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Comment by Zababa | Hacker News Reader

This is probably a relatively naive observation, but I've found that the way some people describe meditation and how their mind change is sometimes the same as how people describe their experience under psychadelics. These bad side effects of meditation sound a bit like a bad trip, but without being able to tell yourself that it's chemically induced and thus will stop in a few hours.

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As someone who dabbles in mushroom based psychedelics you are right. The sudden awareness of yourself, and even moreso the sudden awareness of 'not yourself' can be pretty frightening. I have had bad trips before, and they usually began with an untethering of yourself. Once you start floating outside of your life/personality, you can become very distressed with what is left. It can become almost scarring to see yourself from afar suffering so badly, but that be not yourself. It's hard to put into words, but that experience of intense disassociation, and the pain of being an observer to it is very real.

Yes. From experience I can attest that they are two doors to the same house, so to speak.

And I can attest that only one of those doors leads to intoxication.

Meditation under the influence, on the other hand, is a door to the ocean.

Do you swim in it in eternal bliss? Or do you drown in it?

Does ”you” ”swimming” or ”drowning” ”in” spatially experienced consciousness make sense?

>spatially experienced consciousness

I understand it's supposed to be an abstract concept, but this statement still doesn't make sense

You experience your surroundings spatially through your senses every day. In the ordinary state of consciousness, this is sometimes called sense-experience. Now imagine experiencing your consciousness — cognition, feelings, memories — as the state of a boundless ocean, ”you” in this case being the ocean experiencing itself in this way.

Definitely, there's more than one way to get to a different state of mind.

Christian religions for example set a certain stage, create an atmosphere that puts people in a shared mental state. Meditative, perhaps. I can see (although never experienced myself) how that, if you let it "in", can lead to a "religious experience" / awakening of sorts.

Worst one was that one time I was in an American evangelical church, the type where there's lots of music and the like. But also weird behaviour; during the sermon, lots of people around me had their hand up and were whispering "jesus", it was eerie as fuck to be honest. That line of churches does a lot with altering brain states though, one article I read mentioned measuring brain waves and seeing them enter an "alpha" state, similar to hypnosis and making people very susceptive to suggestions. Another example is exorcisms, where people go - let themselves go? - into a state of dissociation, speaking in tongues and spasming. I kinda see that as letting their own inhibitions go and letting the impulses take over.

TL;DR not a scientist, just armchair theorizing and waffling.

"These bad side effects of meditation sound a bit like a bad trip, but without being able to tell yourself that it's chemically induced and thus will stop in a few hours."

It's not uncommon to forget one has taken psychedelics when one is having a powerful trip, and just telling yourself that it's chemically induced and will stop in a few hours doesn't necessarily help.

That's not to mention that while under the influence of psychedelics a single minute might seem like many lifetimes, or you could feel like you're in an infinite time loop and are never getting out, etc.

That's totally fair. My point was, your experience (usually) stops at some point without you having to do anything. That doesn't seem to be the case with meditation.

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