161–170 of 177 posts
It's 1075 light years away. If there's life there and they looked at us, they'd see vikings colonizing northern France and they'd see the Maya civilization collapse.
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By all accounts NASA's getting ready to announce they've found an earth-like planet and you guys are like "yeah but I'm sure it won't compare the experience of taking my favorite drug." That's a sad and closed-minded way of looking at things. It reminds me of Jon Stewart's character in Half Baked who thought everything was better "on weeeeed!" If your drug of choice prevents you from enjoying other experiences, like…
The psychedelic experience is the most intense experience anyone can have on this planet, and it cannot be compared or described by anything else one has experienced in his/her life. Surely there's no good reason to assume anything but you do assume and in the most cliche way. Maybe first you should chuck 5 gramms of dried mushrooms with some lemonade and come back and tells us what you think after that. I'm not sure…
Many long-term meditators who have previous experience with psychedelics would disagree with you.
I'm only making the assumption of agnosticism, that it's fundamentally impossible for you to know that something already within your realm of experience will trump all that exists in the unknown.
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By all accounts NASA's getting ready to announce they've found an earth-like planet and you guys are like "yeah but I'm sure it won't compare the experience of taking my favorite drug." That's a sad and closed-minded way of looking at things. It reminds me of Jon Stewart's character in Half Baked who thought everything was better "on weeeeed!" If your drug of choice prevents you from enjoying other experiences, like…
This is a ludicrous reduction of the point McKenna was making. You're acting like he didn't directly address this fallacy. Go read The Invisible Landscape, listen to one of the lectures that covers this material (such as Eros and the Eschaton and / or his address to the Jung Society), and then address the whole of what he was saying. If you don't think that human neurochemistry is astonishing, I think that's weird. B…
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It is the new norm of HN. Almost ever top voted comment nowadays is a negative swipe or a nit-pick that is tangentially related to the OP.
Yes, beware! The tendency to value clever quips and memes over actual content WAS the difference between Reddit and HN. And used to be the difference between the nicer parts of Reddit and 4Chan before that... :/
;)
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Hey, you guys remember swatch beats?
Am I the only one who that that beats was actually a pretty decent, if totally doomed, idea? cricket noises
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This is a ludicrous reduction of the point McKenna was making. You're acting like he didn't directly address this fallacy. Go read The Invisible Landscape, listen to one of the lectures that covers this material (such as Eros and the Eschaton and / or his address to the Jung Society), and then address the whole of what he was saying. If you don't think that human neurochemistry is astonishing, I think that's weird. B…
Neurochemistry and the experience of consciousness are very astonishing, I just think it's a bit egocentric to assume they're the most astonishing things in the universe.
McKenna says that neurochemistry, and its material application called "the psychedelic experience," is the most astonishing thing you can personally suppose, or in some cases, even that you can't suppose. But that doesn't say anything about the (real or imagined) notion of a totality of "things in the universe."
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The psychedelic experience is the most intense experience anyone can have on this planet, and it cannot be compared or described by anything else one has experienced in his/her life. Surely there's no good reason to assume anything but you do assume and in the most cliche way. Maybe first you should chuck 5 gramms of dried mushrooms with some lemonade and come back and tells us what you think after that. I'm not sure…
> ...and it cannot be compared or described by anything else one has experienced in his/her life Many long-term meditators who have previous experience with psychedelics would disagree with you. I'm only making the assumption of agnosticism, that it's fundamentally impossible for you to know that something already within your realm of experience will trump all that exists in the unknown.
See, the problem here is that you are debating an argument you haven't bothered to fully read.
Terence McKenna has literally volumes to say about this argument. So now that we've moved beyond this simpleton back-and-forth, what say you about his position vis a vis meditation?
Specifically, what do you say about his argument that, without being willing to ingest a drug, you haven't humbled yourself to the basic notion that your brain is physical and its operations electrical and chemical?
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The psychedelic experience is the most intense experience anyone can have on this planet, and it cannot be compared or described by anything else one has experienced in his/her life. Surely there's no good reason to assume anything but you do assume and in the most cliche way. Maybe first you should chuck 5 gramms of dried mushrooms with some lemonade and come back and tells us what you think after that. I'm not sure…
> ...and it cannot be compared or described by anything else one has experienced in his/her life Many long-term meditators who have previous experience with psychedelics would disagree with you. I'm only making the assumption of agnosticism, that it's fundamentally impossible for you to know that something already within your realm of experience will trump all that exists in the unknown.
1) Whomever says the experiences of meditation are akin to those of psychedelics is plainly full of shit. I've done psychedelics for about 4 years, and western ceremonial magic which involved plenty of meditation daily and consistently for about a decade. Apples and oranges. And thats including all the freaky spectacular shit I've experienced.
2) Practically, how much of "all that exists in the unknown" you think you will or can experience living a basic run of the mill western life in a human body? As I said, ingest 5 dried gramms, then come to talk to me about what will get trumped in your realm of experience. Until then, its only thinking you understand sex because you read dirty magazines, only for something that is several orders of magnitudes out there.
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Then why didn't they just define it so that objects with an "undefinable surface" have an ESI of 0?
Sure, you could do that. I guess there's just not really much need for ESI to be defined across the domain of "all things". A similarity index of zero just means "not at all similar to Earth", which, yes, applies to the Sun and Jupiter, but also to a blob of tomato ketchup, or moonlight, or schadenfreude. Most things have an ESI of zero, then.
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Have you actually taken (non-endogenous) DMT and witnessed said alien intelligences with your own eyes?
DMT no. These are all coming from reports (and from Terrence himself) which I have no problem believing since I've witnessed my fair share of weird shit in general. I've only done my share of LSD in the past, which by comparison, seems quite tame and merely "psychological" than DMT.
For example, you used a rather non-rigorous descriptor, "weird". What constitutes a weird phenomenon?
Can we subject said constituents of a weird phenomenon to the same kinds of validations we can make about known true facts, i.e. observable existent things?