Self-Altered States, The False Mind-Body Dichotomy, and the Chemical Factories in our Glands

What percentage of the world is drunk or high at any given moment?

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It seems like lots of people are. The more people I meet, the more commonplace it seems to be a little stoned on something.

It seems like even more when you consider that prescription pharmaceuticals do just as much to alter our mental states as the illegal substances do.

Maybe I'm a bit stodgy, but my own chemical balance is volatile enough that I've found I don't really have to goose it with external molecules too much. Or maybe I'm a bit hypocritical, because I have gone through periods of steady, if not heavy, drinking. Or maybe I'm just a coward, since the thought of a criminal record for getting sloppy with a drug deal has always been enough to keep me far from shady dealings.

Then there's the fact that this brain is the only one I've got. Any potential of messing it up, however remote, is too much of a risk. By any cost-benefit analysis, it's not worth it.

^{(I pause here to watch a fat lady with a purse making a last-minute run for the train, holding it up by a minute. Or it might have been a heavy man with a fat briefcase. That's the thing about going nearsighted - leave your glasses off and the world outside gets to turn into an impressionist fuzzy wonderland.)}

My father was a paranoid schizophrenic suicide, and lord knows the 1960s drug culture went a long way to messing up his chemical balance. So that's another reason I handle my own psyche with chemical-kid gloves. I probably feel more stable now than I ever have, and it's taken me 40+ years to get this strong.

Today, the results of all that 60s and 70s drug experimentation have been institutionalized, corporatized, patented, marketed, and even made compulsory for any child who is incapable of sitting still under fluorescent lighting for eight hours a day.

DARE to keep kids off drugs. But give them their Ritilin. CPS is in the wings to take them from you, if you don't.

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From a philosophical perspective, drugs throw a monkey-wrench into dualist theories of mind-body separation.

If we have minds (and even, potentially, souls) that are separate from the sweetbreads in our skulls, then why do our thoughts go all sideways when we drop a tab of acid or have a couple of drinks? How do those chemicals alter our "selves," if our selves are separate from the brains that sustain them?

It's not like our meat computers suddenly have a hard time connecting to our self-databases. As if the data of who we are is out there in some spiritual cloud, and by taking drugs we get to forget about our ideal (platonic) personalities for a while, and then stumble back to them when the trip is over.

We say things like, "It wasn't really me. I was drinking that night."

Sorry, but if you were drinking, the alcohol was you.

Or: "Man, I'm so high I don't even know who I am." Wrong. You are so high your brain is no longer able to provide a framework of identity to your perception. So here, in this moment, you are no one. And there, in that moment, from your perspective, you will always have been no one.

Then there's the mental performance enhancing drugs to consider. Paul Erdos, one of the most well published and celebrated mathematicians of all time, was a copious pill-popper. He was fond of uppers and amphetamines and a bunch of the stuff we're pushing on our kids today. They kept him publishing into his twilight years, which is a rarity, among mathematicians.

A colleague, concerned with the amount of drugs Erdos was using, bet him he couldn't go a month without taking pills.

Erdos won the bet. But during the time he was clean, he didn't write a single paper. Does that mean he wasn't really such a great thinker, after all? Or that there was some Platonic "Erdos Mind" out there, which he wasn't able to connect to without the help of some mental-accelerating molecules? Or was the real Paul Erdos just an ordinary guy, who spent his life as a falsehood, publishing genius papers in an altered state?

Nah. This is all bullshit. Our thoughts are who we are, and they're indistinguishable from the meat that makes them and the sea of chemicals and electrical impulses and the sensory impulses that feed into them. We're all body and we're all brain and we're all mind. There are no dividing lines between them.

And so much of who we are is hormonal. Glandular.

In Iain Banks' Culture novels, people have evolved (or maybe they were surgically altered; I can't remember) to the point where they contain chemical factories in their own bodies.

By conscious decision, they can "gland" pain-killers, or anti-anxiety drugs, or caffeine.

This sounds dangerous in the long term, or even the medium term. Who isn't down with metabolizing a dopamine hit now and again? How long is it before that's all you're doing, all day long, until you starve to death?

It would take a lot of training and will-power before you could introduce this sort of technology without destroying a culture. (Plus, self-glanding caffeine would kill the ritual of having a nice cup of coffee.)

But in a way, we already have a bit of this self-glanding power.

The trick is learning to control it.

Men, try this:

Close your eyes for a minute and think about your favorite sexy actress (or porn star). Imagine you've just had a nice steak dinner together, and now you're back at your place (or hers, if you're a slob) and she's slipped into something more comfortable, and said, "What do you want to do? I'm up for anything."

Go ahead and run that simulation in your head for a minute.

Meanwhile: ladies -

Imagine you're in a high-end shoe store. I don't know, Manolo, or Ferragamo, or Prada or summit. It's in New York. No, Paris. Or Milan. And on the way in you passed a slender man in a dark suit who said, "Go ahead beautiful, get anything you like," and handed you his credit card. And wouldn't you know, all those strappy shiny pointy shoes are just your size.

Feel that tingle? That's self-directed glanding.

(Well, actually I directed it. Which might be a little gay - either because I just turned on a man or because I just talked about women's shoes.)

This what the world is doing to us, all day long. Pushing our buttons and filling us with our self-manufactured drugs: testosterone, adrenaline, dopamine. And that's what we're doing to ourselves, when we watch a movie or read a book or listen to music. Sometimes we're pushing those buttons as a form of practice, to learn how we'll react to something in the "real world." And sometimes we're pushing them just because it feels good to soak our brains in a different cocktail for a while.

When we meditate, and clear our minds of conscious thought, we're trying to get back to a baseline - under the assumption that we can achieve some temporary inner peace by banishing stimulations from inside and out that monkey with our chemical balance. When we exercise, we're getting accustomed to extremes, so that we can live more comfortably in a wider range of day-to-day exertions. And all of this is worthwhile.

And I think it's worthwhile, too, to manufacture our own joy, our own passion, our own serenity and strength. And to do it, as much as possible, by looking at things, and touching them, and using our senses, and by turning ideas over in our minds, and by just thinking about stuff.

It takes practice.

And I've found that drugs are such an easy shortcut to places that are so "far out," the people who use them don't ever really learn how to navigate their own psychological neighborhood.

And that's a shame. Because there's a lot of great stuff there to explore.

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