Friday, October 06, 2006

science vs "nonscience"................

i read an article today about experiments that doctors performed on patients using lsd in the sixties. in the article they touched on how some patients recovered after as little as one session but critics said that the numbers for success were biased and the contols weren`t stringent enough. so some doctors were actually strapping patients down to meet stricter control guidelines.

now i don`t know how you feel about being restrained, but i can only imagine what being restrained while on acid would feel like................

anyway, some of the doctors in the study were suggesting that mood, dose and setting were all critical aspects of the treatment modality. if you messed with one ore more of the elements you weren`t going to have positive results.

how can you calibrate mood and setting?


so science, which utilises metrics to predict and control had a real difficult time with the touchy-feely approach to thier new drug, with it`s potential for so much in terms of understanding brain function and consciousness.

but as usual, unless they can measure elements of the system they aren`t going to advocate it`s use.

my view was that they couldn`t weaponise the drug, so eventually they found other games to play. in the meantime lsd changed the face of culture anyway.

lsd is a destroyer of the ego . one needs to be in a safe place whenever that happens, because whatever happens next is the new imprint for the psyche...........whether you are strapped to a gurney in a hospital, or in the care of a compassionate practitioner, or out in the fields, or streets of a city, or with friends.........you will be destroyed and emerge, newborn into this realm once again.

science cannot measure that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I haven't tried LSD but since reading about the experiments of Ram Dass and Timothy Leary in the 60s, I've been curious.

What would it feel like to lose my ego? Wow.

Dr.Alistair said...

well, the ego is a persistant thing. when you manage to dissolve in for a period of time, however you manage to do that, it resolves it`s self. i think the ego is the only way we interact with material reality. yoga, meditation, lsd, etc. blast us out of ego/material binding into.......um, that other space out of the four dimensional reality we live in daily. we can exist in that space for a period of time and be poetic and artistic, but if we need to sustain ourselves physically then a coarser level of perception is needed.