Friday, December 27, 2019

Guru Unaffected by LSD – Christmas Flounder (N.C.) – Japanese Urban Legends



Scientific American
24 December 2019

Baba Ram Dass and the Tale of the Acid-Gobbling Guru
Skeptics have questioned a story told by the late counterculture icon in his classic best seller Be Here Now

    By John Horgan

[…] To commemorate the man, I’ll tell a little tale about him. It begins in 1999 when I interviewed psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna in New York City. McKenna said he doubted a famous anecdote in Be Here Now involving […] a guru whom Ram Dass met in India in 1967[.] […] When Maharajji asked Ram Dass for “medicine,” Ram Dass gave him three pills, each containing 305 micrograms of LSD, a very strong dose. The guru gulped down all three pills. “All day long I’m there,” Ram Dass wrote, “and every now and then he twinkles at me and nothing—nothing happens!”  LSD didn’t affect Maharajji, Ram Dass implied, because the guru already had such a profoundly mystical outlook. […]

[Via the Wayback Machine]
The Scientific Curmudgeon
12 July 2006
Did Ram Dass’s Guru Really Take LSD?
by John Horgan

See also John Horgan, Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 185-6.

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Wilmington StarNews [NC]
24 December 2019

Is local Christmas fish tale fishy, or a perfect muse?

[…] [Newsman Paul Jennewein] first penned the tale of the Christmas Flounder on Christmas Eve in 1950 and it has been annually reprinted ever since. Apparently in the Great Depression, Wilmington folks, too poor for turkeys and hams on Christmas Eve, slipped out into local waters with lights and gigs. They would bring home flounder for Christmas morning, stuffing them with local delicacies like oysters, crabs, collards and grits. These dishes supposedly appeared on tables across the region, even after the bleak days of the Depression had passed. […]

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Nippon.com [Japan]
27 December 2019

Japanese Urban Legends from the “Slit-Mouthed Woman” to “Kisaragi Station”
The story of a terrifying “slit-mouthed woman” who approached children in the late 1970s kickstarted Japan’s modern urban legends.

[…] Compared with word of mouth, urban legends conveyed digitally tend to go to one of the two extremes, either staying completely the same or radically changing during the process. “When you pass on a story orally, you’re always going by memory, so even if there are small changes the main details stay the same. Online, you can copy and paste or transform it completely if you want.” […]

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