Sam Harris Drugs and the meaning of life.

funknotik
atheist
funknotik's picture
Posts: 159
Joined: 2007-12-10
User is offlineOffline
Sam Harris Drugs and the meaning of life.

It's amazing to read the things you have been thinking but never had the courage or tenacity to say aloud, being articulated by one of your favorite authors. So fucking good.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-life/


Luminon
SuperfanTheist
Luminon's picture
Posts: 2455
Joined: 2008-02-17
User is offlineOffline
 I like drugs, specially

 I like drugs, specially when they help some other people make wonderful music. Simon Posford would never be DJ Hallucinogen without hallucinogens. 

But it's mostly a platonic love, not epicurean. It's all so unpredictable. I had a friend who can smoke pot like every day, without problems. But it would make me extremely oversensitive in all senses including the etheric tactile, and therefore left very vulnerable, in bad mood and no way to end this for hours.

Apparently, down-to-earth people have nerves they could hang on with full weight and dipping their ends in some substance won't spoil their day. 
On the other side, I can achieve psychedelic states spontaneously, with some effort or even more easily with help of the right music. For me, music is a powerful psychedelic stuff, but it is completely under my control. I can pick it carefully and switch it off any time needed. This I can really appreciate after a couple of bad experiences with ganja.

Sam Harris wrote:
It is possible, however, if not actually plausible, to seize this datum from the other end and argue, and Aldous Huxley did in his classic essay, The Doors of Perception, that the primary function of the brain could be eliminative: its purpose could be to prevent some vast, transpersonal dimension of mind from flooding consciousness, thereby allowing apes like ourselves to make their way in the world without being dazzled at every step by visionary phenomena irrelevant to their survival. Huxley thought that if the brain were a kind of “reducing valve” for “Mind at Large,” this would explain the efficacy of psychedelics: They could simply be a material means of opening the tap.
Yeah, that's what it is about. Except that it isn't any "Mind at Large", but a raw experience of astral dimension. Which is a really messy place nowadays, something between Hollywood, Las Vegas, dump yard, madhouse and battlefield. According to some esotericists, somewhere in there is the source of all evil. And psychonauts go there drugged, fools.

Sam Harris wrote:
 Unfortunately, Huxley was operating under the erroneous assumption that psychedelics decrease brain activity. However, modern techniques of neuroimaging have shown that these drugs tend to increase activity in many regions of the cortex (and in subcortical structures as well). Still, the action of these drugs does not rule out dualism, or the existence of realms of mind beyond the brain—but then nothing does. This is one of the problems with views of this kind: They appear to be unfalsifiable.[3]
 Psychedelics don't have to decrease brain activity. They just throw our inner spongy censor out of sync with this reality, so uncensored astral perception floods in. No wonder the brain is agitated. But Mr Harris really should read Robert Allan Monroe.

We should be grateful for our dense-physical body and sober consciousness, it's our fortress against certain undesirable things that usually protects us, unless we stick out our head too much. There is a lot of comfort in thinking, that this "subjective" world is illusory and powerless against a healthy waking consciousness and that enemies we may have there can never halfway materialize. For most of people this presumption holds well in practice too. I'm just not one of them. 

Do I refuse physicalism? Not exactly, but I'd like to see it redefined, with discovery of new forms of life-supporting matter that is from our point of view ghost-like and dispersed compared to ours, yet immensely more durable, radiant and much more pliable to the force of thought than the rusty and creaky wheels of our brain.

So what is the meaning of life? It is certainly not lingering in the realms, as the Shpongle song tells us. It is bringing the highest qualities of these realms here, into physical reality. This is why creative stuff like art is the most accessible form of spirituality there ever was. But the really valuable principles and qualities much be sought much higher (deeper) than in the astral realm, where drugs take us. On the deepest levels people experience (instead of fancy hallucinations) a deep love and unity with each other and they seek to manifest this unity externally, in social and political structures, art and even religion. 

The meaning of all this is to build such a rapport with the highest qualities of ourselves found there, that we will be able to reproduce ideas from there in physical form precisely and adequately. That means, without being distracted by fancy visual imagery or exalted feelings. 

Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.