Scientists studying psychoactive drugs accidentally proved the self is an illusion

[Christopher O'Brien]

[I don't care what Randall says, I still say that someone should utilize psychedelic compounds in humanity's search for extraterrestrail life. It's obvious to me that we have other tenets in the building and they're just dying to meet you! —chris ]

Article HERE:

By Ephrat Livni

"Philosophers and mystics have long contemplated the disconcerting notion that the fixed self is an illusion. Neuroscientists now think they can prove it or, at least, help us glimpse this truth with some help from psilocybin, the psychoactive property in magic mushrooms.

"Researchers around the world are exploring the drug’s transformative power to help people quit smoking; lower violent crime; treat depression, anxiety. and post-traumatic stress disorder; and trigger lasting spiritual epiphanies in psychologically healthy people, especially when coupled with meditation or contemplative training.

"There are some limitations to psilocybin studies—they tend to be small, and rely on volunteers willing to take drugs and, thus, open to an alternate experience. But the research could have major implications in an age characterized by widespread anxiety. Psilocybin seems to offer some people a route to an alternate view of reality, in which they shed the limitations of their individual consciousness and embrace a sense of interconnectedness and universality. These trips aren’t temporary, but have transformative psychological effects. Even if we don’t all end up on mushrooms, the studies offer insights on how we might minimize suffering and interpersonal strife and gain a sense of peace.

"Consider a study of 75 subjects, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology last October. The study concluded that psilocybin leads to mystical experiences that can have long-term psychological benefits in conjunction with meditation training. The greater the drug dosage, the more potent the positive psychological effect was six months later. [my emphasis] “Participants showed significant positive changes on longitudinal measures of interpersonal closeness, gratitude, life meaning/purpose, forgiveness, death transcendence, daily spiritual experiences, religious faith and coping,” the study concluded..."

REST OF ARTICLE HERE:

 

[marduk]

I think this kind of pharmacology can be very useful in exploring your inner landscape. I know it illuminated many dark corners of my mind, even as I used/abused mushrooms recreationally in my late teens/early 20's.

However, I don't ascribe any validity to the notion that it actually connects us with any external reality. Just internal ones. But that's just me.

McKenna's stuff is fascinating, though.

 

[Randall]

[I don't care what Randall says, ... ]

Of course you care, otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned it. . I hope you're doing okay too. The word is you've moved ( again ) to help out a friend or something? Gene didn't say much but it sounds very honorable.

I still say that someone should utilize psychedelic compounds in humanity's search for extraterrestrail life. It's obvious to me that we have other tenets in the building and they're just dying to meet you! —chris ]

If the aliens are dying to meet me, that's just fine. But I don't do drugs on a first date. I'd have to get to know them better first so that I can be sure they've got a clean product. You know, maybe a free sample or two just to get me hooked. After that they'll probably want me to pay in prime rib for my supply, but that's not a big problem because there's a supermarket only ten minutes away. When I'm running low I'll just tune them in with a nice telepathic image of a sizzling BBQ. Maybe they can even hang for dinner, and if they're not too busy afterwards, break out the toys .

 

[marduk]

Of course you care, otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned it. . I hope you're doing okay too. The word is you've moved ( again ) to help out a friend or something? Gene didn't say much but it sounds very honorable. If the aliens are dying to meet me, that's just fine. But I don't do drugs on a first date. I'd have to get to know them better first so that I can be sure they've got a clean product. You know, maybe a free sample or two just to get me hooked. After that they'll probably want me to pay in prime rib for my supply, but that's not a big problem because there's a supermarket only ten minutes away. When I'm running low I'll just tune them in with a nice telepathic image of a sizzling BBQ. Maybe they can even hang for dinner, and if they're not too busy afterwards, break out the toys .

What if they're the drug... like how images can hack the brain in Snow Crash?

 

[Randall]

What if they're the drug... like how images can hack the brain in Snow Crash?

Snow Crash? Gonna have to look that one up.

 

[marduk]

Snow Crash? Gonna have to look that one up.

Oh. My. God.

It's one of the 100 greatest works of english fiction. Please read it. Today.

Hiro Protagonist — yeah, that’s his name — is a freelance hacker and unemployed pizza deliveryman lost in a post-lapsarian, hyper-capitalist future America in which the central government has withered away, leaving behind a landscape of gated communities and endless strip malls lined with cookie-cutter retail franchises. When a virulent computer virus (or is it a drug? or a religion?) called Snow Crash gets loose and somehow starts infecting humans, Hiro teams up with a sassy skateboard messenger to save both the real world and cyberspace. Stephenson is that rare—no, unique—thing, both a virtuosic literary stylist and a consummate observer of a brave new world where information flows freely between humans and computers, to the point where the two are no longer easily distinguishable.

Is Snow Crash one of the All-TIME 100 Best Novels?

In the book, L Bob Rife (a play on L Ron Hubbard) finances a dig in Sumeria which uncovers the original tablets of the cult of Asherah - which learned millennia ago how to hack the human mind with speech.

He translates this into a visual hack of the neocortex with imagery - literally, show this person a bitmap, and you've hacked their mind.

This virus then spreads through sex, speech, etc... until he has his own zombie army. He simultaneously attacks the meta verse (a VR version of the internet) and the real world, converting everyone to his 'religion.'

With only a pizza delivery guy and a skateboard messenger to stop him.

 

[Belley]

There are a lot of opinions that i heard about the truffle shroom and it took me awhile if i will believe it then i read this article Common Misconceptions and Myths about Drugs - Trufflemagic - Fresh Truffles & Grow Kitss/ that magic shrooms induce hallucinations by making your brain bleed and it makes me think that this shroom can help us even in our health problem as well. It can help us also in anxiety and depression as well. Some of you guys tried to use this as a medicine?

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

Chris good article and link. Also the impact of technology and its chemical interaction with the environment .

 

[Constance]

I think this kind of pharmacology can be very useful in exploring your inner landscape. I know it illuminated many dark corners of my mind, even as I used/abused mushrooms recreationally in my late teens/early 20's.

However, I don't ascribe any validity to the notion that it actually connects us with any external reality. Just internal ones. But that's just me.

Even in persons or other animals deprived of sight or hearing what is experienced, consciously and subconsciously, is always a combination -- a compresence or being-together -- of external and internal aspects of being, lived being. How the neural nets process experience is another question, still unanswered.

 

[Constance]

In the book, L Bob Rife (a play on L Ron Hubbard) finances a dig in Sumeria which uncovers the original tablets of the cult of Asherah - which learned millennia ago how to hack the human mind with speech.

He translates this into a visual hack of the neocortex with imagery - literally, show this person a bitmap, and you've hacked their mind.

Speech, and later written language, are evolutions from human gestures and inarticulate sounds organized over lengths of time to achieve communication with one another. (references: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Richard Lanigan; background reference: the field of semiotics)

 

[Constance]

My daughter called me on the phone one night when she was 17 years old, where she was at a party and had eaten shrooms, to tell me what she was feeling and thinking. I learned from what she said that no doubt shrooms and similar substances allow a fuller and stronger sense of the self to emerge and simultaneously expand and sharpen the sense of the world as absorbed from multiple levels of conscious being-in-the-world, this world and also perhaps subconscious access to adjacent worlds as well. At the same time, existing in the world/culture we live in now, I think that many of the ideations/hallucinations that arise in these states bring forward images from popular culture absorbed by the subconscious as well as by our ordinarily waking consciousnesses. So the question is how to source these ideations and hallucinations. Can we do that adequately from the restricted precincts of neuroscience and fMRI technology in our time? I doubt it.

 

[Constance]

Chris good article and link. Also the impact of technology and its chemical interaction with the environment .

@blowfish, I haven't read Chris's article yet but will do so now because of the interest aroused by your comment.

 

[Constance]

@blowfish, reading the article now. Who could argue with or disapprove of this?

“Participants showed significant positive changes on longitudinal measures of interpersonal closeness, gratitude, life meaning/purpose, forgiveness, death transcendence, daily spiritual experiences, religious faith and coping,” the study concluded..."

Impressed with these results. Thank you for leading me to read this article.

 

[Constance]

Just one comment about the article's thesis statement at the head of the article:

Philosophers and mystics have long contemplated the disconcerting notion that the fixed self is an illusion. Neuroscientists now think they can prove it or, at least, help us glimpse this truth with some help from psilocybin, the psychoactive property in magic mushrooms.

Phenomenological philosophers, esp. Merleau-Ponty, take this insight further than any other school of philosophy to date. In MP's later work he develops his insight into the 'Chiasmic' relation between lived consciousness as we experience it and the world of nature within which we live our being, nature having produced and developed our experiential being as an innate expression of itself. (references, four books by MP: Phenomenology of Perception, The Structure of Behavior, The Visible and the Invisible, and Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France [published, after his sudden death at age 53 in 1961, by MP's colleagues from his lecture notes for a course he'd just taught on "Nature"].

Overview of his life and work at wiki: Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Wikipedia

 

[Constance]

Perhaps just reading Wikipedia's page on Merleau-Ponty might be enough to prepare some to accept the properly existentialist understanding of ourselves and the radical temporality/unfinished nature of our experience in and of the world, and thus of our knowledge about the world. The poet Wallace Stevens reached this understanding in a short poem entitled "July Mountain" {reaching it gradually over the scope of his poetry as a whole):

July Mountain

"We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry --
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together."

 

[pigfarmer]

Interesting but the study make a conclusion with ‘soft’ data:

“both high-dose groups showed large significant positive changes on longitudinal measures of interpersonal closeness, gratitude, life meaning/purpose, forgiveness, death transcendence, daily spiritual experiences, religious faith and coping, and community observer ratings”

What the hell is a longitudinal measure of interpersonal closeness? It their cholesterol lower? Something we can measure – longitudinally? Janoz Poha ‘drippings with goo’ felt longitudinal closeness also. You pump me full of shrooms sufficiently and I’m going to be feeling quite smarmy towards everybody after a while. They upset the tummy so while you’re communing with Landru you might want to eat something.

In my (dated) experience there are psychoactive drugs and then there are psychoactive drugs. I remember psilocybin and mescaline as get-silly go to a party drugs. LSD was a real trip around the block and you could find yourself lost in bat country quite easily. Best to have someone relatively normal handy to keep an eye on you. Never noticed a permanent aftereffect or any spiritual awakening. Lots of nervous sweating and incoherent mumbling.

 

[Christopher O'Brien]

In my (dated) experience there are psychoactive drugs and then there are psychoactive drugs. I remember psilocybin and mescaline as get-silly go to a party drugs. LSD was a real trip around the block and you could find yourself lost in bat country quite easily. Best to have someone relatively normal handy to keep an eye on you. Never noticed a permanent aftereffect or any spiritual awakening. Lots of nervous sweating and incoherent mumbling.

The old adage, "set & setting" apply here, but also dosage, intention, procedure, company. These substances should NOT be used as party drugs, rather medicines or sacraments IMO.

 

[pigfarmer]

The old adage, "set & setting" apply here, but also dosage, intention, procedure, company. These substances should NOT be used as party drugs, rather medicines or sacraments IMO.

Chris, in our '50s and '60s I completely agree. As a 20+ year old kid it was a whole different ball game. A stupid one.

I remember dosages being rather high and rarely doing just one thing at a time. I do still remember the effects and even some of the weird 'experiences.' Debatable from my p.o.v as to what positives came out of it which is why I wouldn't recommend any of that nonsense to the mildly curious. To those who approach it with some serious intent I say go right ahead but be careful with that axe, Eugene

 

[marduk]

My daughter called me on the phone one night when she was 17 years old, where she was at a party and had eaten shrooms, to tell me what she was feeling and thinking. I learned from what she said that no doubt shrooms and similar substances allow a fuller and stronger sense of the self to emerge and simultaneously expand and sharpen the sense of the world as absorbed from multiple levels of conscious being-in-the-world, this world and also perhaps subconscious access to adjacent worlds as well. At the same time, existing in the world/culture we live in now, I think that many of the ideations/hallucinations that arise in these states bring forward images from popular culture absorbed by the subconscious as well as by our ordinarily waking consciousnesses. So the question is how to source these ideations and hallucinations. Can we do that adequately from the restricted precincts of neuroscience and fMRI technology in our time? I doubt it.

I had a similar experience while combining them with a meditation exercise taught to me by my old sensei. Fascinating.