Ismene said:
But the one, the ONLY one, that works for me is psychedelics. The thing I don't like is you tend to get a lot of snotty Buddhists saying "Oh dude, psychedelics are only temporary, buddhism is like permanent brah". As if Buddhism and Hinduism are somehow "superior" to psychedelics. No they arn't - they're inferior. Vastly, vastly inferior.
It's definitely true that years of Buddhist practice can change the way your brain functions, but it's unclear to me that these changes are for the better unless you interpret them within the framework of Buddhist cosmology, suffering, enlightenment, blah, blah, blah. In fact, as seen by an outside observer with a different model of reality, they may simply be a way to isolate yourself from the bedrock of human experience and slowly drive yourself mad. What is there to respect here?
folding space: If your interpretation was all there was to what I was saying I respected, not much I guess. I don't have any evidence to suggest the way you indicate is how the particular individuals in the study did what they did or not. Somehow I doubt these particular meditators are of the "snotty" type that Ismene mentions who say "Oh dude, psychedelics are only temporary, buddhism is like permanent brah."
The study investigated long-term practitioners of ‘open monitoring meditation’, a meditation practice which in many ways is a form of metacognition: the objective is not to focus one’s attention but rather to use one’s brain to monitor mental experience without directing attention to any one task. In many ways this sort of activity strongly resembles what people value the psychedelic state for enabling: a sense of the free flow of thoughts and heightened self-awareness. The EEGs of long-term meditators exhibited much more gamma-synchrony than that of naive meditators (presumably these naive meditators are more likely to be the snotty type). Moreover, normally human brains produce only short bursts of gamma-synchrony. The long-term meditators were able to produce sustained gamma-activity in a manner that had never previously been observed in
any other human. Achieving subjective states that are novel, intriguing and expand achievement on the more uniquely human levels of our being such as self-awareness and meta cognition is what I'm into psychedelics for (unlike pushing the limits of physical strength/speed/stamina, an area in which other living beings far exceed us in prowess, yet that are popularly admired disproportionally to what I speak of [see sports figure worship]). These practitioners measurably achieved that by doing what has not been observed in any other humans. That's what I respect.
I also practice what I call random involuntary memory evocation while sober, and try to cultivate this ability in order to better understand and monitor subconscious processes and how they affect the way I think consciously. I do this in order to better understand and control my conscious thoughts and emotions, which are partially structured by involuntary memories. It sounds a lot like 'open monitoring meditation.' It's a mind state where I (ironically) voluntarily enter a state where I experience a high frequency of involuntary memories I've never experienced before that seem to be largely independent of each other (seem to belong to different semantic association groupings). According to
Involuntary Memory: Concept and Theory I naturally experience a far higher frequency of involuntary memories than normal, even when not attempting to. Here's why it's relevant to psychedelics: I didn't start experiencing them at this frequency, nor was I able to will myself into a state that made them more prevalent, until after using IM psilocin and ketamine in a semi-disciplined way for over a year.
I learned it beginning with the experience detailed in
the Erowid report of mine this quote describing the state is from:
From here I find myself ... hurled through various channels of my life’s experience with a speed exceeding some definite but unknown limit. But I never feel confined to just one channel. It’s as though I am looking into a single facet of a prism, with my immediate experience playing out in the largest and most central frame of the kaleidoscopic scene but with innumerable other experiences of my life felt flitting like flames around its edges. Everything is so present, so clear.
Like before, when the memory of falling and gripping the root on the island during a summer kayaking trip was followed subsequently by falling from my skis and into snow, the channels of my memories remain networked through associationistic nodes.
A string of prayer flags snapping in the wind over a Nepalese mountain expanse becomes psychedelically spliced into the cable line of a tramcar leading down from Rio de Janeiro’s Sugar Loaf peak. A tunnel maze beneath the floor at Chuck E. Cheese’s I crawled through during a childhood friend’s birthday party opens out into a blizzard-battered night framed by the mouth of a snow tunnel dug out at age nine along my parent’s street.
I travel between waking life memories and memories of dreams thought forgotten forever with equal facility. In this world constructed of life experiences and held together by associations, dreams bear loads as heavy as those from waking life.
I hope it's evident from the above how the phenomena described in this psychedelic experience is related to what I'm speaking of, even though these memories hold much stronger semantic associations with each other than to those involuntary memories I've described that the sober practice has since developed to evoke. So, as I've attempted to illustrate, I have spent a long time using psychedelics to train my mind to do something sober that seems very similar to what these meditators do with their practice, and they've also achieved something similar with meditation to what I desire to achieve with semi-focused use of psychedelics (achieving novel and intriguing subjective states -- I mean philosophically and psychologically intriguing on a more formal intellectual level, not just "intense" experiences. I've been at this shit for over 15 years and I've had plenty of the latter and not nearly so many of the former)). So that's a further more personal reason why I respect them, not because they "simply isolate themselves from the bedrock of human experience and slowly drive themselves mad."
