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roche  16hr ago (text post)   275 thread views

Looking for open-minded people interested in meditation, drugs, dreaming, consciousness, and so on.

This thread may be unpopular; so be it. If I reach a single person, that is enough.

Seven years ago, I discovered my life's purpose -- but didn't realize it at the time. I had discovered Buddhism, and this notion that one could attain perfect happiness without a single material possession instantly lifted up my spirit from the depths it had remained in since childhood, since I had learned of death, and had heard those stories of children who become orphans from a plane crash, knowing that the only thing separating us from them is a stroke of luck. And that chasing any happiness in this world is to embrace a dice roll with a good probability of immense suffering. You can call it silly, but to single-digit-age me, consigning yourself to fate like this was more or less insane, and that was only confirmed by the large quantity of childhood suffering outside of my control. So from there I ducked out of (most) socializing to learn everything I could, unconsciously in response to this issue.

When I discovered Buddhism, I was truly elated for the first time in years, to this doctrine promising everything that I had desired. But as I dug deeper, I encountered problems with this scripture, and meditation and so on that could only build to one conclusion: Enlightenment is not real. The pieces building up to this conclusion are too numerous to list, but essentially there is little evidence to believe in a state of enlightenment qua profound transformation of your moment-to-moment experience where the problem of change is solved. What does happen though is a non-dualist revelation analogous to the mystic experiences of all religions. In fact, for the Hindus and Jains it was this experience that led to liberation in the next life. Nothing came afterward. Now consider that yoga and meditation were practiced in India for a solid millennium before Buddhism, and if such a state existed the Hindus and Jains would have surely noted it. So this revelation is quite achievable, but it is functionally the end of the mystic path. There is almost no evidence to suggest otherwise.

Now, why am I writing this post...? Because I can't accept that outcome. I refuse to believe it simply ends there, and we have a healthy amount of evidence that is largely ignored which gives us reason to be skeptics. Here's a brief list:

  • Meditative jhanas exist, and they are (allegedly) the most pleasant sensation a human can experience, they can be sustained for hours, and demand very little energy. These show up on brain scans.
  • You can take drugs in a lucid dream, and this produces the effects of the drug (for the majority). What's more, if you imagine a drug you've never tried, it will match whatever you expect to occur.
  • The human body functions remarkably well on drugs, or in other altered states of consciousness.
  • LSD has been observed to produce virtually any symptoms imaginable, or even no symptoms at all.
  • LSD-like effects may be obtained easily through hyperventilation, at no cost to oneself (save a little energy).
  • I have myself replicated some effects of alcohol and cough syrup through meditation.
  • Predictive processing is a fact at this point; we humans play an active role in constructing our perceptions.
  • Meditation has effects on the parasympathetic nervous system we did not know were possible until recently. Wim Hoff and Tummo do as well.

Hence the following conclusion:

  • There is little reason to believe in the "No free lunch" theory of human happiness, that is to say, that our good must be obtained at some expense.

You can take a very, very tentative stance that our body's homeostasis lends itself to survival by default, but that perhaps by some mysterious process this homeostasis may be changed, and so effects that are normally won through bitter exertion are now had easily.

I am aware this is fringe -- probably too fringe for here, honestly. But be aware you are my best shot. The Buddhists are too dogmatic, the dreamers are too "spiritual". There is clearly something worth investigating here, but apparently nobody is doing so. My tag is crashestoearth on discord, but I'm responsive here as well. Add me if you're curious, and skeptics too please chime in. If you are a Buddhist dogmatist though I'm not interested. Thanks for reading.

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I don't suppose I could interest you in psychoanalysis? This would be a "skeptical" position by your standards, but, hopefully it's a type of skepticism that may provide some illumination:

In what, then, consists the gap that separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism? At least, Lacanian psychoanalysis.

In order to answer this question, we should confront what I think is the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blind spot. Ok, maybe some of you are more intelligent, but I was talking with many Buddhists, and all of them, I'm asking them this same question. I didn't yet get a good answer. The simple question is the following one: how did the fall into samsara, the wheel of life, occur? That is to say, the question that we should raise is the exact opposite of the main Buddhist concern; "how can we break out of the wheel of life, this wheel of false passions and so on, and attain Nirvana"? The question is exactly the opposite for me... it's not, "we are caught in this false reality, can we break out of it and attain the void"? The question is, how did we fall into it in the first place? [...] The nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerged out of the void, is the big unknown at the heart of the Buddhist edifice. [...]

This question points towards an act that, precisely in the quantum sense maybe, breaks the symmetry of Nirvana itself, and thus makes appear something out of nothing. Freud's answer for this is precisely "drive", trieb [the death drive]. I want to be here very precise. What Freud calls drive, trieb, is not the Buddhist wheel of life. [...] The point of Freud is not, "no we cannot get out, we are forever caught in the wheel of craving which makes us nonsatisfied". Drive on the contrary is a kind of Freudian eppur si muove. The Freudian ontological wager is that even when you traverse the fantasy, go through the illusions and so on, you are not in Nirvana. Something still moves. [...]

...Drive is a persistence which goes on even when the will disappears or is suspended. I think it's wrong, phenomenologically, to read Freud's todestrieb as another expression of "will". Todestrieb is precisely something which remains even when you suspend the will. [...] Again the question that interests me in Buddhism is, to put it in popular culture terms, the question that unfortunately Star Wars fails to answer: how did evil emerge? How did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? And the film fails there of course, miserably. But there is one useful notion that you find there: this idea of a disturbance in the Force. The idea is, to put it in Buddhist terms - and there are some mysterious passages in Tibetan Buddhist stuff that point in this direction - it's not simply that we have Nirvana, and then samsara, the field of false passions and appearances. Something can go terribly wrong already at the level of Nirvana itself, up there. There is something wrong up there, some pathological disturbance, which is not yet "we are caught in desire and false craving", and that would be "drive", I think. Drive is Nirvana, spiritual enlightenment, going wrong.

This strain of analysis is limited, because one pillar of the Indian perspective we struggle to understand is the jewel analogy, the kaleidoscopic view of the capital-t Truth where it changes depending on where we stand, hence Kathenotheism, hence Syadvada. Hence Samsara as being an arrow that soars out of oblivion and lands in your rib. It doesn't matter where the arrow came from; it's a problem and it needs to go. Unfortunately, I don't see much in your quote. To me it seems like a rehashed and watered-down Schopenhauer's Will.

Zizek explicitly distinguishes the death drive from Schopenhauer’s concept of Will:

Drive is a persistence which goes on even when the will disappears or is suspended.

The death drive is the point where the subject contradicts and undermines himself; it belongs to the domain of the unconscious. It is what makes a final state of completion or satisfaction (even in the purely negative sense of being free from desire) impossible. It certainly has nothing to do with any conscious willing or desire.

I didn’t quote the part where he references Schopenhauer by name, but if you check the video, he does mention him.

@TowardsPanna is the right guy for this as he's a more experienced meditation practitioner than I am.

With regards to enlightenment, there are various paths in various traditions. I am not on the Buddhist track that many follow and I can't comment on the ideas about enlightenment properly though I will come back to this after a few days.

I have been meditating on and off for two years and nothing comes close to the equanimity I feel once I practice. It may be true that how you say people perceive enlightenment may not exist as we think it does but the benefits of meditation are profound, way stronger than any intoxicant I've tried and I've tried some.

Also jains and Hindus aren't the same. Buddhist meditation practices and the good Hindu ones come from the himalayas where you had intermingling of traditions, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Tibet being places where bulk of what we do indirectly has roots to. Ultimately I don't care about enlightenment as much, not because kashmir shaivism the school I'm a part of via tantra illuminated doesn't talk about it but because even getting closer to it than where I'm at would be life changing in the most literal sense.

There are people I've spoken to who are probably in a similar boat as you, but they can't recommend this stuff enough for the same reason. I'd definitely like to hear more, but for any theory, @TowardsPanna is the guy. I just paid 10 dollars for a three-month membership for Tantra Illuminated, so I was surprised to see this here. Happy coincidence.

edit - another happy coincidence, I saw this video of Shinzen Young describing the benefits of long-term meditation

Sure, there are benefits to meditation both in the moment and long-term. But there's a massive discrepancy between what is being promised, and what is actually happening for long-term practitioners. People go in expecting something like Krishnamurti's natural state, where the qualitative nature of moment-to-moment experience and behavior is permanently changed, but all you really get is a mild feeling of equanimity and non-dualism -- though you can reach immensely powerful states during meditation and shortly after. There is an obvious mismatch between what manifests and the type of thing promised in the suttas. And yet, our meditation is entirely a reconstruction from the ancient texts; one that emphasizes vipassana while the ancients emphasized samadhi.

It is tragic that meditation is so closely tied to a religion, because this means effectively one side of the population will not take it seriously, while the other half embraces it like pure magic. And this extends to our scientists. Someone who's done his reading knows the almost cartoonish way our scientists flip on a dime when shown a few good proofs of eastern medicine. When the Greeks found their high arts among the Egyptian priests, they saw to separating the mystical from the material. It is a third position that is exceedingly hard to come by now.

Why is it tragic? Religion is fundamental to human existence, and even Christians have a school of contemplative practise. Though the Himalayas had the best schools for it. I dont want that side to do it then. If chanting a mantra for lord shiva is such a pain then people are best suited to the Sam Harris School of meditation which is not far off from Hustlers University in terms of rigor when compared to real schools.

No one I know started with the explicit goal to achieve enlightenment of the kind Shinzen Young had and it took him decades to get there. This is not me being rude, I am a noob at life but do you not think that the only correct answer for this for your own perspective can only come once you spend 5-10 years of following a proper path? You may have in which case I have nothing to add.

There is no mismatch, there has never been any mismatch and the people I know who do meditate never think about enlightenment as a goal. Might be because we are all beginners compared to someone like Hareesh Wallis. I have crippling ADHD, extreme issues not just from my lifestyle, life choices but also at a neurological level. I find profound benefits in this and was recommended to meditate even by my therapist in my psychiatrist's office.

You can meditate to be more grounded on a moment-to-moment basis. That, to me, is liberating, and anyone who sticks with it can give a decent answer for it. Enlightenment likely is real, but I can only know if I sit daily for an hour or more for decades on end. I purposefully dont read about it, I want to just sit and do whats needed, I can only experience things once I do that, anything else and I am ensuring that I dont get there.

Until recently it was also natural that infant mortality rates were 30% to 50% during childbirth, and that a single cut from a rock may prove fatal. Natural too, then, is the fact that this mystical path really ends in no profound change, and this is owed not to the weakness of our methods, but the poor karma of most practitioners. So the Buddha is said to have stored countless lifetimes of accumulated good will, and that for any man to become awakened it is like digging through a mountain with a spoon. In the end it's all promises, and I've seen it too many times. Dig through the layer of promises and you hit the bottom.

I find profound benefits in this and was recommended to meditate even by my therapist in my psychiatrist's office.

Sure. Freedom from ADHD. Freedom from anxiety. These are all wonderful things. But it's not what was advertised.

There are many benefits, watch that video I linked, I can't state that you can't attain it without having put in the requisite time.

How long have you been pracitising for and how regular, what sect?

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