Hacker News Reader

> the vast majority of people also have chakra type experiences within the first few days of taking up meditation in a retreat setting

and here I sat several retreats with dagger-like pain in the knees, wandering mind, and a deep desire to somehow exit stage left unnoticed.

Meanwhile I guess everyone else was blowing open the dharma gates. Possible, but if everyone progressed as quickly in the retreat experience as you're implying, we'd soon have an enormous number of teachers (whereas the reality is that a teacher is a rarity and a student is one of the vast majority).

As for hallucinogens, they certainly provide immediate, and sometimes unwanted, entry into non-self/non-body, but as a way of life, not so sure. If you look at the great mystics of past and present, you'd be hard pressed to find one that depended on external stimuli.

Saying that, I take a journey into the woods a couple of times per year, life is short.

"If you look at the great mystics of past and present, you'd be hard pressed to find one that depended on external stimuli."

A good (albeit possibly apocryphal) example would be Jesus. His epithet was 'the anointed one', because he regularly covered his body in an oil that contained enormous amounts of cannabis, among other psychoactive ingredients. (At least a according to several linguists.)

"and here I sat several retreats with dagger-like pain in the knees, wandering mind, and a deep desire to somehow exit stage left unnoticed."

You're not going to have a mystical experience from meditation as a beginner, but it's pretty typical to start experiencing various energy phenomena after a few days. It depends what kind of meditation you're doing though.

re: Jesus and annointing himself with cannabis, I'll stand by the historically great mystics (Jesus,Buddha,...many others,Ramana Maharshi,Krishnamurti,etc.) not _needing_ anything to alter or enhance what is.

re: stages of meditation, sure, energetic experiences will come soon after starting a retreat, but in my experience, while interesting events will happen, there was a certain grind to a 5, 7, or 10 day retreat that left me feeling more bored out/raw than realized.

Don't do retreats anymore, drawn fully back into the world, for better or worse, not sure ;-)

Isn't Buddha normally depicted as being surrounded by datura flowers on his death bed? They might not have needed these things on any given day, but given that it's a path, you might need various tools from time to time to get around obstacles blocking the way. You might only use a substance once or twice in your life, but if not for that you might never have advanced any further.

If we take the sutras attributed to the Buddha as coming from one being, it would be laughable to think that this utter non-person would require anything to alter an already complete experience.

Repeating myself, but the same goes for the great mystics past & present. As to what they did prior to awakening, perhaps some did take hallucinogens, but given that none of the extant teachings suggest ingesting external substances, we can conclude that hallucinogens are non-essential to awakening.

In the west, where materialism reigns, many of us grow up spiritually bankrupt and turn to strong experience (hallucinogenic intake in my case) as a means to fill the void. Provides a much needed break from technology and rational thinking, but not convinced that this does much more than spin the wheels in place.

I think the number of teachers is much more affected by demand than supply. You can't be a teacher unless people want to pay attention to you. I had an experience that blew those gates clear off their hinges, and into the nearest ocean. But I'm not teaching, and nobody's asking. My best friend was vaguely interested for one conversation over coffee, while we were sitting around waiting for something else. Everyone other than her was far less interested than that. How many people express that they're looking for more? How many act like they know just who they are and what they're doing? The world only has attention for a relative few dalai lamas or Eckhart Tolles.

Interesting, an old friend, whom I, and a couple of established Zen teachers (Rinzai and Soto) view as hugely awakened, sat a single weekend retreat, which he left due to aforementioned pain in the knees.

Apparently he tooks loads of LSD in his late teens, enough to drop out of college, literally grab a blanket and head into the woods for 6 months (verified by mutual friends).

That's a pretty "old" school approach ;-)

In the couple of years that I knew him he routinely blew my mind with in-the-moment koans.

FWIW, a brilliant mathematician and programmer who gave up silicon valley money for a non-thinking form of employment so he could more fully contemplate the magnitude of death.

OK, sure.

"...I am dubious about the actual epistemic value of the psychedelic experience; my interest, like William James, is in what I can learn from the experience about myself and religion."

If the mystical trip is what one is shooting for 10ug doses from blotter paper purchased from silk road in one's living room is just going to give you indigestion at best. If the author is serious about exploring this experience, I recommend to the author to step outside of his comfort zone and read as much as he can about what the psycohnauts (e.g. shulgin, mckenna, RAW, leary, watts, huxley, lilly) say (w.r.t. dosages, set, setting, _tools not toys!!!_, etc.) and then experiment with larger doses. Your life probably will change profoundly, for better or worse, but there is no going back. This discussion gives a glimpse into the material: < http://deoxy.org/t_weeke1.htm >.

"And this brings us to one of the issues around psychedelics. There are a lot of wannabe experts running around who didn't take enough, because you have to take a lot -- not a LOT -- but you have to take a frightening amount to get into what it's really about. People who have taken, you know, 50 gamma of LSD or 100 gamma of LSD or two grams of mushrooms or something like that, they are not qualified to hold forth on the nature of the psychedelic experience, because those doses don't deliver it to you. What they deliver is the periphery of the psychedelic experience: accelerated thought processes, a kind of depth and richness to cognition that is unfamiliar, an ability to analyze situations from unusual perspectives, or to reach unexpected conclusions."

If you don't want to go the drug route, I've had profound mystical experiences sober with flotation tanks and kundalini yoga.

EDIT: I should also mention that I've had out of body experiences with light and sound machines (i.e. < http://www.toolsforwellness.com/light-sound-machines.html >), but I'm hesitant to recommend these as they're newer and I suspect less researched (more fringe). Alternatively, ecstatic dance is a fun sober way to reach states of ecstasy, and there's lots of it in Silicon Valley!

> If the mystical trip is what one is shooting for 10ug doses from blotter paper purchased from silk road in one's living room is just going to give you indigestion at best.

Most people do not claim even indigestion from microdosing. And I agree that one would not expect 10mcg to do anything, which is why I discussed it in the terms of trips and bought 2 tabs rather than just 1.

> If the author is serious about exploring this experience, I recommend to the author to step outside of his comfort zone and read as much as he can about what the psycohnauts (e.g. shulgin, mckenna, RAW, leary, watts, huxley, lilly) say (w.r.t. dosages, set, setting, _tools not toys!!!_, etc.) and then experiment with larger doses

What makes you think I have not read a substantial amount of material from those authors?

@Gwern I just wanted to point out that I did actually like the essay as a whole, even though it doesn't necessary come off that way when I'm only pointing out the few parts I disagree with!

There is literally no known phenomena which you couldn't explain away with some as yet undiscovered materialist phenomena.

Many people (including me) believe that consciousness can't be explained with physics.

Do you believe it could be explained eventually by future discoveries utilizing the scientific method?

This is, by the way, the major weakness with Physicalism as an ontology; the scientific method is a great methodology, but it would be foolish to say "the only things that exist are those described by science" since science is, by its very nature, incomplete and continually evolving. One could say, of course, that the only things that exist are those described by some future perfect physics, but this claim is kind of circular/meaningless.

This issue is known as Hempel's dilemma: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel's_dilemma

Physics can't even describe consciousness, let alone explain it. It's impossible to describe consciousness without refering to subjective experience.

I am in the same boat, although I don't know if in the future someone can explain consciousness in a better way.

Downvoter: I see you disagree - how would you define consciousness without refering to subjectve experience?

"Many people (including me) believe that consciousness can't be explained with physics."

Yeah, I was trying to make the point that materialism isn't falsifiable, though this may not have been clear.

Sorry, I missed that :)