Just say Yes

LISTEN. Today in Happiness, after our little exam, we'll discuss what it means to Stoics to live in accordance with nature. We'll also consider the shared Stoic-Buddhist aversion to "drug-induced bliss." That's my cue to bring Michael Pollan and William James into the conversation.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience James said 

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature;

That's a remarkable observation, which he quickly tempered with the crushing corollary that 

it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning.

So, much as we should wish to affirm the Yes function, we can't sanction the degradation and poisoning. 

Does the same caveat apply to all drugs? James had (pardon the pun) high hopes for nitrous oxide, saying it taught him that 

our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

And we mustn't dismiss the other forms. "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." (Also see "The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher")

Michael Pollan agrees. Nitrous was not his drug of choice, even under tightly-controlled conditions, but psilocybin and other hallucinogens did bring him to conclude that "I am not identical with my ego..." In How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence he writes:

The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.

If dissolution of the ego results in greater heart, more altruism, a deeper spirituality and a clearer understanding of what matters in life, I say let's dissolve. But I'm still looking for ways to accomplish that in the more familiar and seemingly less risky forms of trip that don't require me to violate statutes or disorient my consciousness in ways that may feel violently disruptive. That time may come, if the predictable health trajectory of many of my cohort holds in my own case. If and when it does I hope our laws will by then have caught up to the science and the humanism of judiciously dispensed psycho-activity. I don't want to take a trip to jail. But neither do I want to suffer needlessly, or for anyone else to either.