Hacker News Reader

Comment by superswordfish | Hacker News Reader

> This is common with LSD trips and other such experiences.

What other experiences?

> The very first line in the Tao Te Ching is "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Some things are ineffable.

So you're saying the parent commenter was made aware of the Tao? Or that it was a religious experience? I don't follow.

> For instance, it's not possible to explain the experience of the color red to a blind person.

That's bogus. You're likening abstinence from LSD to a disability.

> Unless your brain has time travel capabilities, your experience of the past is just replaying memories and the future is just simulations of potential paths.

I didn't say anything about time travel. My point was it's a bit concerning that somebody would refer to their past and future as "trivial and not important." You mentioned using knowledge of the past to plan the future. That suggests you agree that the past and future are connected and important.

View on HN

> What other experiences?

Fevered dreams, near death experience, deep meditation, orgasm, stroke, epileptic fits, etc.

> So you're saying the parent commenter was made aware of the Tao? Or that it was a religious experience? I don't follow

I wasn't making any claim about his/her experience of the Tao. It was simply to emphasize my point, which is that certain experiences can not be described or analogized, but must be experienced first hand.

> That's bogus. You're likening abstinence from LSD to a disability.

Why is that bogus?

> That suggests you agree that the past and future are connected and important.

No, I said nothing of the sort. I said that you can't experience the future and past. They are just ideas in your head. They are just conceptual tools that you use to better your experience. How can conceptual tools be as important as you actual existence?

> So you're saying the parent commenter was made aware of the Tao?

No, he's saying, "Some things are ineffable." — in exactly so many words.

There are experiences we can have that simply can not be articulated in something as clumsy and imprecise as language. The same word can mean subtly different things to the parties of a single conversation, and this kind of thing is pretty much all subtlety.

The experiences you can have working with psychedelics are among the most, "You really had to be there," things possible, for values of "there" that generally taken to mean, "inside the same skull".

But we're humans and our foremost means of communication is language. Who cares if it's clumsy and imprecise? Try us, it's the best we've got. Saying it's ineffable is lazy. Unless you're talking about the centerpiece of your religion, I suppose, so I thought parent was suggesting that this person had stumbled upon the Tao.

Edit: My comments are getting hammered into oblivion, forbid somebody should try to hold something up to the light and expect an answer other than "you have to use psychedelics to get it." Maybe it's bad to care about objectivity when in the company of psychonauts? Sorry, but I have a hard time distinguishing what I read here from a host of other woo, and I'm left with questions, not answers. My questions are not meant to be dismissive in any way, but they are deliberately prying.

Okay, I'm going to try to articulate the experience? Again, words are insufficient, but here are more of them.[1]

So here goes:

In the day-to-day life you experience a boundary between that which we consider 'self' and that which we consider 'other'. That boundary gives the environment shape, defined by what you know to be you. To say the same thing another way, the boundary is the difference between seeing the color blue, and describing it. Or the difference between listening to music, and describing vibrations in the air. Alan Watts has some lectures which might help you understand what this boundary is, if you don't "get it" yet.

That boundary is illusory. It is a way of thinking, a way of separating out the ego's experience from the environment. It is a pattern of thought and thought patterns can be changed. Psychedelics (I'm told), meditation (I know), and other techniques (sensory deprivation? sleep deprivation? haven't tried) are ways of changing your thinking to remove or blur this boundary. Some ways are more permanent than others; having such an experience often leaves you questioning what permanent is in the first place.

And again, as many in this thread have said, I've described it, or tried to, but it is necessary to experience it to actually understand the full detail of the situation.

[1] Commentary: I would argue that any form of expressing experience to another person is by construction imprecise; to truly have the same experience you must be the same person, and then you wouldn't need words. http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer

In the day-to-day life you experience a boundary between that which we consider 'self' and that which we consider 'other'. That boundary gives the environment shape, defined by what you know to be you.

To say the same thing another way, the boundary is the difference between seeing the color blue, and describing it.

I think I understand (to some degree) what you mean by each of these statements. The first seems to relate to the Buddhist concept of non-self (at least to the degree that you perceive the boundary of self to be relative rather than a well-defined absolute) while the second I think relates to the nama-rupa distinction or in other systems to the notion of qualia as opposed to abstract descriptive knowledge.

However it isn't clear to me that these are the same thing. Could you clarify how you understand the relation between these two notions ?

It's not lazy to say something such as an LSD trip is ineffable. It's just how it is.

Sure a lot of the sounds, sounds and experiences may technically be describable. But it's the experience itself that is ineffable.

I've done LSD twice myself, and won't be doing it again for many years as I started suffering from panic attacks and pretty much an existential crisis as many others in this thread reported.

That said, I don't regret taking it at all. It definitely broadened my mind to how simple we take the world for granted.

Whilst we're on the subject of language it would be a little enlightening if you'd tell me the meaning of "woo".

It is not a word I see often, but whenever I have seen it (never yet heard) it seems like someone wishes to push ideas they cannot or will not grasp into an objective category such as "things I and other straight thinking individuals like Feynmann know to be empirically bullshit".

Was this the way you intended to used term "woo" here?

Seems he's just resorting to insults in his response:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo

Saying it's ineffable is being accurate. The human language is clumsy, and I'd argue our normal consciousness and ego lack the mechanisms to convey this experience in any tangible way to a person who hasn't also been affected by it.

LSD is quite possibly the most powerful thing I've ever experienced. It really is like describing color to a blind person.

You're going to be frustrated if you try to understand it without actually trying it. I just wouldn't recommend it for anyone who doesn't respect it appropriately.

I think any novel experience is impossible to explain to someone who hasn't "been there."

That said—it's interesting to consider, what can we say to each other, we who have plenty of experience with LSD?

Hello. I hope your life is cool, and I bet it is!

Right now I'm on a bench in a park near Riga's old town. It's one of the first days of real nice spring.

Life is strange, earth is strange, grass is strange...

Being on a planet in the middle of space is strange...

Enjoying this field of vision with colors and textures and light and dark is strange...

For me, the LSD experience is a vantage point. Like climbing up on a secret roof and looking at everything... really, everything... thoughts, language, logic, structure, emotion, time, space, mass, energy, love, yearning, fear, history, the future, ambition, alienation, loneliness, fruits, bread, wine, smoke, oceans, rivers, stars, computers, electricity, flowers, religions, poems, books, families, stories, superstitions, science, math, soil, worms, ... yeah, I'm just listing everything right now!

And then you go to sleep, enjoy the next day in some calm and beautiful way... and then it's Monday, and you head back to your office... the apartment building staircase where people avoid each other... cars everywhere... couples who seem bored with each other... people working all day with bullshit they hate... humanity collectively very worried about money, borders, property... and all this stuff.

And then you spend your life wondering...

Perhaps that is your answer - that you will only be left with questions until you experience one of these states firsthand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com