My biggest qualm against most psychedelics is not that they don’t work per say, but that they are kind of redundant and not the most effective long term, when compared to the various meditations we have.
Mindfulness-based practices have been found to reduce anxiety, depression, pain, stress and can help people bounce back faster from negative events. They can be used alongside CBT or be employed when CBT fails to make an impact. The jhanas are highly pleasurable and virtually unknown to most people. The boundless attitudes / viharas may make one feel better about themselves and improve positive affect along with willingness to express compassionate, kindness, and engage in altruistic activities. Vipassana and Dzog Chen can chip away at ego construction and the illusion of permanent selfhood, and are calming. Zazen has parallels with all day awareness activities. And like yoga, these are all easily secularizable if that is ever an issue.
Besides mindfulness and mindfulness-based practices, not much clinical research (RCTs and the like) have been done with these other forms of meditation. There aren’t too many metanalyses and systematic reviews of Vipassana, jhanas, and the viharas, particularly because rcts including them are in their infancy and many are underway.
Various meditation may be able to improved cortical thickness, make brains faster and more efficient to counter the effects of aging, among other benefits like emotional/behavioral regulation. Perhaps they can be used to make people think more like consequentialists, now that I think about it...
Taking a page out of Buddhist ethics, psychedelics aren’t inherently bad, they are just usually unskillful, as they may easily lead to heedlessness and short term ethical carelessness (as opposed to vigilance or awareness). That is to say, while it is harder to enter meditative states, and they take some practice before one can do it at whim, they are easier to exit & the same cannot apply until the physiological and physiologic effects of a substance or very good or very bad trip wears off. This argument may not apply to microdosing, though, or future biohacking medications that reduce pain.
Meditation is not a panacea, sure, but it is among the fastest growing industries & practices (doubling in terms of Us practitioners in the past decade). It’s something EA should highly consider studying and possibly funding.
Lastly, once one knows how to engage in a meditative practice, it is free and can be done anywhere with little risk or danger to others. Anyplace and anytime. It may help reduce physician or healthcare worker burnout [a factor I’d posit as possibly responsible for costly medical errors], and has been used to treat many of the psychiatric conditions you referenced. There are a few conditions (schizophrenia) where some meditations may not be helpful and may indeed be harmful, but given the scope of contemplative practices, some may be clinically applicable.
A prominent Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest Tradition (Ajahn Jayasaro) said the following, which I feel is highly relevant here:
Someone had asked (llama) Kohima, “What do you think of expanding minds through chemical means?” He said, if you have an ignorant mind then you just get expanded ignorance. I thought he was just on the spot. It is all within the sphere of darkness, isn’t it? You are still playing around with different modes of ignorance. You are not actually going beyond. You are not transcending. You are transcending one particular state of ignorance, but you are still in the same building, you haven’t got out of the building, you still haven’t got out of prison. So this sobriety is that whole turning away from all the strange and unusual experiences and visions, physiological, mental states that are available through chemical means and taking a delight in the simple down to earth clarity of awareness.”
My biggest qualm against most psychedelics is not that they don’t work per say, but that they are kind of redundant and not the most effective long term, when compared to the various meditations we have.
Mindfulness-based practices have been found to reduce anxiety, depression, pain, stress and can help people bounce back faster from negative events. They can be used alongside CBT or be employed when CBT fails to make an impact. The jhanas are highly pleasurable and virtually unknown to most people. The boundless attitudes / viharas may make one feel better about themselves and improve positive affect along with willingness to express compassionate, kindness, and engage in altruistic activities. Vipassana and Dzog Chen can chip away at ego construction and the illusion of permanent selfhood, and are calming. Zazen has parallels with all day awareness activities. And like yoga, these are all easily secularizable if that is ever an issue.
Besides mindfulness and mindfulness-based practices, not much clinical research (RCTs and the like) have been done with these other forms of meditation. There aren’t too many metanalyses and systematic reviews of Vipassana, jhanas, and the viharas, particularly because rcts including them are in their infancy and many are underway.
Various meditation may be able to improved cortical thickness, make brains faster and more efficient to counter the effects of aging, among other benefits like emotional/behavioral regulation. Perhaps they can be used to make people think more like consequentialists, now that I think about it...
Taking a page out of Buddhist ethics, psychedelics aren’t inherently bad, they are just usually unskillful, as they may easily lead to heedlessness and short term ethical carelessness (as opposed to vigilance or awareness). That is to say, while it is harder to enter meditative states, and they take some practice before one can do it at whim, they are easier to exit & the same cannot apply until the physiological and physiologic effects of a substance or very good or very bad trip wears off. This argument may not apply to microdosing, though, or future biohacking medications that reduce pain.
Meditation is not a panacea, sure, but it is among the fastest growing industries & practices (doubling in terms of Us practitioners in the past decade). It’s something EA should highly consider studying and possibly funding.
Lastly, once one knows how to engage in a meditative practice, it is free and can be done anywhere with little risk or danger to others. Anyplace and anytime. It may help reduce physician or healthcare worker burnout [a factor I’d posit as possibly responsible for costly medical errors], and has been used to treat many of the psychiatric conditions you referenced. There are a few conditions (schizophrenia) where some meditations may not be helpful and may indeed be harmful, but given the scope of contemplative practices, some may be clinically applicable.
Strong upvoted this one.
A prominent Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest Tradition (Ajahn Jayasaro) said the following, which I feel is highly relevant here:
Someone had asked (llama) Kohima, “What do you think of expanding minds through chemical means?” He said, if you have an ignorant mind then you just get expanded ignorance. I thought he was just on the spot. It is all within the sphere of darkness, isn’t it? You are still playing around with different modes of ignorance. You are not actually going beyond. You are not transcending. You are transcending one particular state of ignorance, but you are still in the same building, you haven’t got out of the building, you still haven’t got out of prison. So this sobriety is that whole turning away from all the strange and unusual experiences and visions, physiological, mental states that are available through chemical means and taking a delight in the simple down to earth clarity of awareness.”