It also depends on what "zero effects" means, exactly.

Thanks to a lot of meditation myself, I generally remain almost perfectly lucid on very large doses (10g+) of psilocybe cubensis. But boy, stuff is sure still happening. It's closely related to this quote above:

"Now the whole idea of a meditative practice is the process of very simply extricating awareness from the identification with thought & sensation." - Ram Dass

The more one practices this, the less one "loses oneself" in the ever-changing swirl of phenomena passing through the experiential field.

I should also add that this "witnessing" phase is not the end of the story, either. I'm not necessarily a big fan of Ken Wilber, but I like how he describes it here:

"This is actually the profound discovery of… the pure divine Self, the formless Witness, causal nothingness, the vast Emptiness in which the entire world arises, stays a bit, and passes. And you are That. You are not the body, not the ego, not nature, not thoughts, not this, not that – you are a vast Emptiness, Freedom, Release, and Liberation.

With this discovery… you are halfway home. You have disidentified from any and all finite objects; you rest as infinite Consciousness. You are free, open, empty, clear, radiant, released, liberated, exalted, drenched in a blissful emptiness that exists prior to space, prior to time, prior to tears and terror, prior to pain and mortality and suffering and death. You have found the great Unborn, the vast Abyss, the unqualifiable Ground of all that is, and all that was, and all that ever shall be.

But why is that only halfway home? Because as you rest in the infinite ease of consciousness, spontaneously aware of all that is arising, there will soon enough come the great catastrophe of Freedom and Fullness: the Witness itself will disappear entirely, and instead of witnessing the sky, you are the sky; instead of touching the earth, you are the earth; instead of hearing the thunder, you are the thunder. You and the entire Kosmos become One Taste – you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, hold Mt. Everest in the palm of your hand; supernovas swirl in your heart and the solar system replaces your head…"

Maharajji's (Neem Karoli Baba) only possession was a blanket and he was living in a remote village in North India in the 60's. There is little chance that he had access to the drugs you mentioned.

And the LSD that was carried by Ram Dass was made by Sandoz, arguably the purest LSD that you could ever get.

May be reading Ram Dass' account of the event in _Be Here Now_ will provide some much needed context.

An anecdote being published in a book doesn’t make it true.

When you read about Indian holy men, don’t take things literally. Instead, appreciate the message of the story

Correct and one should also point out that the field of yogis, spiritual teachers and holy men is full of fraudsters and charlatans.

That people seem willing to give unwarranted credit to some famous guy's claims does not invalidate your point. Ram Dass has said and written a lot of nonsense.

It is worth more than a downvote to mention here .. even if what you say is completely accurate, it is not the right time to say this, for really a lot of reasons

To address the content of your ill-timed comment, I enjoyed the book "Holy Madness" by Georg Feurstein. Details on request...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Feuerstein

Theory: It had no effect because his sadhana already crossed the zone of consciousness LSD moves one to.

In advanced meditation alot of “effort” is spent on ignoring ephemeral phenomena including the kinds of visual and auditory phenomena LSD induces. An expert meditator at his level would likely be able to move freely into the “LSD Frequency” and out again with no drugs required.

I think it had an effect, but it is possible that, through meditation, he had already achieved similar states of mind and become adept at controlling/navigating them.

This is totally anecdotal and based only on experiences I've had though. It's hard to make blanket statements about the nature of psychedelics.

brains are a lot more complex than ordinary daily mind lets on.. corollary, things happen that we didnt know could happen

I call bullshit on that. Besides the rampant charlatanism that infects the "expert" meditator community, my own multi-decade experience with meditation tells me that anyone who compares it to LSD or other strong psychedelics doesn't know what he's talking about.

You could be meditating for 10 years and not come anywhere near close to what 1 hit of LSD unveils about the mind and "you".

To be fair, we have no way to disprove anything about another person's subjective experience. Someone could have a special aptitude or talent in "meditation", broadly speaking. Our own accomplishments may not be any indication.

Everyone's experience of sweetness may indeed be different, but at least the standard way to induce the experience of sweetness is ubiquitous and immediate. Just taste sugar. Decades of meditative experience is far less commonly found.

I also have "multi-decade experience with meditation" and, to me, LSD is a kind of toy. (Not in the sense of something to give to kids to play with, but rather in the sense of something not worth the time of sober seekers.)

YMMV

Beautiful way of putting it.

Ram Das himself admitted that he later found out that Maharaj-ji didn't actually take the LSD, but faked taking it.

Absolutely, either he wasn’t given LSD or the dude was on a tremendous amount of benzos. I read elsewhere that the dose was 1200 mcg, which is a very strong dose. Most recreational tabs are 75-250 mcg

LSD having no effect on Maharaj-Ji is about as likely as Prince Andrew not being able to sweat because of a scare during the Falkland War.

Reading that sentence, “it had zero effect”, since there’s no context, no details, no elaboration at all, I wondered to myself if what Ram meant was that it had no lasting effect, no spiritual effect on Maharaj-ji, that it didn’t change his mind or world view at all. Perhaps Mahara-ji was tripping just like anyone, but afterward didn’t care or see it as any sort of enlightenment, and saw it the same way any of us would view getting drunk. That would have been a pretty serious blow for Ram; his own belief at the time was that LSD changed his life and presumably his hope in sharing it was it would change others. Maybe when it didn’t change Maharaj-ji’s life, Ram viewed it as having had zero effect.

"...I added yet another, making the total dosage nine hundred micrograms–certainly not a dose for beginners. Then he threw all the pills into his mouth. My reaction was one of shock mixed with fascination of a social scientist eager to see what would happen.

He allowed me to stay for an hour– and nothing happened. Nothing whatsoever.

He just laughed at me."

Did the guru pull a fast one?

An hour is not sufficient time for a peak.

The most believable explanation is that the guru only pretended to take them, or their trip just hadn't really started. I don't know why Ram Dass doesn't seem to consider these options, and it makes me wonder if he's too credulous in general.

Can’t find the reference, but according to a contemporary, Maharaj-ji palmed the LSD.

Then later, mixed it with sacred ash, and gave it as prasad to his devotees. Who were duly impressed with his shakti!

It makes sense if we think about the adult mind as a rigid psychologic construct that temporarily loses rigidity when taking a psychodelic; so it doesn't has any effect if the mind has no rigid psy-construct to begin with.