Hey guys!
It’s been a couple months since last time I posted.
The astute reader might be wondering how the recent QRI retreat in México turned out. It was amazing! I went internet-silent when I started the Jhana retreat (as a participant) and didn’t tune back in until after the whole retreat was over about five weeks later. I’m still integrating, exploring research threads from the retreat, and sifting through the data we gathered. And there is so much to talk about! We will be releasing the first tranche of the retreat output in September. Stay Tuned! (keep an eye on: heart.qri.org/).
Importantly, I am very happy to report that a decent number of participants had Jhana experiences during the meditation portion of the retreat, and a decent number of participants explored up to a “breakthrough” dose of 5-MeO-DMT during the 5-MeO-DMT portion of the retreat. We had the appropriate freshness of phenomenality, group drive, and technical expertise to be able to characterize key similarities and differences between these exotic states of consciousness… and we found a lot. I won’t spoil any results, but I’m happy to say we definitely have a novel, unique, and drata-driven view on the relationship between these states that will (I hope) significantly contribute to the conversation and our collective understanding.
So, I can say with confidence that QRI ha some really nice treats in store for you all in the near future. :-)
More prosaically, and for those who are wondering, I’m also happy to report the retreat ended with zero scorpion stings (context)! Our protocols (e.g. UV lights to find them and a standard, practiced, method to remove them) seemed really effective in the context of Tepoztlán, Morelos. :-) I don’t expect scorptions to be a recurring problem (I have a plan!) and in reality they are a minor contributor to the micromort count of the event (which is dominated by transportation to and from the airport, it turns out; we don’t often realize how dangerous driving is). But they do cause painful stings and can trigger a trip to the hospital that could easily disturb someone trying the enter the Jhanas. Hence my efforts to establish an enforce an effective prevention protocol. More on this later.
For now, let me reward you for your patience with some information-dense QRI-flavored Tier List memes I’ve been making for the last week or so…
Appendix for the above:
Cigarette damage is concave whereas alcohol damage is convex. Meaning, the health effects of going from 4 to 5 beers in a day are much larger than from 0 to 1, whereas smoking 5 vs 4 cigarettes is a tiny fraction of extra damage relative to the difference between 0 and 1. This implies there is a group of people for whom it would be genuinely good health advise to "drink less, smoke more". Essentially, if your Pareto Frontier of cigarettes x alcohol allows you to trade drinks from cigarettes and you're consuming both in a daily basis, it's possible that smoking more will be better for you on the whole (assuming it makes you drink less). *Don't drink, smoke!*
> Conclusions Smoking only about one cigarette per day carries a risk of developing coronary heart disease and stroke much greater than expected: around half that for people who smoke 20 per day. No safe level of smoking exists for cardiovascular disease. Smokers should aim to quit instead of cutting down to significantly reduce their risk of these two common major disorders. (Hackshaw et al., BMJ 2018; https://bmj.com/content/360/bmj.j5855)
> Nonlinear mendelian randomization analyses suggested nonlinear associations between alcohol consumption and both hypertension and coronary artery disease: light alcohol intake was associated with minimal increases in cardiovascular risk, whereas heavier consumption was associated with exponential increases in risk of both clinical and subclinical cardiovascular disease. (Biddinger et al., JAMA Network Open 2022.; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35333364/)
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