Comment by buildsjets | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buildsjets | Hacker News Reader

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It is TOTALLY psuedo-scientific new agey talk. That doesn't necessarily negate it's validity. What determines it's it's validity is whether it is a testable and repeatable method to accomplish a result, and whether it can be learned, then communicated / taught to others.

Aleister Crowley said in Magick in Theory and Practice:

"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them."

So, have you studied and received training and tried your own personal practice in pushing up your cerebrospinal fluid / manipulating your kundalini energy / grounding your root chakra / whatever new-agey terms your chosen method uses? Or are you dismissing the validity of these methods without firsthand experimentation because of how other people in your society have trained you think and because you do not like the terminology that they use?

Assuming that this suggestion of “pushing up” CSF is possible, if taken literally, it would increase intracranial pressure (ICP). The normal ICP range is around 7-15 mmHg, and pressures outside this range can reduce cerebral perfusion, with increases potentially causing cerebral ischemia and brain herniation. Therefore, maintaining normal ICP is crucial for brain health. Let’s assume this supposed technique alters ICP minimally enough to stay within the normal range. I am not aware of any evidence suggesting that ICP at the higher end of normal (or anywhere within normal) is associated with health benefits.

There's a record of people reaching altered states of consciousness for millenia. However besides drugs the methods aren't widely known or recognised by the scientific community.

So by definition anything that produces an effect not readily accepted by 'science' is pseudo-science. It doesn't make it wrong it just means consensus hasn't caught up with it.

Maybe it's CSF that's pushed up the spine, maybe it's energy. But multiple traditions practice some form of moving awareness up the spine combined with gentle physical contraction as a primary means of creating the conditions for entering mystical states. Those same traditions describe how this method energises the endocrine system. Furthermore the effects of doing this are now documented in scientific papers (search pubmed for kundalini).

None of this negates the validity of the methods. They require firsthand experience for any real benefit, and more study to understand the exact processes at work.

I agree that that by itself, even when it's anatomically incorrect, that doesn't negate it's validity to produce effects and I like Crowley's quote.

I don't consider Joe Dispenza a good and experienced meditation teacher, and I don't consider serious his use of pseudoscientific explanations. Still, what he says may be helpful for some people, but I believe that there are much better meditation teachers.

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