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By Root 1125 0

in relation to unreasonable laws, if you get caught, you won’t be happy. That leaves room for trying a lot of drugs, especially if you are willing to travel. But let us begin right here in the United States and see what we can do. We can drink tea and coffee not only as productivity drugs, but also as happiness drugs. That might mean only a change in one’s mind, but it may involve switching beverages, and maybe finding different places and ways to drink them. We can refuse to let cultural ideas stop us from trying pharmaceuticals that might otherwise interest us. We can take it as a responsibility to experience something of this nature. When we drink alcohol we can think about it as a possibility for minor metaphysical events, not only as a technique to numb ourselves; we can see it as a different kind of intelligence rather than as stupidity.

Smart people have been analyzing the meaning, benefits, and drawbacks of drugs for a long time. Centuries. Millennia. Their overall message is that human chemistry and the chemistry of the world are separated by a porous border. In a normal life we are naturally affected by all sorts of external chemicals. The question is not whether to take drugs, but which ones, and with what expectations. Modern pundits who claim we are dosing ourselves too freely are not speaking with historical knowledge or philosophical sense. Keeping your mind in only one place is not a very assertive way to relate to life, to search it for happiness, or for truth. The point is to be equally robust in analyzing and controlling your experience. And being savaged by inner pain doesn’t do anyone any good. Through history, many people have let their drug use get out of hand, but many people have managed quite well. It is worth thinking about. In this section I have tried to jostle your sense of categories when it comes to drugs, partially just because jostling categories allows us to get a fresh perspective on reality. That is to say, the issue of drug categories has been here used in the service of a wider investigation into how people think and how thinking changes over time. The trances of value seem dependant on categories, so you can wake yourself up by confronting the fact that the categories are fantasies. You are not ever going to be happy all the time. Since we are human and the universe is not, there will always be disappointment. Sour charm is in no danger of being cured. But as all graceful-life philosophies agree, sometimes it is good to let yourself be helped and let yourself be happy, and if you block off whole categories of solace as forbidden, you might miss out on what you need.

Money

Everybody knows that money doesn’t buy happiness. Yet it sure feels like it would, if only we had a little more. These opposing convictions are both wrong. They are the two key features of our modern myth about money. The truth revealed by historical research is this: money can buy happiness, and it already did. Most Americans are living in a blissful world free of the sorrows, sores, and losses experienced by most people throughout history and throughout the world. What we do with money nowadays is to remind ourselves of this triumph. Above poverty, it is not very important how much money you have. What counts is that you spend what you have in a way that makes sense to your feelings and to your reason. To do this, you need historical context. The world is not so disenchanted and rational as people think; our culture has fixations that drag us around. When we are more aware of them, we can see how money works for us, and we can augment our pleasure with understanding. We need to remember that most people through history have been racked by work that was bloody-knuckled drudgery, the periodic desperate hunger of their children, and for all but the wealthiest, the additional threat of violent animals. Nowadays a lot of what we use money for is a symbolic acting-out of these triumphs.

It is a modern myth that money and happiness are unrelated for the wise and in direct proportion for the shallow. They are never