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In reality, of course, it always does look after itself. All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.
Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner light of even the most cruelly tormented mind.
Lung cancer, traffic accidents and the millions of miserable and misery-creating alcoholics are facts even more certain than was, in Dante’s day, the fact of the Inferno. But all such facts are remote and unsubstantial compared with the near, felt fact of a craving, here and now, for release or sedation, for a drink or a smoke.
The problems raised by alcohol and tobacco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by prohibition. The universal and ever-present urge
IN THE COURSE OF HISTORY many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.
Until late in the Victorian era, “poppy and mandragora,” along with henbane and ethyl alcohol, were the only pain relievers available to civilized man. Toothache, arthritis and neuralgia could, and frequently did, drive men and women to become opium addicts.
The problem of drug addiction and excessive drinking is not merely a matter of chemistry and psychopathology, of relief from pain and conformity with a bad society. It is also a problem in metaphysics—a problem, one might almost say, in theology.
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties in human nature,
In hell, a great religious poet has written, the punishment of the lost is to be “their sweating selves, but worse.” On earth we are not worse than we are; we are merely our sweating selves, period.
