[https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/hey-why-arent-we-doing-more-research]

Imagine that there were a bunch of intelligent people trying to figure out how best to kill other people. This isn’t hard to imagine, since this is the world we live in. But let’s add another fun little wrinkle: imagine, also, that in this alternate world, some people are capable of killing other people by shooting deadly lasers out of their eyes. Not only that, but the laser shooters claim that this is a learnable skill, and there’s some old guy who hangs out at your local coffee shop who has laser eyes—he refrains from killing you because your silly jokes amuse him. And, according to historians, people have been shooting lasers out of their eyes for millennia.

For thousands of years, people have been like, “yeah, I meditated/prayed/contemplated for a while, and, one day, my mind metamorphosed, and now my relationship with the universe is a fundamentally constructive and peaceful one. I still have problems and get sad sometimes, I’m still a human, but it all seems much easier to deal with, and my day-to-day reality is luminous and beautiful in a way it wasn’t before, like God is ever-present, or the Godhead, or the Mystery of Being, or whatever I believe in personally.” That seems nice. That seems like something that should be available to as many people as possible.