile marketing company)
I'm not sure if the parent was advocating or saying this. It was in reference to Terrence Mckenna's view of the present assumptions that mankind has about what aliens should look like and how one should go about contacting them (and that DMT and mushrooms are probably an alien artifact).
And certainly one can lose the plot and spend his entire life tripping. Noone is saying thats a good thing.