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Comment by NotSashaShulgin | Hacker News Reader

Sasha and Ann Shulgin famously believed that dissociatives have no safe role in psychedelic therapy:

  "We are strongly prejudiced against psychedelic drugs which cause such mind-body separation, as we are against any drug which causes separation from feelings and emotions. However, we acknowledge that the ketamine state can be highly instructive for researchers trying to understand the functions of the human mind."

Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin passed away in 2014. He is a historical figure. His lab will eventually be an official historical landmark.

Is it really so confusing that I use his nickname as a handle online?

John C. Lilly died of heart failure at age 86 in Los Angeles on September 30, 2001. His remains were cremated.

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I thought he might have had a kid named Sasha and that it might be you. So yeah, I'd say it's confusing - you have to distinguish your own point of view (no doubt entirely clear on the point) from the rest of us who are looking at this with a lot less information and widely varying assumptions. Not everyone knows that he has died, for example.

Re Lilly - sorry for not being clearer - what I'm curious about is that you seemed to imply that at a certain point he was adversely affected by his own use of dissociatives, that it had some profound effect on him, and that he never fully recovered from it. I was curious to hear more about what happened there. I'm not super familiar with his work but I read a bit and found it to be a mixture of penetratingly lucid and completely unintelligible (mostly the latter).

Ok, rename me to NotSashaShulgin if you must.

John C. Lilly's later books are a beautiful example of ketamine delusions and loss of contact with reality.

Quoting Wikipedia:

  In 1974, Lilly's research using various psychoactive drugs led him to believe in the existence of a certain hierarchical group of cosmic entities, the lowest of which he later dubbed Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.) in an autobiography published jointly with his wife Antonietta (often called Toni). Lilly states that "[t]here exists a Cosmic Coincidence Control Center (CCCC) with a Galactic substation called Galactic Coincidence Control (GCC). Within GCC is the Solar System Control Unit (SSCU), within which is the Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO)."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly

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