7 ms·

Beautiful quote from him in the article: When I began to navigate psychospace with LSD, I realized that before we were conscious, seemingly self-propelled huma

by themgt 10y ago

Beautiful quote from him in the article: When I began to navigate psychospace with LSD, I realized that before we were conscious, seemingly self-propelled human beings, many tapes and corridors had been created in our minds and reflexes which were not of our own making. These patterns and tapes laid down in our consciousness are walled off from each other. I see it as a vast labyrinth with high walls sealing off the many directives created by our personal history. Many of these directives are contradictory. The coexistence of these contradictory programs is what we call inner conflict. This conflict causes us to constantly check ourselves while we are caught in the opposition of polarity. Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration. To complicate matters, the programs are reinforced by fear. Fear separates, love integrates. We find ourselves drawn to love and unity, but afraid to make the leap. What I found to be the genius of LSD is that it really gets you high, higher than the programs, higher than the walls that mask and blind one to the energy destroying presence of many contradictory but hidden programs. When LSD is used intentionally it enables you to see all the tracks laid down, to explore each one intensely. It also allows you to see the many parallel and redundant programs as well as the contradictory ones. It allows you to see the underlying unity of all opposites in the magic play of existence. This allows you to edit these programs and recreate superior programs that give you the insight to shake loose the restrictions and conflicts programmed into each one of us by our parents, our religion, our early education, and by society as a whole. --- Very much in line with what recent neuroscience results are finding: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46421 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46421 http://www.nature.com/news/brain-scans-reveal-how-lsd-affects-consciousness-1.19727 http://www.nature.com/news/brain-scans-reveal-how-lsd-affect...

badosu 10y ago
Surprisingly similar to what Lilly wrote in 1968: "PROGRAMMING AND METAPROGAMMING IN THE HUMAN BIOCOMPUTER" [0] A very good book, even though you should not take it literally, quote from the preface: Eventually the cerebral cortex appeared as an expanding new highlevel computer controlling the structurally lower levels of the nervous system, the lower builtin programs. For the first time learning and its faster adaptation to a rapidly changing environment began to appear. Further, as this new cortex expanded over several millions of years, a critical size cortex was reached. At this level of structure, a new capability emerged: learning to learn. [0]: http://nekhbet.leary.csoft.net/biocomputer.pdf http://nekhbet.leary.csoft.net/biocomputer.pdf Edit (further context): To avoid the necessity of repeating learning to learn, symbols, metaphors, models each time, I symbolize the under- lying idea in these operations as metaprogramming. Metaprogramming appears at a critical cortical size-the cerebral computer must have a large enough number of interconnected circuits of sufficient quality for the operations of meta- programming to exist in that biocomputer. Essentially, metaprogramming is an operation in which a central control system controls hundreds of thousands of programs operating in parallel simultaneously.
- eip 10y ago
  This is the best book to read on LSD. Only a little bit though otherwise your pupils will dilate too much to read. Obviously.
  - kordless 10y ago
    I already need readers, so putting on my visor magnifiers will probably do the trick!
  - cnp 10y ago
    The one you really need to read by him is "The Center of the Cyclone" ;) It is truly, truly incredible. This guy was a real-deal scientist. I first discovered him through reading this https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-ketamine-secrets-of-segas-ecco-the-dolphin-347 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-ketamine-secrets-of-s... and then went on to read every one of his books except for his last, which I want to save for the right time. This guy has had a profound effect on my life and I cant recommend his work highly enough.
    - badosu 10y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation! I like 'The Biocomputer' but I find it over the top, hope this one's a bit more sober.
Alex3917 10y ago
The Psychedelic Salon podcast has a few of his talks. He was insanely smart and well-spoken: https://psychedelicsalon.com/category/people/nick-sand/ https://psychedelicsalon.com/category/people/nick-sand/ Especially interesting is episode 054, where IIRC he talks about how all the high-level LSD producers and distributors he was in prison with were the children of the folks who worked on the Manhattan project.
Exuma 10y ago
That's a truly well-put quote... its so easy to 'see' having done LSD a lot. I'm still it's sure hard to even come 1% of grasping it if you've never experienced though.
- notwfn 10y ago
  > I'm still it's sure hard to even come 1% of grasping it if you've never experienced though. I'm not sure about that. I've done my fair share of LSD some years ago, but to me (to lift a simile from somebody else), it's a bit like a program's coredump. All the information is there, sure, less pre-categorized / pre-filtered, but it's not exactly guiding, so to speak. You're left on your own in a forest. Not always, and doesn't have to be like that, but I've seen diminishing returns after a while (meaning, it definitely does give you something the first time; and perhaps several more - when you can focus on thoughts and the world in a calmer way). The latter may not even be the case for some people, maybe, but I definitely think there is an overall "floor" in regards to the "depth" you can reach. Let me compare and contrast. This may sound cheesy, but the quoted text above reminds me very much of Kant and the approach he had laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason, which I very much recommend and had the pleasure to (to a most definitely quite limited degree) grok, partly. (I think it's quite possible to just take it and read it - some guidance would definitely help - but in itself, it's very organized and (when he's not contradicting himself, which (under some interpretations) does happen) almost pedagogical at times. Familiarity with (especially) Hume and (perhaps) Leibniz, et al. would help, but I think there's value to be extraced by reading it just like that.) In epistemology ("how do we come to know things, and what kinds of things can we know?"), Kant was all about the "Kantian filter/net" - the "raw experience" / sense data we get is not actually raw; not only is it filtered just by virtue of us having specific perceptual sense, but there appears to be structure in the very experience we get (for him, this was (first and foremost) spatial, temporal and causal structure; in addition to this, we have an arsenal of Kantian categories, which are something that all objects we get to experience have, our perception applying the former to the latter involuntarily and preemptively; Kantian categories are (so to speak) "conditions of the possibility of objects in the first place"). Kant goes into detail about this, attempting to deduce them and the associated "judgments" (we judge whenever we understand things, for him), and so on. His whole project does a reversal of the "how can we know laws of the world?" inductive approach done by Hume et al.; it's not observed temporal sequences -> causal relations between events -> aha! - general causal principle. Kant instead reverses the "direction" and shows how you inevitably have to have a general causal principle if you are to have any experience whatsoever (this is explain in part in his Second Analogy, for anyone interested). Thus it is that even though we cannot know how things in the world are "in themselves", we know things about our experience - their conditions. Consider a fish: a "normal" thinking fish would just think that all its world is water. But a Kantian fish would deduce that even though it does not know what the world "out there" truly is, whether it's water, not-water-deceiving-as-water, or a mixture - it can know something - namely: whatever it comes to experience, the experience itself is aquatic so to speak, having to come "through water". Kant applies this general approach to a number of things, going in detail about the "filters" and about what they tell us about the world, and how this can be used to revive metaphysics (which aims to know what things exist in the world a priori (known not empirically); no, we cannot know this, in a sense; but we can pin down the conditions of human experience, at the very least; these conditions will be a priori). This kind of stuff was (in a way) quite more powerful than the "knowledge" from LSD. LSD is good for other things, and it can "bootstrap" your drive for knowledge (maybe), and give you initial insights. But for me, I prefer a debugger-symbols-loaded REPL vs. investigation of a binary coredump ;) (that said, I'll want to have a trip again some day just to compare).
soineuh 10y ago
That's not a beautiful quote, it's incoherent nonsense. You're reading bones, mystic brute.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- knowaveragejoe 10y ago
  Your responses smack of an angry, small person looking to pick a fight from what you think is a position of superiority(not engaging in drug use). If you could actually explain what is wrong with the above quote, that'd be magnitudes more useful than this and your other screed elsewhere in the thread.
  - soineuh 10y ago
    I'm easily in the 99th percentile for physical strength, and anger is last in my repertoire of rich emotions. I'd say a peaceful, focused calm is probably number one.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      "Small" doesn't have anything to do with physical stuff, bro. Edit: English isn't even my first language, and I got that. If you're so bloody smart, how come you took the comment so literally?
      - michaelcampbell 10y ago
        Someone missed a subtlety, but I'm not sure it was him.
        mirimir 10y ago
        Care to explain?
        mirimir 10y ago
good_vibes 10y ago
That's been my experience for sure. Found the underlying unity of all things and how duality is the root of all of the world's problems, man vs. nature, race, gender, class.
tfnw 10y ago
"Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration." I find this part disturbing if he sees the different programs as competing viewpoints and wishes to enforce a "deep integration" by limiting the possible viewpoints to a single one. I see a mind that is in constant contradiction and disagreement as the only way to prevent a person from becoming a zealot of any particular viewpoint.

by themgt 10y ago

badosu 10y ago

Surprisingly similar to what Lilly wrote in 1968: "PROGRAMMING AND METAPROGAMMING IN THE HUMAN BIOCOMPUTER" [0] A very good book, even though you should not take it literally, quote from the preface: Eventually the cerebral cortex appeared as an expanding new highlevel computer controlling the structurally lower levels of the nervous system, the lower builtin programs. For the first time learning and its faster adaptation to a rapidly changing environment began to appear. Further, as this new cortex expanded over several millions of years, a critical size cortex was reached. At this level of structure, a new capability emerged: learning to learn. [0]: http://nekhbet.leary.csoft.net/biocomputer.pdf http://nekhbet.leary.csoft.net/biocomputer.pdf Edit (further context): To avoid the necessity of repeating learning to learn, symbols, metaphors, models each time, I symbolize the under- lying idea in these operations as metaprogramming. Metaprogramming appears at a critical cortical size-the cerebral computer must have a large enough number of interconnected circuits of sufficient quality for the operations of meta- programming to exist in that biocomputer. Essentially, metaprogramming is an operation in which a central control system controls hundreds of thousands of programs operating in parallel simultaneously.

eip 10y ago
This is the best book to read on LSD. Only a little bit though otherwise your pupils will dilate too much to read. Obviously.
- kordless 10y ago
  I already need readers, so putting on my visor magnifiers will probably do the trick!
- cnp 10y ago
  The one you really need to read by him is "The Center of the Cyclone" ;) It is truly, truly incredible. This guy was a real-deal scientist. I first discovered him through reading this https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-ketamine-secrets-of-segas-ecco-the-dolphin-347 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-ketamine-secrets-of-s... and then went on to read every one of his books except for his last, which I want to save for the right time. This guy has had a profound effect on my life and I cant recommend his work highly enough.
  - badosu 10y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation! I like 'The Biocomputer' but I find it over the top, hope this one's a bit more sober.

Alex3917 10y ago

The Psychedelic Salon podcast has a few of his talks. He was insanely smart and well-spoken: https://psychedelicsalon.com/category/people/nick-sand/ https://psychedelicsalon.com/category/people/nick-sand/ Especially interesting is episode 054, where IIRC he talks about how all the high-level LSD producers and distributors he was in prison with were the children of the folks who worked on the Manhattan project.

Exuma 10y ago

That's a truly well-put quote... its so easy to 'see' having done LSD a lot. I'm still it's sure hard to even come 1% of grasping it if you've never experienced though.

notwfn 10y ago
> I'm still it's sure hard to even come 1% of grasping it if you've never experienced though. I'm not sure about that. I've done my fair share of LSD some years ago, but to me (to lift a simile from somebody else), it's a bit like a program's coredump. All the information is there, sure, less pre-categorized / pre-filtered, but it's not exactly guiding, so to speak. You're left on your own in a forest. Not always, and doesn't have to be like that, but I've seen diminishing returns after a while (meaning, it definitely does give you something the first time; and perhaps several more - when you can focus on thoughts and the world in a calmer way). The latter may not even be the case for some people, maybe, but I definitely think there is an overall "floor" in regards to the "depth" you can reach. Let me compare and contrast. This may sound cheesy, but the quoted text above reminds me very much of Kant and the approach he had laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason, which I very much recommend and had the pleasure to (to a most definitely quite limited degree) grok, partly. (I think it's quite possible to just take it and read it - some guidance would definitely help - but in itself, it's very organized and (when he's not contradicting himself, which (under some interpretations) does happen) almost pedagogical at times. Familiarity with (especially) Hume and (perhaps) Leibniz, et al. would help, but I think there's value to be extraced by reading it just like that.) In epistemology ("how do we come to know things, and what kinds of things can we know?"), Kant was all about the "Kantian filter/net" - the "raw experience" / sense data we get is not actually raw; not only is it filtered just by virtue of us having specific perceptual sense, but there appears to be structure in the very experience we get (for him, this was (first and foremost) spatial, temporal and causal structure; in addition to this, we have an arsenal of Kantian categories, which are something that all objects we get to experience have, our perception applying the former to the latter involuntarily and preemptively; Kantian categories are (so to speak) "conditions of the possibility of objects in the first place"). Kant goes into detail about this, attempting to deduce them and the associated "judgments" (we judge whenever we understand things, for him), and so on. His whole project does a reversal of the "how can we know laws of the world?" inductive approach done by Hume et al.; it's not observed temporal sequences -> causal relations between events -> aha! - general causal principle. Kant instead reverses the "direction" and shows how you inevitably have to have a general causal principle if you are to have any experience whatsoever (this is explain in part in his Second Analogy, for anyone interested). Thus it is that even though we cannot know how things in the world are "in themselves", we know things about our experience - their conditions. Consider a fish: a "normal" thinking fish would just think that all its world is water. But a Kantian fish would deduce that even though it does not know what the world "out there" truly is, whether it's water, not-water-deceiving-as-water, or a mixture - it can know something - namely: whatever it comes to experience, the experience itself is aquatic so to speak, having to come "through water". Kant applies this general approach to a number of things, going in detail about the "filters" and about what they tell us about the world, and how this can be used to revive metaphysics (which aims to know what things exist in the world a priori (known not empirically); no, we cannot know this, in a sense; but we can pin down the conditions of human experience, at the very least; these conditions will be a priori). This kind of stuff was (in a way) quite more powerful than the "knowledge" from LSD. LSD is good for other things, and it can "bootstrap" your drive for knowledge (maybe), and give you initial insights. But for me, I prefer a debugger-symbols-loaded REPL vs. investigation of a binary coredump ;) (that said, I'll want to have a trip again some day just to compare).

soineuh 10y ago

That's not a beautiful quote, it's incoherent nonsense. You're reading bones, mystic brute.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
knowaveragejoe 10y ago
Your responses smack of an angry, small person looking to pick a fight from what you think is a position of superiority(not engaging in drug use). If you could actually explain what is wrong with the above quote, that'd be magnitudes more useful than this and your other screed elsewhere in the thread.
- soineuh 10y ago
  I'm easily in the 99th percentile for physical strength, and anger is last in my repertoire of rich emotions. I'd say a peaceful, focused calm is probably number one.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    "Small" doesn't have anything to do with physical stuff, bro. Edit: English isn't even my first language, and I got that. If you're so bloody smart, how come you took the comment so literally?
    - michaelcampbell 10y ago
      Someone missed a subtlety, but I'm not sure it was him.
      - mirimir 10y ago
        Care to explain?
      - mirimir 10y ago

good_vibes 10y ago

That's been my experience for sure. Found the underlying unity of all things and how duality is the root of all of the world's problems, man vs. nature, race, gender, class.

tfnw 10y ago

"Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration." I find this part disturbing if he sees the different programs as competing viewpoints and wishes to enforce a "deep integration" by limiting the possible viewpoints to a single one. I see a mind that is in constant contradiction and disagreement as the only way to prevent a person from becoming a zealot of any particular viewpoint.