Most of Canada’s main federal parties have voiced support during the election campaign for removing criminal penalties for simple drug possession and offering safer alternatives to street-level drugs as overdose deaths reach record-high levels across the country.
This is not the best way to prevent people from using drugs. Common sense and introspection will lead you to conclude this will not reduce overdose deaths, it will increase overdose deaths and further grow the vast aura of suffering. This will not help the world move towards lasting joy, which is every human being’s natural state.
Behaving and consuming mindfully is the intelligent way to stop ingesting toxins into our consciousness and prevent the malaise from becoming overwhelming. Consuming kind, nourishing, and healing elements is the way to restore our balance and transform the pain and loneliness that are already in us. To do this, we must practice together. The practice of mindful living should become a national policy. Those who are destroying themselves, their families, and their society by intoxicating themselves are not doing it intentionally. Their pain and loneliness are overwhelming, and they want to escape. They need to be helped, not offered more drugs. Only understanding and compassion on a collective level can free us.
Despite the pleas and assertions of the drug-takers, the two worlds are emphatically not the same. What the truly enlightened being experiences is the reality; what the drug-taker experiences is, in part or very largely, a plausible copy with dangerously misleading results.
Yet a national campaign is presented to offer “safe drugs”. This is ignorant and dangerous.
Those who use intoxicants, drugs, or narcotics to escape from the common normal human condition will find that they have put obstacles in their own path when the time comes later to abandon these artificial methods for the natural ones which alone can give a permanent result.
What the drug-taker gets is imagined reality, not real reality. Consciousness assumes the experience of knowing Truth, gives him the most vivid idea that this is IT. The end effect is not to bring him nearer to the goal, as he wrongly believes, but farther from it. Such are the tricks that mind can play on self. And yet, we have mental health groups and national policies that are clearly misguided.
Drugs destroy character, weaken the will, and sabotage the memory. They destroy the reasoning faculty. Drugs taken long enough turn the taker into an addict. In the end, when dependence is complete, he will be a nervous, moral, or physical wreck, depending on the kind of person he is. When one begins to show signs of negative emotions, which are the primary cause of all mental health issues, from wherever they arose, drugs of many kinds including “anti-depressants” are quickly prescribed as a band aid without any real inquiry as to the true nature of the way things are. This is an ignorant and sloth like approach to a tremendous problem.
The conclusion of this matter on the moral level is that we would be wise to ban drugs. The dangers and delusions inherent in their use are too serious to permit it. Clearly this is not likely as some “modern” thinkers are struggling with the relatively benign social order to wear a mask or get vaccinated while at the same time some of the same protestors are vaping.
The dangers of seeking an experience alone as the highest in life is shown by the drug-takers, the LSD addicts, the hippies and, on a different level, the alcoholics.
The stronger drugs may turn their user into a robot, a victim of seemingly outside forces which compel him to do what he normally dare not or would not do.
The reluctance of parents, educators, health care professionals, and countless others to do the hard work to row to the shore of reality from the island of illusion to which they live is itself leading to the very problems that we face. We must, however, forgive ourselves, for at times, we know not what we do. Those that are leading the charge, like those that issue policies and hand out drugs, will ultimately be accountable for any wrongdoing to the higher self.
The real danger is when the person begins to externalize some of these fantasies, to express physically in murder or suicide, or some other desperate act, the pictures and ideas which roam or rave within him are outside of his control.
Those of us who know from personal observation of many cases that the harmfulness of taking drugs is a real possibility cannot be misled by those cases which seem to have escaped it.
At The Emily Dahl Foundation we have learned from intense personal experience is just this; The root of the world problem is too plain for our complex age to perceive: all acts are flowing from the hidden machine of the mind, and when we learn to think rightly, we will act accordingly, not before. Our deeds can never be greater than our ideas, for the unheard songs of the mind decide the hectic movements of our feet.
It is the duty of every intelligent and rational human being searching for a more joyful life, not to rest in mental laziness but to persist in searching for the truth.
Sherman Dahl
The Emily Dahl Foundation
September 11, 2021
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
