Excerpts from The Natural Mind

Just finished The Natural Mind, by Andrew Weil. It's a worthwhile read for levelheaded arguments for and against the use of psychoactive substances in satisfying the underlying human drive to alter consciousness, and insight into solving the drug problem and using substances productively. A few excerpts that were particularly interesting or timely for me:

As philosophers love to remind us, we do not know anything absolutely. For example, we do not know that the earth travels around the sun; that is simply the most useful way we now know of interpreting what we observe -- useful because it simplifies things maximally and thereby gives us greater accuracy of description and prediction than any other concept yet proposed. If a more useful one came along, most of us would probably have as much trouble accepting it as the Ptolemaists had with the heliocentric theory. But more useful concepts do catch on, however much they are opposed, because they confer a greater degree of success in prediction and control of the phenomenal world on those who accept them. Their adherents thus become more fit in the Darwinian sense and have a distinct survival advantage in the intellectual evolution of the race.
(pp. 10-11)

The tendency for novice users of marihuana to imagine that their psychological functioning is disrupted to a much greater degree than it actually is, is most noticeable in connection with subtle changes in speech. People who are high on marihuana seem to have to do slightly more work than usual to remember from moment to moment the logical thread of what they are saying. This change manifests itself in two ways: as a tendency to forget what one started out to say, especially following an interruption, and a tendency to go off on irrelevant tangents. ... Someone not specially trained to listen for these changes would not hear them. Interestingly enough, however, marihuana users themselves often imagine they are not making sense and become anxious about other people guessing that they are high.
(pp. 88)

From Concentration and Meditation by Christmas Humphreys:
"As the sequence of day and night, so is the alternation of work and rest, and it is in these minutes of comparative repose that the difference appears between the trained and untrained student of mind-development. The beginner allows his energy to drain away in idle conversation or mental rambling, in vague revision of past experiences or anxiety over events as yet unborn, or in a thousand other wasteful ways for which, were he spending gold instead of mental energy, he would be hailed as a reckless spendthrift to be avoided by all prudent men."
(pp. 92-93)

Perhaps the most effective stratagem of the intellect is to convince its owner that is equivalent to the mind; if one accepts this notion, abandoning the intellect becomes equivalent to losing one's mind. For this reason, intellectuals tend to look upon persons who have gone beyond the intellect as unfortunates who have suffered a mental catastrophe, even though those persons may have greater awareness than any intellectual can have.
(pp. 121)

To the straight mind nonallopathic healing sounds very mystical. Faith healing is held in contempt by most rational people, despite the abundant evidence of cures. What rational people fail to understand is that their systems require faith, too -- faith in the intellect and the rational process. A supreme irony is that so-called rational methods require more faith than nonrational ones because they fly in the face of experience.
(pp. 171)