| >Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off. >I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away. There has been some "intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states."[0] I came across this while researching meditation practices, and stumbled upon Andrew Newberg's work[1] on the neuroscience of religion.[2][3] He's spoken about an experiment where the neural correlates of nuns experienced in the "centering prayer" exhibited similarities to people who'd taken psilocybin mushrooms.[4] I find this absolutely fascinating, yet completely expected, because the ancient literature on meditation do mention drugs in relation to meditation. For example, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras mention that "siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs, mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi."[5] In light of this, I've also thought about why, for example, there are the Five Precepts in Buddhism,[6] which are considered to be fundamental in the path towards attaining enlightenment. We've often understood it as a code of ethics for Buddhists, but what if it arose as a way to protect meditators from harming themselves and others in case of adverse episodes during meditation practice? [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0147... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_B._Newberg [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/what-happ... [4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/28/psychedelic-drug-b... [5] https://realitysandwich.com/11276/psychedelics_light_yoga_su... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_precepts |