Cool study though
Cool study though
It becomes opinionated as to what causes heedlessness, so there is a divide between groups when it comes to what one is and isn't allowed, so I get you could argue magic mushrooms should not be allowed.
As food for thought, brain scans show mushrooms lights up the brain in a near identical way to jhanic meditation, so it's common to use mushrooms as an advertisement. "One day you can do this with meditation."
Technically the fifth precept is about alcohol: Surāmerayamajjapamādaṭṭhānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi -> I undertake the precept to refrain from fermented drink which lead to heedlessness. However, the hermeneutical understanding of that precept is it applies to any mind-altering substance. Why? Because losing control of yourself can trigger violating other precepts. For example intoxicants could lead to sexual misconduct which can lead to lying, and so on.
I wouldn't call it a short cut. I hope I didn't accidentally imply it is. Wisdom is built up through experience, be it meditative experience, social experiences (like dispelling ill-will), or written experiences (like suttas). When there is enough wisdom from awareness the fetter of ignorance breaks. There is no short cut when it comes to dispelling ignorance and misunderstanding.
>However, the hermeneutical understanding of that precept is it applies to any mind-altering substance. Why? Because losing control of yourself can trigger violating other precepts. For example intoxicants could lead to sexual misconduct which can lead to lying, and so on.
I would say losing control of yourself is heedlessness. There isn't a loss of control when it comes to magic mushrooms. However, you could argue magic mushrooms causes heedlessness because you can't control how long the meditative-like state is, which could be a reason to ban it. What magic mushrooms do is increase awareness.
Buddhist tradition does it's best to not offend. Because Buddhism tries not to offend, the general rule of thumb is: if it's illegal in that part of the world, Buddhism does not encourage law breaking behavior. Where I live, for example, magic mushrooms are legal. There are many places in the world where they are unregulated. Likewise, in many circles in the west, over 50% of new practitioners came from psychedelics often having seen a glimpse of nirvana and are looking for that. Some come from yoga too. The idea is to let those people know there is more out there, so they don't get stuck.
I'm not trying to take sides here or say it's right or wrong. I'm just trying to help.
That's taking a very narrow point of view on the subject. While modern, mainstream, orthodox eastern religions forbid drugs and alcohol the traditions that inform them used a wide array of tools to reveal and tune the instruments of perception.
A man with a broken leg benefits from a crutch until the bone heals.
I would suggest psilocybin and LSD mainly for punctual experiences. They can make you understand what lies "behind the veil".
Once you know that, once you have lived that, your life can take a huge turn.
One of the best case outcomes is that you no longer have to believe or hope that life is way more profound than society wants us to believe, but you know it (intuitively, that is, not intellectually speaking, of course).
I'm sure they had reasons. We do studies like this to determine whether or not those reasons are any good. I've seen a lot of evidence that suggests that mediation can have lots of benefits, and I've seen evidence that suggests that psychedellics can have benefits in certain use cases as well.
It's easy on a personal level to dismiss results of a study because of dogma, but it doesn't translate into an effective argument.
With drugs you can experience states that may be good but not true, true but not good.
During meditation you experience states that are good and true.
I've experienced closed eyes visuals during sober meditation, and I wouldn't call any phenomenal experiences strictly "true."
My real issue is that your perceptions of reality are a construct shaped by evolution and culture, and while they probabalistically correspond to aspects of reality that is also true in a drugged up state; the difference is mostly quantitative, albeit with such difference in quantity as to appear qualitative. We're patching together fragments of sensory input with processes that fill in the blanks and delay event streams so that things appear to happen in orders that are useful for us to react to.
We delay our perception of light to better match our perception of sound, so that people talking have lip movements that correspond to the sounds they're speaking in the moment. This applies to other events as well, and researchers have hacked the percieved casaulity of the event stream through conditioning; first the subject repeatedly presses a button and hears a sound a moment later that is offset by an artificial delay. After the subject is accustomed to this, the artificial delay is removed and the subject experiences the sound before they press the button.
As a side note it obviously isn't clever to have all visual input delayed, which is why your brainstem gets a separate stream of visual data it can respond to quickly. When the neural pathway that feeds data into your percieved consciousness is damaged, your brainstem can keep responding to data and catching objects that "you" can't see or speak about -- this condition is known as blindsight.
Your eyes are much less sensitive to color in your peripheral vision than they are to colors in your central field of view, yet you don't experience that color differently. By the time you experience color, the values in your periphery have been "corrected" to match more reliable data. There is noise in that process, and guesstimation.
If I experience the sky as a different color than you do, is one of us experiencing the "true" color of the sky? Does consensus reality have anything to do with truth, other than by usually massaging out some errors by looking at averages?
Moreover, can a color even be true? A color corresponds to some frequency of a light particle, or whatever the fuck a light particle really is in the fundamentally unknowable base reality that our conscious processes are implemented on top of, but a color is not that vibration or that particle, a color is an experience. [Edit: i.e. a representation; do not mistake the pointing finger for the moon, nor the pointer for the register.]
I'm not claiming that sober experiences don't generally correspond more to base reality than do experiences under the influence of entheogens (I only feel the need to make this explicit because some folks in the same drug fan clubs I'm in do make such claims), but they still aren't one-to-one. You aren't experiencing reality, only a useful model of reality. After a standard disclaimer that all statements about reality are implicitly probabalistic and unprovable (including that one) we might venture that some experiences are more or less "true" than others depending on how much we think they correspond to reality, but none of our experiences are strictly true in this sense. The only way I can see arguing for a strictly true human experience is to judge the experience entirely apart from reality; if the phenomenon was experienced it was true in this sense, but obviously we're talking about subjective rather than objective truth at that point and drugged-truth is just as valid as sober-truth. Words are mushy.
If Alice is on drugs and doesn't see a ghost, and Bob is sober but hallucinating a ghost while his brain is in a "natural" state, is Bob seeing what is true while Alice is not? If you think this example is utterly ridiculous and nobody has ever hallucinated something on that scale while sober, I would check the pop-sci book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. Sober perceptions can be super trippy, even if they aren't for most people most of the time.
To what degree and under which scenarios this reasoning is correct &/or optimal is currently unknown.
> While you can have drug induced trances similar to meditation, in Zen they call it "losing your self", the entire point is to be able to develop that skill and point of view without a chemical aid.
Whether (non-psychedelic) meditative states are "optimal" (regardless of what the specific "point" of various practices are) is currently unknown.
But to be clear, this in no way implies that developing an ability to reach these states without drugs isn't beneficial, or that the ability to reach such a state doesn't have unrecognized advantages over and above a psychedelic approach, or that psychedelics do not come with a much higher (yet unknown) risk profile.
I've read very little that suggests a meditation practice is likely to be harmful, and plenty that suggests it is extremely beneficial. But I've read nothing that suggests it utterly supplants psychedelic experiences, and that includes Ram Dass' experience as well, to my understanding anyways. If he personally stopped using psychedelics, and recommends that to others, in no way proves that this is the optimal path.
The correct answers to questions such as these are currently unknown. We need more research and ideas.