Cody Noconi, Can Entheogens Lead to Deep Spirituality? |360|

Alex,

Your original post contains a lot of what I think are references - such as "[Spiral Out 90704]" - how are these meant to be used?

David
 
I think it's fair game... but I get yr point as well.

I have a entire show coming up dedicated to the conspiratorial part of this topic.
It seems to me that there are always people willing to turn a good thing into something bad to turn a profit. Tobacco as it was originally used for traditional ceremonial purposes is not the tobacco of today that has been altered to contain much higher amounts of addictive substances. The same thing goes for marijuana. Today's Marijuana contains much higher amounts of the addictive ingredient, THC, than it did back in the 70s, but negligible amounts of the medicinal ingredient, CBD. That was found to be true of both illegal marijuana and marijuana purchased in a legal medical dispensary.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/marketplace-marijuana-thc-cbd-legalization-1.3861144
Study after study points to the attributes of combining THC and CBD. The science isn't settled, but research suggests CBD can mitigate some of the negative effects that can happen with high-THC weed, including anxiety, paranoia, and psychosis.

CBD is also the focus of much research on possible medicinal benefits in treating everything from childhood epilepsy to schizophrenia and arthritis.
 
I have a problem with the idea that any naturally occurring or synthetic chemical compound offers a more authentic perspective on ultimate reality. Terminally ill people are given opiates to mask the worst symptoms of their condition, but no one claims the ensuing trip is anything but a palliative second best to clear thinking and good health. If a drug exists in conscious reality, it is occluding or changing a perspective within conscious reality, not replacing conscious reality.

Perhaps I'm not a psychonaut? I find normal consciousness a three ring circus without needing to experience the trapeze and hire wire act up close. Some people get addicted to war zones, but that isn't a good reason to continue fighting wars.
 
I have a problem with the idea that any naturally occurring or synthetic chemical compound offers a more authentic perspective on ultimate reality. Terminally ill people are given opiates to mask the worst symptoms of their condition, but no one claims the ensuing trip is anything but a palliative second best to clear thinking and good health. If a drug exists in conscious reality, it is occluding or changing a perspective within conscious reality, not replacing conscious reality.

Perhaps I'm not a psychonaut? I find normal consciousness a three ring circus without needing to experience the trapeze and hire wire act up close. Some people get addicted to war zones, but that isn't a good reason to continue fighting wars.
I remember having a discussion with artist friends years ago about how some artists use drugs to get them to that place where they find inspiration and can create art, while others do not. I've always felt the drugs were a kind of short cut, but that it was never the drugs that took you to the state of inspiration. You take yourself to that state of being; the drugs do nothing but make you stoned. It's the belief that you need the drugs to get there that makes you need the drugs to get there.
 
I remember having a discussion with artist friends years ago about how some artists use drugs to get them to that place where they find inspiration and can create art, while others do not. I've always felt the drugs were a kind of short cut, but that it was never the drugs that took you to the state of inspiration. You take yourself to that state of being; the drugs do nothing but make you stoned. It's the belief that you need the drugs to get there that makes you need the drugs to get there.
Yes, there's probably something in that. Discussions of drugs steer dangerously close to materialist interpretations of reality, where a thing changes an individual, rather than the other way round.
 
I have a problem with the idea that any naturally occurring or synthetic chemical compound offers a more authentic perspective on ultimate reality. Terminally ill people are given opiates to mask the worst symptoms of their condition, but no one claims the ensuing trip is anything but a palliative second best to clear thinking and good health. If a drug exists in conscious reality, it is occluding or changing a perspective within conscious reality, not replacing conscious reality.
The curious thing is, that these drugs bind to receptors - you are flipping a few switches in your brain!

From the physicalist point of view, your brain must have the potential to create these weird realities available at the flip of a switch!

From another point of view, these drugs flip switches that turn off the mind control aspect of the brain - letting it expand.

I have never done anything stronger than cannabis cakes (I don't smoke, so I don't imagine smoking a joint would be a very pleasant experience). Probably mainly due to cowardice!

David
 
The curious thing is, that these drugs bind to receptors - you are flipping a few switches in your brain!

From the physicalist point of view, your brain must have the potential to create these weird realities available at the flip of a switch!

From another point of view, these drugs flip switches that turn off the mind control aspect of the brain - letting it expand.

I have never done anything stronger than cannabis cakes (I don't smoke, so I don't imagine smoking a joint would be a very pleasant experience). Probably mainly due to cowardice!

David
I'm fond of my inhibitors. They prevent my plans for world domination.
 
am in contact with. hope to have on Skeptiko next yr.

If we are always halucinating, then materialism is also a hallucination.

Sir John Eccles
(Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine)
Sir John Eccles was a neurophysiologist who won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963 for his work on the synapse. He did not believe that the brain produces consciousness. In Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (1989) he wrote:
I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition ... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Carew_Eccles

I also am not impressed by mere promises to answer the hard problem of consciousness.

There are some pretty stiff obstacles to overcome:
- The many independent forms of empirical evidence for the afterlife
http://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/summary_of_evidence

- Philosophical arguments that conscioiusness is non physical: Consciousness is not an illusion or an epiphenomenon or an emergent property of the brain. Natural selection would not produce consciousness. The brain is not a conscious computer.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2013/08/consciousness-cannot-be-emergent.html
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-materialist-explanation-of.html

- The filter model of the brain explains more empirical evidence than the production model. A filter can be clogged, punctured, or removed. Loss of function injuries to the brain are like clogs. Injuries that result in new abilities are like punctures. And NDEers experience unfiltered consciousness when the brain is inactive.
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_fallacies#skeptical_fallacies_brain

- Nobel Prize winners Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Brian Josephson, Sir John Eccles, Eugene Wigner, George Wald and other great scientists and philosophers such as John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, Wernher von Braun, Karl Popper, and Carl Jung believed consciousness is non physical because of the evidence.
http://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/eminent_researchers

- In fact there are a number of good arguments that materialism is not logicaly consistent philosophy. If we are always halucinating, then materialism is also a hallucination.
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_fallacies#skeptical_fallacies_materialism_rational

- Promissory materialism isn't even plausible, it is contradicted by the history of science.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2015/03/promissory-materialism-isnt-even.html


People have been saying self is an illusion for thousands of years, long before the first neuroscientist was a mere gleam in his father's eye. Almost every religion and spiritual system of beliefs has a mystical school that includes a version of this including Christianity, Judiasm, Spiritualism, Zen, Hinduism, Islam, and Native Americans:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2015/03/realizing-ultimate.html

Scientific analysis doesn't contradict this, it explains it.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/05/experience-of-oneness.html
 
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The karmic consequences of financing drug gangs that run child prostitution rings, undermine governments in foreign countries, and commit other horrible crimes are part of the spiritual implications.
I was not aware that psychedelics were popular in the underground criminal culture you describe. Do you have information on this?
 
I was not aware that psychedelics were popular in the underground criminal culture you describe. Do you have information on this?

I am not saying the drugs are popular with the organized crime gangs in that they use them, I am saying they sell them. Sometimes you find unaffiliated "chemists" selling independently but they will not have a large distribution network so most of the sales in many areas are distributed through criminal organizations involved in more than just selling drugs (and pushing addictive drugs which is bad enough).

But even if you asked your local drug dealer to make sure he doesn't use the money he gets from selling you DMT made locally to buy his next delivery of cocaine or heroin, do you think he would be conscientious about that?

Here are a couple of references to support my points:

The same "groups" who sell cocaine and heron sell synthetic drugs (such as LSD):

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/04/u...e-into-the-rural-states-us-warns.html?mcubz=0
Drug Gangs and Drug Wars Move Into the Rural States, U.S. Warns
By JULIE JOHNSON, Special to The New York Times
Published: August 4, 1989
...
Mr. Thornburgh acknowledged that the report's findings underscored information that was suspected or had been exchanged anecdotally among law-enforcement officials. For more than a year, urban-based groups have been establishing distribution networks in the Midwest and rural South to sell not only cocaine but heroin, marijuana and synthetic drugs like LSD and methamphetamines, law-enforcement officials have said.

"Outlaw motorcycle gangs" distribute LSD (It's not in the excerpt below but it is safe to assume the same gangs sell other drugs like cocaine and heroin).

https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs11/11379/11379p.pdf

BULLETIN
INTELLIGENCE
U. S. D E P A R T M E N T O F J U S T I C E
...
DEA Philadelphia Field
Division identifies members of outlaw motorcycle
gangs as retail distributors of LSD. Sales of the
drug most often take place at colleges, high
schools
, nightclubs, and raves.​
 
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I always find it funny that people talk about "experimenting" with drugs. In a proper experiment one formulates then tests for the hypothesis and draws a conclusion. In the case of drug experimentation, very often people have no hypothesis about what they will experience and draw no conclusions from that experience. Jung contended that if you don't bother to analyse the meaning of your dreams i.e. formulate a hypothesis and conclusion about their content, they remain a confusing array of meaningless experiences. I think the same applies to Entheogens. For Entheogens to elicit deeply meaningful content the experiencer has to be able to open their mind to the experience as one that will guide them into a greater understanding of their Jungian Self. If you don't seek this kind of understanding, at best Etheogen trips can be absurd and meaningless and at worst, confronting and ultimately destructive.
 
Cody Noconi, Can Entheogens Lead to Deep Spirituality? |360|
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Cody Noconi of the Psilly Rabbits Podcast on whether entheogens and psychedelics lead to deep spirituality.
360-cody-noconi-skeptiko.jpg

photo by: Skeptiko
[Joe Rogan] My first DMT experience changed everything I thought about the world.

The Joe Rogan podcast you’re listening to is hugely popular…

[Graham Hancock] So that’s the aliens, an utterly alien realm, filled with alien intelligences who communicate, and of course, the skeptics say, “Oh, it’s all just made up in your brain, but we don’t know that.”

This interview with Graham Hancock drew millions of listeners.

It’s quite a statement regarding how far our culture has come in trying to understand the relationship between psychedelics and consciousness

[Spiral Out 90704] Let’s go to YouTube, Spiral Out 90704 coming at you.

But this next clip may be even more remarkable.

[Spiral Out 90704] In one of my videos, there was a comment left asking me if I could make a video explaining why I don’t use entheogens any longer.

It’s from SpiralOut90704 and was published for the benefit of his 342 subscribers. It’s titled, ‘Why I no longer use entheogens’, and while the numbers may not be as impressive as the Joe Rogan interview with Graham Hancock, the thousands of trip reports available on YouTube may be an even more significant statement about what’s going with entheogens in our culture.

But what does it all mean and what are we supposed to do? Graham?

[Graham Hancock] Can we use changes in consciousness to understand the majestic complexity of the universe in which we live? And I think the answer is definitely yes.

SpiralOut90704?

[Spiral Out 90704] People need to understand that the mind is a very fragile thing, it can be bent in so many strange directions and some people’s mind can’t be bent as much as others and remain intact.

Stick around for a show on entheogens and my interview with Cody Noconi.

Coming up next on Skeptiko…
I am wondering if Cody or anyone following this has done any work on so called herbal mind enhancers - Bacopa, ginkgo, Rhodiola, ashgawanda, morenga and the like. Anyone?
 
IMO hallucinogens are like a chemical version of electroshock therapy. I have known many who were harmed permanently by hallucinogens. That's why I dont approve of the promotion of them and other psychoactive drugs. That's also why I dislike Hancock, who is constantly promoting drug use. I was ill served and harmed by drug use earlier in my life and I always advise younger folk to be very careful and if possible to avoid altogether. Thankfully my sons listened to my advice and didn't waste time going down that road.
 
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