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.
=====
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. […]
=====
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.” […]
No comments:
Post a Comment