Comment by SlowTao

8 months ago

Ram Dass said that back in the 1960's when they were doing study of LSD they would try to randomize/double blind these tests but it was very funny to see. There were one where they had clergy involved and it basically went, one person would be like "I think it is doing something" and another would be wandering around going "I SEE GOD! I SEE GOD!". It was obvious who had what.

19 comments

SlowTao

Reply
harry8  8 months ago

Cartoon about that which made me laugh.

https://www.altaonline.com/culture/cartoons/a42179654/weekly...

so hard to track these things down with google nowadays. Treats every word you add as an "or" like yahoo used to when google took their search market. The move from search engine to suggestion engine has been a disaster from my point of view. Hard to see how it would be more profitable.

edit: better link

  • sznio  8 months ago

    >Hard to see how it would be more profitable

    Queries use less compute time to complete, saving money. Why provide quality if there's no competitor for users to escape to?

    • 1oooqooq  8 months ago

      it's even worse. revenue per query is up if they can search more keywords for advertisements to display. their lists aren't as comprehensive as before.

echelon_musk  8 months ago

> “I took five people and we locked ourselves in a building for three weeks and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day.… We finally were just drinking out of the bottle.… We were very high. What happened in those three weeks in that house, no one would ever believe, including us. And at the end of the three weeks, we walked out of the house and within a few days, we came down! It was a very frustrating experience, as if you came into the kingdom of heaven and you saw how it all was…and then you got cast out again.”

Ram Dass and his retelling of this experience contributed to my shift from psychedelics to established spiritual traditions. They had the territory mapped out thousands of years ago. Ram Dass ultimately settled as a Hindu where as I find myself drawn to Buddhism. Anatta maps nicely to experiences of ego death and I find that I can see all drugs as part of the conditioned world. If you rely on a physical substance of the conditioned world for access to the divine then you're not free yet.

  • jobs_throwaway  8 months ago

    > What happened in those three weeks in that house, no one would ever believe, including us.

    I've often wondered what happened here

  • kgwxd  8 months ago

    If the goal is death, what's the point of living? shouldn't we be doing something completely different here than trying to find a way back? if we're going to end up back there no matter what, it seems a waste of life to spend it on that.

    • carlosjobim  8 months ago

      The goal is ego death, to let your day-to-day machine mind die and be reborn as yourself without having to physically die. Keeping your soul, subconsciousness and your experience, while shedding the crust and rust that we accumulate over the years.

      Now you know what born again Christians are all about.

    • haswell  8 months ago

      The goal is not death. The comment mentioned ego death which is something else entirely.

      At the risk of trivializing something that must be experienced not explained, the realization of no-self (ego death) is one of the most liberating things one can experience.

      It’s the realization that the feeling of “I” is just another feeling that arises in the same space as all other feelings, and that this feeling is ultimately greatly constraining/limiting. It’s the realization that what we are is far more expansive than most people realize without such exploration of self and no-self. It’s liberation from the illusion that is our default state.

      > what's the point of living?

      For me, experiencing it is what makes life worth living.

      The best way I can describe this is that it was the gradual dissolution of certain ideas I had about what it means to be me. This dissolution wasn’t just experiential - it was also the result of rational interrogation of various beliefs I had about myself.

      To put this another way, it was the sum total of a series of realizations about what it can’t mean to be me.

      - It feels like “I” is at the “center” of me, but biologically and neurologically, there is no discernible center

      - It feels like “I” am my thoughts and feelings, but who then is aware of these thoughts and feelings?

      - It feels like “I” am looking out at the world through the windows of my eyes, “I” am in the inside, and the world is on the outside. Except this relies on the unexamined belief that there’s some kind of homunculus inside my head doing the seeing. Instead, there’s just seeing.

      And a list of related realizations too long to enumerate without making this comment longer than it already is.

      The end result that people often refer to as ego death is the opposite of a waste in my experience. A life without breaking down these illusions is a life of servitude to our evolutionary defaults. A life lost in thought is a life that hasn’t experienced some of the most awe inspiring states of consciousness on offer.

      As a skeptic, I spent the first 35 years of my life lost in my thoughts and feelings, and unaware that I could experience life any other way, and frankly uninterested in such ideas.

      Life circumstances gave me a taste of what ego death entails, at which point I realized how completely oblivious I’d been and how deep my misconceptions about people who talked about such things were.

      This comment is a stream of thought and not sufficient to communicate what ego death entails, but it is certainly not the scary/bad thing I had once believed, and is one of the most meaningful/helpful experiences of my life and has made life much richer.

      Anything but a waste.

      3 replies →

hellotheretoday  8 months ago

This was part of this difficulty in clinical trials for mdma iirc. Both researchers and participants were fairly reliably able to discern placebo, among some other issues