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— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER)
Sep 30, 2021

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Just say Yes

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.”

Michael Pollan agrees. Nitrous was not his drug of choice, 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.

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17! https://t.co/FD61tAEF5C

17! https://t.co/FD61tAEF5C

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Sep 29, 2021

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@RobertTalisse Does it make you stronger, or… ?

@RobertTalisse Does it make you stronger, or… ?

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I’ve just posted on my Blog about: Into the woods https://t.co/a2FMis7R6J

I’ve just posted on my Blog about: Into the woods https://t.co/a2FMis7R6J

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Sep 28, 2021

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Into the woods

Today in Happiness we consider Buddhist and Stoic prescriptions for  the “existential illness” that finds us deluded, grasping, and erroneously attaching to the impermanent world’s chintzy shiny baubles. Both traditions propose therapies.

Our campus counseling center sent out a flyer yesterday, advertising its services “free of charge” to the campus community. Freer still for many of us, and more effective, might simply be a walk in the woods or down the street. Or on a sandwalk.

Positive emotions come into play on a good walk. For the Stoics emotions were “problematic because they are inseparable from faulty beliefs,” but that surely is a faulty overstatement. Some emotions lead us down the wrong path, others make us feel at home in the woods and the universe and our own skin. Jennifer Michael Hecht puts it well in Doubt: A History, in her discussion of “graceful-life philosophies” which offers a lovely forest metaphor for happiness:

The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest… we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some *blueberries, sit beneath a  tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest… Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time.

Maybe that’s the sort of therapy Cicero had in mind when he said we can be our own physicians (not meta-) when treating “diseases of the soul.” No license required. Just hang a sign.

RAIN is a nice counseling acronym (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-identification), the gist of which is that you are not your pain. Let it go.

Buddhist awakening involves an end of rebirth, when karma stops “accumulating.” Doesn’t that just mean an end, full-stop? Is that cure possibly not worse than the disease? Or is that very question emblematic of western delusion?

Jhanas are states of “deep concentration” or “absorptions” meant to facilitate “detachment from worldly delights.” I’ve written about that, I’m still trying to understand why I’d ever want to plug my springs of delight. For the attainment of nirvana, presumably. But that sounds mystical. Doesn’t have to, according to our author. “A ‘little nirvana’ could consist in a state of more contentment and less reactivity.” Nothing wrong with that. We’re all suffering from less contentment and more reactivity than is healthy, mentally or physically. A little forest bath couldn’t hurt.

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Enraging. “I fault the pastors & comm’ty leaders for failing to teach the need to protect the vulnerable-the elderly and the sick and the babies…Most of all, I fault the right-wing pundits…for promulgating harebrained notions of freedom and a baseless suspicion of science.” https://t.co/Ek0LYfflgL

Enraging. “I fault the pastors & comm’ty leaders for failing to teach the need to protect the vulnerable-the elderly and the sick and the babies…Most of all, I fault the right-wing pundits…for promulgating harebrained notions of freedom and a baseless suspicion of science.” https://t.co/Ek0LYfflgL

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER)
Sep 28, 2021

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@JulianBaggini The Greatest Generation (though also taken), but write about the birth of Pragmatism (Peirce, James, Dewey…)

@JulianBaggini The Greatest Generation (though also taken), but write about the birth of Pragmatism (Peirce, James, Dewey…)

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Sep 27, 2021

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My Intro students are all younger than Google. Explains a lot. https://t.co/Wg8Bo61b2C

My Intro students are all younger than Google. Explains a lot. https://t.co/Wg8Bo61b2C

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Sep 27, 2021

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I’ve just posted on my Blog about: Playing right https://t.co/p6efOpTYWg

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Sep 27, 2021

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