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Tenoke comments on LSD, Meditation, Enlightenment, and Ego Death - Less Wrong Discussion
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Textbooks on the human mind, not on meditation (as I am talking about what helps to understand the human mind)..
My statement was aimed at the idea that if you've already done a lot of mushrooms and meditation, doing another psychedelic (like LSD) or changing your meditation techniquie is going to have diminishing returns (e.g. compared to the much bigger insight or low-hanging fruit that your first trip provides).
As somebody who's also done a lot of mushrooms, the first trip provides comparatively little insight. You're so busy observing all the novelty that you don't have much time to think about it. When you're more familiar with the common effects there's time for introspection without missing anything interesting.
If you want to really study how a state works, than you need control to go in and out of the state.
If you want to research how a certain mental state leads the body to produce additional warmth than it's highly useful to be able to have control to go in and out of the state by conscious decision.
Researching the mind isn't easy. You don't see very well what the human mind does through putting people into an fMRI. Having awareness of what happens in your own mind is a good way to understand minds better.
Of course you can also learn something through experiments but it's often hard to know from reading a scientific paper in which state the participants have been during the experiment. A lot of psychology experiments are also not well replicated so you don't really know which effects are stable and which aren't.
People who are not aware of what happens in their own mind also frequently project their own issues into other people. That makes it hard to understand why other people do what they do. Meditation helps you to become aware of the stuff that happens inside your own mind.