lsd like trip through meditation?

[The Hebrew Hammer]

I don't know about trips through meditation, but self-induced sober trips are definitely a reality. I am a certified hypnotist and have hypnotized quite a few people to experience a variety of drug experiences. I've been able to tell subjects that each time I snap my fingers it will be like taking a shot of liquor, and after a few snaps they will slur their words and stumble around like they're completely trashed. I've also been able to help friends on probation to recall their smoking experiences while under trance. I've even given post-hypnotic suggestions that they could bring back the stoned experience by simply rubbing their thumb and index finger together slowly. You can watch their eyes slowly become half closed and blood-shot, they also experience real cotton-mouth. I've done the same with tripping. While under trance I tell the subject to remember the best trip they ever experienced. Once they remember the experience I tell them to focus on the visuals and and physical sensations of the memory. Once they are at the peak of the experience I give them a trigger that they can use to bring back the experience at will. You can also trigger bliss states and orgasms through hypnosis. So my suggestion would be to study self-hypnosis if you are looking to induce a recreational experience. Meditation is about self-realization, not recreation....

I am curious about the setting in which you performed these events.

Were these people friends of yours? or clients?

Was this in a professional setting, or just chillin out at the house?

 

[demon66]

I have reached a headspace in deep meditation that was very much like a mushroom trip I had a couple years earlier.

However meditation and psychedelics do have certain different qualities.

 

[LacunaSamsara]

Haven't read the thread yet but I saw the title and it got me thinkin...

Totally theoretical at this point: Could meditating result in the release of DMT from the pineal gland?

Supposedly, after Sidharta Guatamo meditated for days, he was confronted by an army of demons controlled by the lord of desire. In a symbolic gesture he simply touched the ground causing an earthquake and defeated the army. Sounds pretty trippy to me.

Perhaps meditating tricks the body into thinking it is near death causing this to happen... I don't know but I'm sure as hell going to try and find out.

 

[Ismene]

No you can't have an LSD trip through meditation. There was a big load of bullshit back in the 70's when Ram Dass claimed he gave some monk a massive dose of LSD and the monk just sat there as if nothing had happened because "he was so used to the same state from meditation". As if you can just give someone 1000mics of acid for their first trip and they're going to just sit there calmly 8)

It was later revealed the monk had palmed the LSD and conned Ram Dass into seeing him as some kind of fucking superhero (a lot of these monks/holy men are adept at sleight of hand - it's an effective way of convincing some people of your "holy powers". If you took David Copperfield to some village in India he'd be worshipped as a God)

Psychedelics are their own path - trying to say mediation is the same thing is disrespectful to psychedelics. It's usually people who have some kind of anti-drug stick up their ass. "Psychedelics arn't as good as doing it naturally with Buddhism". I think psychedelics are far, far more spiritual than man-made ideas like Buddhism.

 

[Ismene]

Didn't McKenna once reference a monk that was supposed to be able to make his pineal squirt DMT through meditation?

The idea that the pineal gland contains DMT was just a theory Rick Strassman guessed at. There's no evidence that it's true.

And even if the pineal gland did contain tiny amounts of DMT the idea that it contains large amounts ready to squirt into the brain is sheer fantasy. Sounds good but I think it's an theory best consigned to the "absolute bollocks" category

 

[Solipsis]

No you can't have an LSD trip through meditation. There was a big load of bullshit back in the 70's when Ram Dass claimed he gave some monk a massive dose of LSD and the monk just sat there as if nothing had happened because "he was so used to the same state from meditation". As if you can just give someone 1000mics of acid for their first trip and they're going to just sit there calmly 8)

It was later revealed the monk had palmed the LSD and conned Ram Dass into seeing him as some kind of fucking superhero (a lot of these monks/holy men are adept at sleight of hand - it's an effective way of convincing some people of your "holy powers". If you took David Copperfield to some village in India he'd be worshipped as a God)

Psychedelics are their own path - trying to say mediation is the same thing is disrespectful to psychedelics. It's usually people who have some kind of anti-drug stick up their ass. "Psychedelics arn't as good as doing it naturally with Buddhism". I think psychedelics are far, far more spiritual than man-made ideas like Buddhism.

I totally disagree, and I hardly think I am anti-drugs! Not at all, I am very much for the responsible use of the wonderful things grown naturally or invented and synthesized.

You make it sound like Buddhism is like a religion composed of man-made ideas comparable to the 'revelations' of christianity of judaism, etc. That isn't necessarily untrue (it's possible to follow Buddhism as if it were something like that) but then you are totally forgetting that most 'church'-like instituted religions have lost a big part of connection with mysticism which is what this is really all about. In this thread there is the use of a couple Buddhist terms but I only think they are used to describe certain phenomena that are mystical in nature so that we can agree what effects we are talking about. I don't have the feeling we are saying this is just the way it is at all, what I am finding is that connections are discovered between what has been said by Buddhism for a very long time, and what many trippers and people who meditate are experiencing themselves without having previously heard about it! That is what blew my mind. First I experienced these mystical states and later I read about them. That is why I find such metaphysical perspectives most useful to describe these states. I wouldn't think of comparing it to science, but the power of science is the ability to predict outcomes. While none of this is empirical, phenomena described in Buddhism I have experienced myself and thought: WTF is that? For years. Then here and there some Buddhist terms and phenomena came along and I found them to be coherent albeit symbolic.
Like kundalini energy. It's not like I believe it or don't believe it, it's like there has never been a better description of a phenomenon that developed in my teenage years.

Zen Buddhism totally defies itself in the sense of being a structure on man-made ideas. The point is to just experience, which is what you do both on psychedelics as well as with meditation. In my personal experience it IS true that you pass similar stations with both which is not to say that either method is better fundamentally.

Let's consider the conscious experience of impulses that are happening with everyday life that we would call sensory impulses - so they originate outside and are experienced within, as is everything. Then also consider sensory experience on psychedelics. Then consider meditation sober, which is not sensory deprivation but extinguishing thought process complication. There are thoughts but there is no intentional association, only unintentional. You let intentions fade and also your will. In its place comes pure experience and a sense of freedom. Last, consider meditating on psychedelics.

I would only agree with you that achieving mystical experiences is highly catalysed by psychedelics, especially when allowing meditative states. You can go to these peaceful perfect places in your mind and enter a sort of centre of the storm much more easily with them, but because of the unstable nature of the catalysis such a state is much more easily disturbed. Which can be seen in MANY accounts of people falling almost involuntarily into trance states.

With meditation getting to such states is more a more stable process and I really don't care if you call it Buddhist or not, it's not just man-made theory. The stories and koans are tools but they are not the core, the core is just allowing your mind enough peace to achieve psychedelic states naturally.

If you are taking psychedelics and involving yourself in less than ideal set and settings you are actually making this whole process of spiritual liberation harder on yourself because you get even more entangled in the spontaneous ego-driven consequences of perceiving sensory information. Meta-programs or thought patterns run wild as well as natural pattern-recognition mechanisms of the mind. That is where the visuals come from and there can be amplified emotions and other things as we all know.

I think a major point is that during this process you need to break free from thinking in feedback loops, thinking in structures and circles that only consolidate the way you see yourself and reality. If you take psychedelics you can break through a lot of them but when you don't there are a whole lot of illusions and delusions coming your way at high pace, because the process is catalysed. If you are forcing this you can really get sidetracked and deeply mentally confused.
If you meditate you encounter each thought loop at a natural pace and can get past it without feeling a blowing power pushing in your back. That way you can integrate it much better and switch between mystical states and functioning in consensus reality progressively more easy. At some point you will lose the distinction between them and the states will be there in superposition. For a long time I thought the goal was a state of faraway bliss of everythingness and nothingness. Eventually I realized that is not the goal, the goal is to realize bliss just sitting here drinking a cup of tea. Peace is found not by escaping what and where you are but by embracing it and totally surrendering to it until there is nothing left holding on to either thing.

Just to be clear: I feel this is a revered place to be but I am not there. I have no illusion of being developed very far and I have lost a lot of my meditative skills if I ever had much. But I have seen glimpses, both naturally and artificially - and they have shown me similar ways and directions. Yeah I am a narcissist, what of it? But I don't mean to brag when I ask if you have ever tried the natural way ismene? If you have meditated hardcore for about a week or more and found little worth in it, then I feel you are more entitled to your opinion on the matter than if you are judging without personal experience, sorry.

For me it's a matter of personal experience that while these are beautiful experiences you can learn from, in a spiritual sense they are rather distractions. Intense euphoria can very well hold you back from coming into deep balance.

Sorry, but I think you are really looking at this the wrong way. It takes a long time to become good enough at meditation to experience effects that resemble those produced without effort by LSD but just because Ram Dass was cheating does not mean that the paths have many similarities! Anyway I heard another story about the same attempt of making a monk trip, which I found quite believable: the monk had a good trip but after that he said there was nothing he had not seen before sober. And that is something I can subscribe to myself. If I had meditated for 3 weeks instead of 1 I would have gone through even more seriously trippy shit than I already had.

I LOVE psychedelics, but you can say what you want - meditating your ass off for a ++ psychedelic experience is still qualitatively more natural-feeling to me than taking acid and getting a whopping +++. And not only that, it has stayed much longer with me as well. If you catapult yourself into nirvana with acid and return that was a temporary mystical state that to me is abstract to integrate. Going there very slowly just makes more sense and it's logical that it's more natural isn't it? It's not because drugs are bad mmmkay? It's just because your endogenous neurotransmitters are natural and psychedelics other than something like DMT are not natural in that respect.

I have spoken with many people about this in the time when I tripped a whole lot, and they were vague about it and just said something is not completely right with forcing such experiences. I always denied it, but I was missing the same subtle things you seem to be missing. The way I see does not mean I think psychedelics are deeply flawed and they are not 'the right way'. I think they are both great ways but given the choice which of the ways is more natural, stable and sustainable - then definitely meditation. Forget Buddhism, that is just one of the crutches to make oneself explainable in terms of the whole process. What useful terms does psychedelic science have? OEVs? CEVs? ++++ ? Wow. Those don't impress me at all as useful. So you need another metaphysics to approach this. Perennial philosophy, taoism, Buddhism and similar subjects hold keys to make more sense out of the whole picture. They are not true or false. They are useful in some discussions and not useful in others. I really think we are finding common ground with things like Buddhism here so it is useful. There is quality in the communication it allows, that is what matters. Don't get hung up on absolute truths, you'll drive yourself crazy.

Don't reject that dynamic aspect of shifting between metaphysics and dont make the mistake of equalling such things with religion. Religion is a derivative of these things, morals extracted from third-person revelations of these mystical processes. That sucks ass. You have to find out for yourself through deep experience and not listen to someone else making allegories that you take as prescription dogma.

 

[Choronzon333]

Here my belief. I know some spiritual healers and and some people trained in eastern spirituality who have meditated for a very long time and become very good at meditation.

I also know some in the neurofeedback, mind machine industry... I have used devices that are supposed to emulate closely if not copy meditative brainstates. I have also done lsd and other psychedelics. From my experience the two are quite differently. Also I have read reports of monks in tibet being given lsd. They said something to the effect of sort of like meditation but not as good.


My two cents is that while Psychedelics also promote certain experiences that are similar to meditative experiences, meditation is still quite different...

 

[zn13bt]

Psychedelics are their own path - trying to say mediation is the same thing is disrespectful to psychedelics. It's usually people who have some kind of anti-drug stick up their ass. "Psychedelics arn't as good as doing it naturally with Buddhism". I think psychedelics are far, far more spiritual than man-made ideas like Buddhism.

An interesting factoid about Buddhism in the US is that a lot of the first generation of teachers here in the 60's and 70's first got interested in Buddhism after having had profound experiences on LSD.

 

[_lily_]

Didn't McKenna once reference a monk that was supposed to be able to make his pineal squirt DMT through meditation?

Not sure if McKenna was referring to this (and McKenna tends to be a silly man), but there is a practice called khechari mudra, that involves touching the tip of your tongue to the uvula in the back of your throat, with some people going so far as to cut the tissue under their tongue to get more mobility. This is supposed to stimulate the pineal gland. I don't have much experience with this type of meditation practice, but if you combine the speculations of kundalini yoga with the speculations of Strassman, there you go.

On a more scientific note, they've studied the effects of long term meditation, and found that open presence/vipassana style practice reduced habituation. I'll dig up the article if I remember, but the short and sloppy version is that when you're presented with a new stimulus, there is a brief dropoff in your alpha waves called alpha blocking. When the stimulus is repeated several times, you stop alpha blocking (i.e. it doesn't register as a novel stimulus). This is called habituation, and certain experienced meditators don't exhibit it - so presumably they continue to awareness of the stimulus as if it were novel each time. This lack of habituation might be similar to the experience of seeing, say, a show, while on psychedelics and first becoming intricately aware of its color, shape, weight, detail, etc. before getting to the stage of thinking "oh yeah, that's a shoe".

 

[Psychodelirium]

IIRC the McKenna story was that he gave DMT to a tibetan buddhist monk and the monk said something like, "these are the lesser lights of the bardo; one does not go further and return."

 

[SKL]

Personally I don't meditate but my mom says she gets higher from meditating, and doesn't fuck with drugs anymore. I think she's pretty legit.

I think a real interesting enlightened state would involved not looking for trips or highs, though.

I'm generally highly suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment though.

Ram Dass had the parable of the man climbing hills and valleys, and at the highest point of each hill saying, Look how enlightened I am, and then descending again into a valley of ego.

A lot of these anecdotes go around.

My favorite is the monk who told Ram Dass that LSD is not for india, because they have their own avatars of God, but rather that LSD is the avatar of God in America, because America, a materalistic society, needed God in a material form.

 

[ControlDenied]

"My favorite is the monk who told Ram Dass that LSD is not for india, because they have their own avatars of God, but rather that LSD is the avatar of God in America, because America, a materalistic society, needed God in a material form. "

thats how ive always seen it too. its like they couldnt handle the natural god, so they could only "admit god" (in both "admitting it is real" and "let it in") in a pill form, basically. fucking pills, man. can get you into a bit of trouble

i think blessing the sacrament of lsd led me onto the dark path of opiate recover i am on now. but that is better, i suppose, than never "finding god" at all. not sure. better safe than sorry is what ill tell my KIDS anyway !!!

 

[SKL]

Related reading ...

All so-called spiritual experiences generated by taking "mind-changing" drugs such as LSD, mescaline and psilocybin are superficial and add enormously to one's addiction to the deceptions of illusion which is but the shadow of Reality.

No drug, whatever its great promise, can help one to attain the spiritual goal. There is no short-cut to the goal except through the grace of the Perfect Master*, and drugs, LSD more than others, give only a semblance of "spiritual experience," a glimpse of a false Reality. [*The Perfect Master is the God-realized being who has completed the cycle of evolution and involution through which consciousness is developed, matured and perfected, and who subsequently elects to return to active participation in creation in order to help other souls perfect consciousness.]

The experience of a semblance of freedom that these drugs may temporarily give to one is in actuality a millstone around the aspirant's neck in his efforts towards emancipation from the rounds of birth and death.

The experience is as far removed from Reality as is a mirage from water. No matter how much one pursues the mirage one will never reach water and the search for God through drugs must end in disillusionment. One who knows the Way, who is the Way, cannot approve the continued pursuance of a method that not only must prove fruitless but leads away from the Path that leads to Reality.

Experiences gained through LSD are, in some cases, experiences of the shadows of the subtle (emotion, energy) plane in the gross (physical) world. These experiences have nothing at all to do with spiritual advancement.

 

[ControlDenied]

whats more they made god ILLEGAL

 

[SKL]

I think every psychonaut should give the above-referenced essay a thorough read, as a little bit of an alternative perspective.

 

[ControlDenied]

at the same time, you cant help but acknowledge all the hippies who have fallen into literal addiction to drugs like heroin, which is like an enhanced version of the addiction to the material world, and say that their faith in LSD led to their disillusionment in themselves. in essence, by "playing with god", they have only fallen further from his path. i know this to be true in my case. i think i would be at least as close to god, maybe closer, if ihad never touched drugs. of course, regret is useless. but promising anyone miracle pills, especially in recourse to spiritual advancement, is like dropping an atom bomb on society. thats what drugs like acid and heroin are : atom bombs. seemingly all that western culture is good at. a kind of gross reflection of eastern principles. which are, i suppose, useful in determining what those principles truly mean (by representing them materially on the physical plane)

 

[ControlDenied]

i dont know a single LSD user who is now normal. they either go into a life-long drugs binge thinking drugs are "the answer", because of the intensity of the LSD experience, or they simply turn to religion of any kind to calm the demons that LSD awoke. these are the lucky ones. then there are a few who just forget the experience and get on with their lives as well.

 

[SKL]

at the same time, you cant help but acknowledge all the hippies who have fallen into literal addiction to drugs like heroin, which is like an enhanced version of the addiction to the material world, and say that their faith in LSD led to their disillusionment in themselves. in essence, by "playing with god", they have only fallen further from his path.

i dont know a single LSD user who is now normal

You have succinctly described a, or the, central dilemma of the past ten years of my life.

 

[ControlDenied]

in other words, i fucking regret taking acid, its like i recreated that trauma by trying opiates, and both have equally fucked me up the ass :/

 

[ControlDenied]

somekindalove--
exactly
-- ive seen this fucking scenario so many times. and experienced it of course, with my fellow Lost Brothers, and it is a NIGHMARE as we all know.
the bottom line seems to be that western culture is missing something. we can appease further generations, and let them refrain from various suicides, by providing and teaching the true way filling that "void" with non-material things like Love, Art, and Spirit.