Comment by notthegov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notthegov | Hacker News Reader

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If you meditate for emotional stillness and spiritual depth, then there is no reason you can't seek happiness and awareness from a girlfriend or a psychedelic drug experience. Or from both at the same time.

You could meditate alone for a thousand lifetimes and not experience love. Saying you can endogenously experience psychedelic states by meditation or Kundalini yoga sounds nice and ideal, but it is only partially true. It can only show you glimpses.

Whatever this world is, it is here for us to enjoy. Proclaiming the answer to enlightement is living an ascetic life without luxury items, smart attractive people or drugs of any kind is silly.

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun." - Alan Watts

(Obviously Osho didn't live an ascetic life. He meditated enough not to need MDMA but not Rolls-Royces.)

> Saying you can endogenously experience psychedelic states by meditation or Kundalini yoga sounds nice and ideal, but it is only partially true.

Even if some people can experience psychedelic states through extensive meditation, that doesn't make their experience intrinsically better. They're chasing the same experience as someone who experiments with psychedelic drugs, but there always seems to be an irritating sense of smug superiority from people who do meditate.

Meditation is a virtue signal, like jogging or being vegetarian.

It also tends to go along with a sense of being on a cosmic path toward truth, beauty, and enlightenment...

Ugh, those people. I bet they think that "turbos don't make real horsepower" too.

well, this is the topic of quality vs quantity, and most people including me prefer the former for obvious reasons

meditation is just like teaching yourself programming for years. after 10k hours of practice in either you can reach to a state of expertise. E.G., you can write any kind of software in your expertise with ease. Similarly you can repeat the same experience as per your wish (like traveling through different planes of existance, hering/seeing extra-dimensional stuff and much more).

Taking drug to experience the state is like throwing yourself onto the source code without any learning/experience to fix a bug. You might end up fixing the bug by accident in some cases, but it can very well lead to other failures which you couldn't imagine with virtually zero experience in programming. More often you end up having bad experiences In both and frustration thereafter.

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