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roche  1d ago (text post)   370 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.

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