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This phenomenon goes far beyond drugs. Contemporary society has explicit or implicit taboos on anything related to expanding or altering human consciousness, to the extent that such topics have essentially vanished from both the mainstream press and academia.

I've been reading a lot of literature from the late 19th/early 20th century over the past few years. The sheer breadth of ideas that were being casually discussed in magazines that regular, educated people subscribed to is astonishing. Drugs, hypnosis/mesmerism, meditation, trance, new religious movements, weird fasting regimens, transcendental experiences in nature, mysticism. That stuff has disappeared from public discourse today, along with many other radical ideas that could apparently just be talked about over coffee back then, without anyone batting an eyelash.

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> This phenomenon goes far beyond drugs. Contemporary society has explicit or implicit taboos on anything related to expanding or altering human consciousness, to the extent that such topics have essentially vanished from both the mainstream press and academia.

I think you need an edit. Here:

> This phenomenon goes far beyond drugs. Contemporary society has explicit or implicit taboos on anything related to expanding or altering the human condition.

I actually agree with you on that. Eugenics, genetic modification of embryos, transhumanism, radical social policies, and many related topics are likewise taboo, and most people wouldn't dare to even mention such ideas in polite company.

The topics are definitely fringe but I'm sure you could find some forum or site that discusses it but I think you have things backwards. It's not that most people wouldn't dare to talk about these ideas in polite company. It's that the people who hold these beliefs aren't polite. Their personalities so abhorrent, vitriolic and unsympathetic. They hold such archaic views, reminiscing about a past that would benefit them at the expense of others.

To use eugenics as an example. Those who speak about it always, without exception end up isolating a single group that they believe is inferior. These people often hold adjacent beliefs that make the lives of other humans significantly harder, to say the least.

I have met a lot of people who support some form of eugenics that do not support "isolating a single group that they believe is inferior". I think that is unfair criticism unless you're only restricting eugenics to sterilizing a group based on a single characteristic.

This seems like a slippery slope argument, much like those who claimed gay marriage would inevitably lead to polygamy and thus should be banned for fear of making it easier to normalize polygamy in the future.

What? No one is being forced into gay marriage. And as long as they're consenting adults they can have whatever non traditional arrangements they want.

I'm having trouble understanding where this slippery slope is coming from. It's one thing if you were talking about assisted suicide, I can see the argument there, but eugenics is something that is forced upon the population. And no, having to watch two people of the same gender kiss on TV is not forced.

> And as long as they're consenting adults they can have whatever non traditional arrangements they want.

An extremely large proportion of the US population would not agree with this if you include polygamy in "whatever non traditional arrangements they want".

Why? Are they being forced to marry the polygamists?

Considering I'm not presently a US citizen you probably shouldn't be asking me.

> Drugs, hypnosis/mesmerism, meditation, trance, new religious movements, weird fasting regimens, transcendental experiences in nature, mysticism. That stuff has disappeared from public discourse today, along with many other radical ideas that could apparently just be talked about over coffee back then, without anyone batting an eyelash.

It's all over the place on social media. What gives you the sense that is has disappeared?

What's on social media is memes vaguely referencing that stuff, and cranks congratulating each other for doing it, usually in a "New Age" type context.

That's a far cry from the scientific, serious, mainstream approach that was common for those topics 120 years ago.

This feels like romanticizing the past. There are plenty of people today writing articles that claim to be taking a “scientific, serious approach” to, say, astral projection and people who will casually discuss such topics over coffee.

I may be romanticizing the past, but I have been interested in hypnosis and trance phenomena for 20 years, studied with teachers, got certified, practiced for some time with clients, and have, I may say, a good deal of experience in the field.

The practitioners (i.e., not academics) back then (Milton Erickson, Dave Elman, Henry Munro, and many others) were much more knowledgeable and interested in studying the phenomena they were investigating and applying than are today's practitioners, who seem instead much more interested in fooling people and making easy money than in advancing the discipline and making new breakthroughs.

I just pulled out of my library the book "Suggestive Therapeutics" by Munro, and it is, however naive in parts, a serious and passionate investigation of hypnotic phenomena. It is evident, even just by reading the text, that these were serious people who thought they could make a huge difference in the lives of others.

Can we say the same about today's practitioners?

Julia Mossbridge

> What's on social media is memes vaguely referencing that stuff, and cranks congratulating each other for doing it, usually in a "New Age" type context.

This just sound like you need to follow better social media circles. There's a bourgeoning scene around people such as Gwern, Nick Cammarata, Aella with a lot of high-quality discourse on the topics you mention.

Where was medicine, 120 years ago?

Do you have a link to a (not reddit, facebook, twitter or discord) forum where such subjects are seriously discussed?

Just came back from Rishikesh this week. That city is overloaded with meditation, drugs, mysticism and gives me fair perspective of whats happening with these phenomenons.

As these concepts became popular in the west past few years, they became very commercialized. For eg. Yoga was always about mindfulness, it became more about stretching and poses. All of these concepts metamorphised into something else. As the transition happened, the value got diluted. As it because diluted, it became taboo and sometime butt of jokes (for eg. Crazy yoga lady was thrown around quite often).

> That city is overloaded with meditation, drugs, mysticism

Overloaded with the pretense of it more likely, for the benefit of tourists who go there in search of a quick pseudo-mystical high.

> As these concepts became popular in the west past few years

That's a common misconception. Mysticism and related experiences actually have a history in Western culture going back thousands of years. In the Middle Ages, it was completely normal and in fact encouraged for young people to seek unity with God through direct mystical interaction, and the many mystical writings from that time (most of them authored by ordinary monks/nuns and priests) are a testament to that.

I recommend the 1915 book Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill as an example of what modern Western mysticism can look like. It's available on Standard Ebooks in a high-quality, free edition[1]. The author, who wrote during WWI, considers mysticism a natural part of everyday life, without ever feeling the need to reference "The East" or other New Age tropes.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/evelyn-underhill/practical...

I suspect that the dopamine feed of modern media and internet has left people without so many quiet moments in which they could practice contemplation.

Thank you.

Can you recommend some good places in Rishikesh to experience all this?

> The sheer breadth of ideas that were being casually discussed in magazines that regular, educated people subscribed to is astonishing.

I am more astonished with the banality and closed-mindedness of the society I live in.

I am not a big Marshall McLuhan fan but this is what is meant by the medium is the message.

You are not going to have the same discussion in print that you have electronically and on social media. It doesn't matter what the subject is.

"Public discourse" really doesn't even mean the same thing to compare today with a 100 years ago.

A 100 years ago the person batting an eyelash would have simply not bothered to consume the media.

You also can't forget that we were a deeply religious society a 100 years ago and all those subjects listed had the appeal of forbidden fruit. That might even be a bigger change than the medium.

As other have pointed out, this stuff is massive still! Nootropics, keto, mindfulness, microdosing, juicing, crystal healing, the list grows endlessly.

But it’s interesting to note how these practices have evolved to meet new cultural circumstances. It feels like more of it is motivated by goals of productivity and status on one side, and distrust of authority on the other, new age, side.

It’s all still absolutely mainstream and in public discourse. But of course, it’s changed. We shouldn’t expect cultural practices to not have evolved since the turn of the 20th century. After all, the culture has changed a LOT since then. These cultural practices exist to meet the needs of people and communities. Those needs change, the practices will change with them.

Meditation is not taboo in a lot of societies.

Then why is there no serious discussion about it to be found anywhere? All I see is bland self-help books and an occasional vague article in a psych journal.

Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult? Where are the online forums where people discuss their experiences that aren't overrun with New Age cranks? Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?

I'd say the absence of those indicates that there is in fact an implicit taboo attached to practicing meditation for the sake of meditation itself.

There's Daniel Ingram's stuff, I liked his book and there's a forum at https://www.dharmaoverground.org/ , haven't checked out how cranky it is.

Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated is detailed, non-mystical and seems to have a solid following with an active /r/TheMindIlluminated subreddit. /r/streamentry subreddit seems to also be pretty focused.

Rob Burbea and Shinzen Young have also written a bunch of non-vague, non-mystical stuff and seem to be well regarded.

> Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult? Where are the online forums where people discuss their experiences that aren't overrun with New Age cranks? Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?

Why is it a taboo unless you totally secularise it? I’m not following. Meditation comes from a religious context, and I don’t see why it’s a taboo just because that context remains

Further, the secular mindfulness and meditation movements are huge, and there are many serious secular oriented meditation books (TMI, MCTB, etc. tho I’m not personally a fan of them)

> Meditation comes from a religious context

I have seen no evidence of this. Many religious practices involve meditation. But they also commonly involve song; it doesn’t follow that singing comes from a religious context.

https://positivepsychology.com/history-of-meditation/

> The earliest written records of meditation come from the Hindu Vedas around 1500 BCE (Sharma, 2015). The Torah also contains a description of the patriarch Isaac going to “lasuach” in a field, a kind of Jewish meditation most likely practiced around 1000 BCE (Kaplan, 1985).

> I have seen no evidence of this.

That doesn't imply no evidence. In fact, there is tons of evidence that meditation originated from a religious context. It is not even controversial.

I'm not sure that singing is really that separated from religious context. You'd have a hard time becoming a classically trained singer without singing a lot of classical Christian music. You wouldn't get far in Blues or Bluegrass without being exposed to traditional spirituals.

I have never encountered a form of meditation that wasn’t heavily inspired by a religious context, most often Vedic traditions or Buddhism. Can you give an example of a historically completely secular form of meditation?

Our earliest written records mention meditation within religious contexts. Both predate history. All modern organised practices of meditation derive from religious sources, but organised practices of meditation is a subset of meditation—mindfully training attention and awareness to achieve “a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state” [1]. (Seen another way: almost all our historical sources about medicine mention it in a religious context. That doesn’t mean medicine comes from religion.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation

This contradicts your singing example, since not all singing derives from religious sources, so why bring it up? You are making the same point as me right now: all modern meditation comes from religious sources

> not all singing derives from religious sources

If you look for the oldest written songs, they’re invariably religious. The evidence used to establish meditation as religiously derived is sufficient to prove the same for song.

In fact, with the evidence at hand, I could just as easily argue that all religion derives from meditation. Secularly speaking, that is a simpler hypothesis than the inverse.

> all modern meditation comes from religious sources

I said modern organised practices of meditation come from religious sources. That caveat is as big as the difference between organised religion and sprituality, generally.

> Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult

Do we need a let me Google Scholar that for you? Meditation is intensely researched by serious people not beholden to pseudoscience.

There are a ton of things out there which contradict what you said. Some samples:

Here is a hospital promoting meditation:

https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/mental-...

Journal on mindfulness:

https://www.springer.com/journal/12671

Meditation research group Harvard:

https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/index.html

Also: consciousness is the core part (equivalent to God) of Hinduism (where a lot of Eastern meditative traditions originate from) and hence it is intertwined with religion.

With practice one is able to carve out a stable pleasant mind mind set that is like an art work, a sculpture, a statue, a bit of music or just like a song, only it is constructed out of a carefully measured mix of moods and emotions. It is like a place you can visit just by thinking of it. We (quite hilariously) only know a flavor of this called being in the zone. (from repeatedly doing a thing and cultivating the mind set along with it) Our culture is about productivity after all, its quite suitable. A weird cult worshiping banks and corporations. Money is like a voodoo doll, you can have other believers do almost anything for it. I wouldn't even know where to begin taking care of myself. ha-ha

I don't think there's any taboo on meditation, and it's not associated with any religion or cult. Your doctor most likely would tell you to go ahead, it can't hurt, it has research behind it, and lots of his/her patients do it.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/meditation/about...

I've been drawing together a bunch of HN readers interested in this stuff for several years, and have a new discussion group coming together now.

Email me if interested (address in profile).

I think you missed mindfulness - it's being integrated into a lot of psychological therapies (DBT, MCBT). It's strongly based on meditation, if not meditation repackaged.

> Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?

I really like the website/app called Waking Up by Sam Harris, I think it fits your description.

I don't think "Buddha nature" is a supernatural belief, but Sam Harris certainly subscribes to (some of) Dzogchen Buddhism. If his site doesn't mention it he's just worded differently.

You must live in quite a conservative society if you’ve seen those things made taboo. In my country they are absolutely part of the public discourse

A bit off topic, but if you are into this kind of literature i can really recomend Sigmund Freud.

"Die Traumdeutung" (Interpretation of dreams) is one of the best books I've read. Its really philosophical masterpiece. I mean the ~500 site book, not the small one.

> expanding or altering human consciousness

I'm quite averse to that because I believe that myself and significant portion of other people tread a very fine line on the edge of sanity and I wouldn't want to risk anything that might tip us over the edge.

Drugs are a revelation we're not ready for.

Old favorite: https://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1

That is incredible

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