LSD, Meditation, Enlightenment, and Ego Death

I don't really have any recommendations, but I do have a story. LSD was actually one of the catalysts that helped me find out about the idea of AGI and the LessWrong community. The story ended up a little long, but I figured I'd share if anyone was interested.

When I was 17, I started experimenting with LSD. I tried successively higher doses until one day I had a very strong experience. I often describe LSD as something that forces you to "drop your filters," the idea being that we take in so much sensory data at any moment, we can't possibly process all of it at once. So what we do is we categorize things into more general levels of organization. Instead of looking at each discrete sight quantum ("pixel" for lack of a better word) of a tree, we instead see the general shape, color, texture, and classify it as a "tree" in order to save processing power. LSD inhibits this process, making you look closer and actually see the details. I suspect that this is why some people report having a better appreciation for nature and natural beauty after taking LSD.

As a parallel to this phenomenon, LSD makes you take a closer look at yourself, your actions, and your trajectory in the same fashion. For me, it started all the way at the beginning, at the level of individual atoms and molecules. At the time, I had a basic understanding of physics and evolution. During my trip, I looked at the sand and saw how it moved in the waves, then started chasing the details of what I was seeing all the way down to atoms and molecules (mentally, of course). Then I started visualizing a rough outline of how the first replicators might have come about; how many would be dashed against the rocks and destroyed. But eventually some would get more complicated and have a slightly higher chance of surviving. At this point, it's all about survival and being able to replicate. Certain variations would make them more likely to survive, but often these would require more energy, like locomotion. Eventually, they would get larger and the energy demands would be greater and they would have to have more purposeful movements to obtain food. Once we're at the point where they have brains, reward centers would develop to guide their actions to make them more likely to survive and replicate.

While many of my ideas at the time were not quite right, if not wrong entirely, I think this was the first time that I'd intuitively understood the idea of evolution. So eventually I got to the point in this process I was imagining where survival needs are all taken care of and I thought about how people would have those reward systems still in place and that might not be a good thing.

I started asking myself, "What is the next 'noble' step to take". I remember that that was the way I phrased the question at the time. I pictured people getting to this stage and then just falling into a cycle of trying to bliss out their reward systems and never advancing. I didn't yet understand the philosophical idea of objective vs subjective morality. I wondered if there was some "right" thing for people to do once they got to this step. What should happen next?

Well, I never got past that point on my trip, but I had gotten to the point where I could start asking the right kinds of questions. Once I was back in a sober state of mind, I took to the internet and started searching. Eventually, I found Eliezer's Levels of Organization in General Intelligence, the technical details of which were over my head, but I learned from it. I was amazed at what I was finding, so I googled the author. That brought me to Yudkowsky.net which lead me to LessWrong and the sequences. I read through all of them and they gave me the foundations of my current understanding, along with helping me realize that AGI is quite possibly the most important problem in the world.

I was amazed with how often one of the articles in the sequences would directly address a question or an uncertainty I had spent a lot of time thinking and wondering about. However, more important than answering the questions, they helped me phrase them the right way.

So my deep wisdom on LSD is that it opens doors, but it won't get you through them. It can help you see things with fresh eyes, without your filters, and gives the opportunity to reshape your understanding if you choose to.

transcendental meditation

Robert Forman has done TM for many, many years, and he writes about his experience in this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Aint-What-Its-Cracked/dp/1846946743/

His perspective is balanced and thoughtful.

You might also be interested in my meditation blog which is often (particularly in earlier posts) but not always from a rationalist perspective:

http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/dark-night-and-what-enlightenment-is-like/

http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/experiences-of-long-term-meditators/

I definitely do not oppose psychedelics, but if you think that doing more of them or meditating more is going to significantly improve your 'understanding of the human mind', you are likely deluding yourself (if you are just doing it for fun, then that is another thing).

The low-hanging fruit has been picked, and probably the most productive thing you can do is to read textbooks on the topic.

Gwern has, of course, some material vaguely related to your text.

This post seems relevant as well: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/04/08/chaos-hallucinogens-virtual-reality-and-the-science-of-self/

You might want to check out Buddhist Geeks and DAniel lngram.

"No, that one was too perfect - too cut and dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis."

This quote from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" page 52 where Feynman relays experiences from his dreams (he did try hypnosis and other methods too) should prompt you to ask how much you really experienced of your thought processes and how much your mind dutifully projected into your 'experiences'.

I experienced what wikipedia calls 'ego death'. That is I felt my 'self' splitting into the individual sub-components that formed consciousness. Acid is well-known for causing synaesthesia and as I fell deeper into meditation I felt like I could actually see the way sensory experiences interacted with cognitive heuristics and rose to the level of conscious perception.

I've recently come into a deep spiritual terror after such an experience I had while sober (albeit in a slightly manic state from sleep deprivation and some caffeine). Afterward, I refused to speak to prevent any unnecessary harm to whoever I'd seek advice from. This is the first time I've seen anybody describe the experience like this, and I was wondering if you knew any resources or persons of experience.

I will continue practicing his enlightenment meditation techniques in an attempt to try to foster these experiences without the use of drugs. Has anyone here had experiences with psychedelic drugs or transcendental meditation? If so, could you tell me about them?

I don't have drug experience but I do have experienced plenty of different mental states in meditation. Do you have questions in need of answers?

Beautiful..so awesome to see that it has affected people in similar ways.

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I have done a few LSD trips. The first one was really weird, the rest were with smaller doses and less intense. They've given me a couple of mildly interesting ideas, but for the most part I don't feel like I've really gotten anything useful out of them. (I keep thinking that given the reputation that the thing has, there has to be some way of getting more out of the experiences, but for a large part it feels like my mind gets temporarily dulled by the thing so that I can't really think or do anything interesting, and then I just get bored and start waiting for the trip to be over.)