[ExI] Open Individualism

[ilsa]

Hi Jason, can you jump off this and have a conversation with me about this
and that? My favorite LSD story is when I was under 16 and walked into a
meeting of the doctor's at the London hospital that was using LSD to cure
alcoholics which is I believe how The Harvard connection got into the LSC
research. So I heard from these doctors how they had formulated the
language to label the experience. And in my older years that I sit here cuz
I'm not 16 anymore It has given me an opportunity to notice how people
label things that they don't understand. But that's another story.
The current interest by the medical community in the psychedelic experience
interests me greatly. I know young people who are growing mushrooms and
making preparations and doing all sorts of chemical hoo-ha. So I am very
interested in talking with you about everything that you said in this
marvelous post.
I went off to study theology because of that experience and others that I
had as a young person to see how these experiences happen naturally.
Smile, ilsa

On Fri, Jan 5, 2024, 6:24 PM Henry Rivera via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> On Jan 5, 2024, at 8:49 AM, Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> …
>
> On Thu, Jan 4, 2024, 9:12 PM Henry Rivera via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> It’s metaphysical.
>>
>> …
>>
> A takeaway for me is that this suggests that we can promote peace and
>> unity and the benefits noted in Bill‘s moral prescription post by promoting
>> ego-loss/psychedelic experiences.
>>
>
> Do most people have the experience of ego-loss in your experience? And
> does it happen reliably for those it happens to?
>
> Jason
>
>
> It’s highly dose-dependent for most psychedelics, LSD being the prototype
> and most studied. DMT and ketamine for example will have a different slope
> relative to most other psychedelics in a graph of the relationship between
> dose and “depth” of a psychedelic experience and also ego-loss, but there
> is still causal relationship there.
>
>
> You can see the dose-dependent relationship in the charts
> in “Dose-response relationships of LSD-induced subjective experiences in
> humans“ (2023) in Neuropsychopharmocology at
> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01588-2
>
>
> In particular, notice the charts for Dread of Ego Dissolution and
> Experience of Unity (full res image of the charts here
> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01588-2/figures/1)
>
>
> I’d say a threshold dose of 100 micrograms needs to be passed
> to experience some degree of ego-loss.
>
>
> The Ego-Dissolution Inventory <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27378878/>,
> which highly correlates with the “Unity” factor of the Mystical
> Experience Questionnaire
> <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5203697/>, is often used to
> examine the depth of ego loss that a participant has felt. This has been
> used to document the dose dependence I’ve described with psilocybin use as
> well. See “Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: immediate and
> persisting dose-related effects” (2011).
> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21674151/
>
>
> Here’s a nice quote that captures the connection between ego-loss and open
> individualism I think:
>
>
> “What is Ego Dissolution on Psychedelics Like?
>
> According to our good friends at DoubleBlind,
> <https://doubleblindmag.com/ego-death/> the ego death or ego dissolution
> experience is described as being: “You are fully “in the moment
> <https://doubleblindmag.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-here-now/>” and able
> to see things from a macroscopic, more objective perspective. You are no
> longer an individual isolated from life as it takes place around you, but
> rather feel interconnected with the universe and all its inhabitants,
> experiencing intense feelings of love, euphoria, and unity while the self
> is temporarily forgotten. This state of selflessness and subsequent
> feelings of connectivity with the universe are often referred to as “ego
> death.””
> https://psychedelic.support/resources/ego-dissolution-during-psychedelic-experiences/
>
>
> As this also came up in this thread, if anyone is interested, here is an
> article that argues that “Ego dissolution experiences reveal that the
> self-model plays an important binding function in cognitive processing, but
> the self does not exist.”
> https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/nix016/3916730?login=false
>
> Provocative, I know. I haven’t read that one yet incidentally.
>
>
> Take care
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