Drugs and the soul

[axon]

If you look through my posts there is a link to a paper where the propagation of light along these, in your opinion non-existent, meridians behaves different from when measured along random chosen points removed from the meridians.

Which post?

 

[axon]

I have accupuncture for my (absolutely head shattering) migranes. Nothing else seems to work. Accupuncture works on the maridian lines to rebalance the flow of chi. The evidence? My own experience that it stops the pain.

If accupunture relieves your migraines then this is evidence that sticking pins in you relieves migraines. It isn't evidence for meridians or chi.
I'm all for the therapeutic effects of acupunture, there's been a few studies showing it can be useful, but there haven't been AFAIK any studies showing the existence of meridians or chi. You have to remember that the idea of chi pre dates pretty much everything we know about the body now.

 

[Crispy]

By explaining the body in terms of Chi etc, treatments and diagnoses can be made. Some of them work (and well). Until western medicine, this was the best model available for treating illness. You could even call it an incomplete science of a sort. The only missing part is falsification - there never was an effort to systematically disprove the model.

Likewise, explaining consciousness as the result of an extra-material soul acting on the material body seems to fit the data available to pre-scientific humanity. People are full of slimey goop, how could that possibly be the seat of me? Hallucinogenic experiences seem to support this idea, as the soul is cut free from the body.

Both these concepts are improvements over an ignorantly savage worldview, and allow improvements in health, philosophy and civilisation.

However, as time has gone on, the set of evidence for these models has shrunk and shrunk, until the only evidence left is anecdotal and subjective. This is not the imposition of an ideology, but just the steady methodical pruning of science.

--

Aagh, got to get off the computer - this post is a mess, back to edit later

 

[Purdie]

i meant this one

 

[Wee Beastie]

If accupunture relieves your migraines then this is evidence that sticking pins in you relieves migraines. It isn't evidence for meridians or chi.
I'm all for the therapeutic effects of acupunture, there's been a few studies showing it can be useful, but there haven't been AFAIK any studies showing the existence of meridians or chi. You have to remember that the idea of chi pre dates pretty much everything we know about the body now.

There have been plenty of studies that show the energy field around the body and how various activities of practices affect it.
Googling for 'human energy field' brings up loads of stuff. The 1st site I looked at had loads of citations of studies check: www.vxm.com/21R.43.html
Various practices and meditation techniques can bring us to a subtle enough point where we can feel it. It's not too difficult. As soon as you study a martial art like tai-chi or aikido you learn various simple chi exercises which demonstrate the profound power of chi. In other martial arts you also learn how various blows affect the body in various ways: neurological shutdown points etc... just as in acupuncture or shiatsu you learn how energy flows through the body.
Frankly I think it's ridiculous to think that energy does not flow through the body. Every physical particle has an energy field.

 

[Purdie]

This page can not be displayed
link not working for me

 

[Wee Beastie]

This page can not be displayed
link not working for me

Sorry, should be working now.

 

[Purdie]

There being a God is the ultimate excuse to avoid personal responsibility for one's actions in life. And one of the consequences is as you say wee; better to remain ingnorant, yet secure, than aware and free. It's almost like we're all living in golden cages, beautifully made and looking, and so we stay there. We have the key, but refuse to leave the cage. It's secure, and to leave would be to go naked with nobody to look after you.

However secure the cage feels, there is no freedom in a cage. And those that never leave the cage have wasted their one stab at life.

Taking certain drugs demands that the user open the cage, throw the key away and throw the cage away, and simply live outside. People can do the same thing without drugs, but it just takes much longer.

Some people never had golden cages to start off with and maybe taking drugs is one way then of getting out of the rotting rustbuckets they find themselves in.
Others think drugs are the golden cages and once in their cage just get dazzled by the intensity of the gold.
Then there is also the kind that sells golden cages of course ... but we won't go into those now

 

[Crispy]

As soon as you study a martial art like tai-chi or aikido you learn various simple chi exercises which demonstrate the profound power of chi. In other martial arts you also learn how various blows affect the body in various ways: neurological shutdown points etc... just as in acupuncture or shiatsu you learn how energy flows through the body.
Frankly I think it's ridiculous to think that energy does not flow through the body. Every physical particle has an energy field.

Do Tai Chi -> Feel relaxed and energised.
Pinch this nerve -> Relieve pain in this limb
Stick 10 pins along this line -> Loosen this joint

All these things happen and I do not deny them. What is far more interesting is why these things happen. We should try and find out. This requires an inquisative mind and a rigorous emperical method - ie based on tests and results, not self-reporting (well known to be the least reliable method of collecting data).

However, that page you linked to contains so much that is non-rogorous and fluffy, it cannot be called science. Each researcher has a different opinion about the Human Energy Field, often connected with the latest technology of the day (photogrophy, vacuum tubes, atomics).

Don't think that science 'ignores' these phenomena. They have an effect on the physical world, and that is science's domain. I am yet to be convinced, but can be by good science. Is there any? I want to see the HEF measured in units and it's effect measured, photographed, documented beyond doubt.

 

[axon]

Frankly I think it's ridiculous to think that energy does not flow through the body. Every physical particle has an energy field.

Of course energy flows through the body. It can be in the form of heat energy, work energy, energy as in electrical potentials in nerbous transmission.
But what energy has to have is a mechanism of flowing through the body. Once you've identified this energy, you must know in what form it takes (otherwise you wouldn't have identified it), and this should lead to how the energy affects the body and how the effects are transmitted.

Every particle does have an energy field, but it is how strong that energy field is relative to everything else that is important. The energy field of a proton is nothing to me, I'm much too big.

 

[Purdie]

Bump

bumpety bump

 

[Purdie]

Sorry, should be working now.

It is. Not read it proper yet but seems to have some good references worth checking out

 

[axon]

bumpety bump

Give us bleedin' chance to read it! I occasionally have to do things other than U75
Anyway, had a quick read. Hmm, there's a lot of experimental details missing from the paper. The results are not very significant (a quick look at the means shows that propogation along the meridian or not meridian are within each others standard deviations).
Also, looking at the points they have chosen. I have a visible vein where they claim the meridian is. I can easily believe that the presence of a blood vessel would affect the propogation of light.

 

[Purdie]

i get too excited sometime

There were other links in that thread related to it.
Also the historical background of chinese medicine plays a big part too.
But by the looks of it at the end of the day i reckon the glory of figuring meridians out will not go to medicine but more likely physics in one form or other. That ... is a discussion in itself ....

I can easily believe that the presence of a blood vessel would affect the propogation of light.

In what way?

 

[axon]

Acupunture eh ? In my mind I can see that there could be feasible mechanisms for it to occur. For example, stimulation of pressure and pain receptors at a point leads to electrical signalling that can propogate to the brain. In theory it's possible to wire this signal up to anything else that goes on in the brain, maybe activating the "I feel happy because I'm being treated pathway". But it doesn't seem to matter where you stick the pins, so it could just be a generic affect.

As for blood vessels and light, it's just a minor point but they absorb light differently to tendons. Mine are reflecting blue light at me, whilst I can't see any light being reflected through my skin from my tendons.

 

[ZWord]

Not going to address the question directly then? If consciousnes is a result of some mysterious "soul" which isn't bound by the rules of the material world, then how come something as mundane as a few chemicals can alter the way that the mind works so radically?

I don't like Ketamine, but occasionally against my better judgement I've taken it through the nose, and I have the impression it leaves my brain switched off, and my consciousness, "pure?" Bizarrely, at this point, although I have no idea what's going on, or why, everything runs smoothly. I think- I want beer, and it is passed, I think I want spliff, and it comes. An intimation of a world without ego, though I think my ego is worth saving, which is why I dont' like enima tekno.

 

[ZWord]

It is strange that drugs can produce spiritual effects. But my conclusion from that is that matter is spirit.

 

[Poi E]

Some of the effects of drugs can be easily replicated by starving yourself of oxygen or self-infliction of a head injury, so I don't really believe that they connect you with some hoobly joobly spirt thing. They're just good fun. Most of the time.

 

[fela fan]

It is strange that drugs can produce spiritual effects. But my conclusion from that is that matter is spirit.

maybe not so strange. Drugs take us out of society's constraints, we no longer conform to standard expected behaviour as decided by society. We have a big blind lifted from in front of us. We no longer do what we're told to do. We rebel, we get free.

We tap into the spiritual world that so many in the east see as a matter of course, but which is hidden from us.

 

[Fruitloop]

Some of the effects of drugs can be easily replicated by starving yourself of oxygen or self-infliction of a head injury, so I don't really believe that they connect you with some hoobly joobly spirt thing. They're just good fun. Most of the time.

Apart from Salvia, which actually feels a lot like a head injury.

 

[Poi E]

Apart from Salvia, which actually feels a lot like a head injury.

I've been tempted but after reading some of the stories around here,

 

[Fruitloop]

It's worth a crack actually, it's an interesting drug with a completely different pharmacology to anything else - there's no familiarity about the salvia space the way that there is with new phenethylamines or tryptamines. You'll never have had your consciousness changed before the way it is on salvia, it's just that it's not really fun as such.