= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DeVliegendeHollander comments on "Spiritual" techniques that actually work thread - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (68)
I'm pretty sure initiation rituals artificially heighten the likelihood the initiate will remember that moment vividly (as a flashbulb memory), then introduce concepts or beliefs that the initiatory tradition wants to pass on.
A big one is non-identification with the self, and the radically different state of mind this leads to. Sam Harris' book "Waking Up" explains this decently, entirely without and explicitly against supernaturalism.
Apart from that, I think the storehouse of spiritual techniques has been looted fairly exhaustively. Some things have been found to work in some way (astral projection as lucid dreaming, amulets as comfort objects, various beliefs in mind-altering speech as hypnosis and NLP, various forms of meditation as techniques of relaxation and improved cognitive control) while most have been found to be nonsense. I can't think of any the jury is still out on, except the two above.
Thank you. I mean the looted ones too, I don't think everybody knows about them.
For example, here is a technique I always thought it should exist and simply cannot find it, nowhere at all, maybe it doesn't or maybe I am just really missing something: I have always thought that with something like rapid breathing I should be able to stimulate my central nervous system the way say amphetamines do it, to temporarily be quicker thinking, physically faster, and ignore fatigue, it would be handy in many situations, really this is something that probably exists because if the CNS can be stimulated at all then probably not only through chems, and I am probably just overlooking something. Maybe there is a tribal people somewhere who do this jumping up and down and chanting, calling it a sacred rage induced by the war god or something.
Hyperventilating leads to hallucinations instead of stimulation. I went to a Holotropic Breathwork session once. Some years before that, I went to a Sufi workshop in NYC where Hu was chanted to get the same result. I have to admit I cheated at both events -- I limited my breathing rate or depth so not much happened to me.
Listening to the reports from the other participants of the Holotropic Breathwork session made my motives very clear to me. I don't want any of that. I like the way my mind works. I might consider making purposeful and careful changes to how my mind works, but I do not want random changes. I don't take psychoactive drugs for the same reason.
With me, hyperventilation leads to just a woozy/l'm-gonna-faint feeling.
As an aside, if you hyperventilate for several minutes, you then can stop breathing for a surprisingly long time. You just go around your daily routine -- and not breathe. It's a weird experience :-/
Yes, I learned that from no-equipment divers. With this simple trick people can look around down there with just a mask and fin. They claim with practice the mental effect disappears.
For free diving, sure, but the weirdness is in walking around your kitchen (or office, or whatever) for several minutes and not breathing. Especially when you realize that if you want to talk, you need some flow of air in your throat :-/
Don't hyperventilate before diving (or at all, really). It doesn't oxygenate blood more than ordinary breathing but it does confuse the breathing reflex allowing you to overextend yourself and possibly drown.
Random changes can be useful. Human minds are not good at being creative and exploring solution space. They can't give "random" numbers, and will tend to round ideas they have towards the nearest cached pattern. The occasional jolt of randomness can lead to unexplored sections of solution space.
Investigating the methods of Wim Hof may yield some useful data points in this search. His book is painfully long winded and self-indulgent, and I'm only half way through without finding any direct methods, but the separate synopsis of the method I've found through google has thus far proven to be both invigorating and grounding when I've tried it.
http://highexistence.com/the-wim-hof-method-revealed-how-to-consciously-control-your-immune-system/