Ego Transcendence Made Easy

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Ego Transcendence Made Easy

or how Schopenhauer was reckoning without drugs before it was cool to do so

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 11, 2025

Update!

My ideal readers will be aware of the fact that I have been struggling with the philosophy of Schopenhauer lately, attempting to discover how his apparent ignorance of psychoactive medicines may have limited his understanding of the world, especially by encouraging him to derive a universal truth from his own pessimistic outlook on life. Indeed, this is just part of a larger shortcoming of Schopenhauer, that he tends to make unqualified pronouncements in cases where a little reticence would have gone a long way. Humility was clearly not the philosopher's strong suit, but a little more agnosticism on his part from time to time might have served him well. It might have helped future-proof his philosophical project and deprive his critics of easy targets. A case in point is his famous (or infamous) claim that

'Life is a business which does not cover its expenses.¹'

Is this really an undeniable fact with which all sane people must agree, or is it not rather the complaint of a man who, like most people even today, was blind to the vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia of Mother Nature and so unable to imagine, let alone profit from, the mood and mind improvement that she offers to human beings gratis? I am not just talking here about the handful of psychedelics and entheogens which are slowly beginning to gain a grudging acceptance in certain mainstream circles, but rather about the worldwide natural pharmacopoeia as a whole, including also the synthetic substances that it can help inspire us to create in a chemistry lab.

For the fact is that no society has yet deliberately sought to profit from this worldwide pharmacopoeia of psychoactive medicines, except in order to exploit it for commercial gain by transforming it into one-size-fits-all medicines, especially ones for which lifelong dependency is marketed as a feature rather than a bug, as in the case of modern antidepressants ², whose widespread use today is normalized in the modern trope: 'Don't forget to take your meds!' It has apparently never even occurred to governments that they should send out pharmacologically savvy empaths to find naturally occurring psychoactive medicines wherever they exist - in plants, trees or animals -- and invent common sense protocols for their actual use, for a wide variety of purposes, including increasing concentration, undertaking spiritual journeys, fighting depression -- and even replacing alcohol with safer, less socially costly drugs. Of course, tribal peoples have always used a locally available subset of such substances for human benefit, but no society has yet had both the ability and the inclination to scour the globe for such medicines. You might think this would be a top priority considering the fact that psychologically satisfied citizens do not generally shoot up grade schools and that entheogenic drugs in particular could bring the world back from the brink of nuclear armageddon ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ by helping to spread peace, love and understanding worldwide.

What's holding us back, then? Mainly, the fact that politicians today engage in strategic fearmongering about drug use, applying a safety standard to that activity that they set for no other risky behavior on the face of the earth: not for horseback riding, not for car driving, and certainly not for gun shooting, a sport for which most Drug Warriors despise any regulation whatsoever. Such fearmongering about the politically defined category called 'drugs' not only helps politicians to win votes from the ignorant populations that they have never sought to educate, but it allows such demagogues to pass laws that have a disproportionate impact on minorities. Thus politicians practice unregenerate racism under the cover of a pretended concern for public health. America has the largest prison population in the world thanks to such tactics, 1.8 million people in 2023 ⁷, with an incarceration ⁸ rate for Black people that is six times that for whites ⁹. And over a third of the federal prison population is incarcerated for drug dealing ¹⁰: in other words, they are in jail for offenses that did not exist prior to 1914, when Congress first started crafting drug laws to punish minorities. This is injustice with a goal, of course, namely, to hand otherwise close elections to Drug Warriors by making it impossible and/or illegal for minorities to vote. Trump was right for the wrong reason: American elections are rigged, but by the War on Drugs, not by democrats.

But racism is not the only reason why America has no interest in making psychoactive medicines available to a suffering humanity. Americans have also made the devastating error of placing materialist researchers and doctors in charge of evaluating mind and mood medicine. This is a tragedy because the reigning ideology in science today is the obsolete theory of behaviorism, according to which the only facts that count when it comes to human behavior are those that can be quantified. This gives materialists the cover they need to collaborate with Drug Warriors in seconding their ridiculous claim that time-honored godsends actually have no proven beneficial uses whatsoever ¹¹. The benefits of psychoactive drug use are glaringly obvious and a matter of psychological common sense. But modern scientists ignore anything obvious when it comes to drugs, including anecdote and history. They do not care, for instance, that laughing gas makes a depressed person laugh, nor that they look forward to use and thereby profit from the therapeutic power of anticipation. They do not care that opium was considered a panacea by such ancient physicians as Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus. They do not care that psychedelics inspired the Hindu religion. Instead they ask a truly metaphysical question in considering such substances: 'Yes, but do they REALLY work?', thereby demonstrating their complete lack of common sense about drug use. Their faithful commitment to behaviorism is not surprising, however, for it turns them into lucratively remunerated 'experts' in matters for which they have no training whatsoever: namely, in those concerning the human heart.

But getting back to Schopenhauer.

Consider a world in which aspirin use is considered to be immoral and so it is outlawed as a matter of course, a world that is governed by the drug-hating religious principles of Mary Baker-Eddy. We already live in such a world, except that the drugs over which we moralize today are just a hypocritically chosen subset of the ones which we should be scorning if we wanted to be logically consistent in enforcing our metaphysical prejudices. Now, consider a pessimistic philosopher in that aspirin-hating world who tells us that the existence of headaches is proof that god does not exist. Why, after all, would a supreme being make us suffer like that? Well, the fact is that no deity actually made them suffer like that; they were suffering because they had scorned to use certain medicines based on superstitious beliefs about the impropriety of doing so. They had asked for pain and they got pain. If they wanted to see what was wrong with their world, they had only to look in a mirror.

This is just the kind of world we live in today when it comes to godsend mind and mood medicines, like opium , LSD, MDMA ¹² , coca and psilocybin - not to mention the hundreds of inspiring and non-addictive phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. We westerners have 'just said no' to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight. And yet western philosophers feel free to trash our existence as a world full of suffering, as a business that does not pay expenses? That claim becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a world in which we outlaw mind and mood medicine and/or fail to do everything possible to benefit from them both personally and as a species. I recognize that Schopenhauer lived before the unprecedented wholesale prohibition of psychoactive substances that we call the War on Drugs, and yet he shared the western bias against mind and mood medicine that one sees developing in Europe as early as 392 AD, when Emperor Theodosius banned the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries as a threat to Christianity ¹³. Over a thousand years later, the Church supported the Bavarian Beer Act of 1516, which included a provision that outlawed the use of psychoactive mushrooms in beer ¹⁴. These were the early days of the European witch hunts, when exotic herbal potations were associated with witchcraft and sorcery ¹⁵.

The fact is that the European world has almost a 2,000-year history of mistrusting mind and mood medicine. This helps account for the disdain with which the Conquistadores of the 16th century greeted first the ritualistic use of mushrooms by the Mazatec Indians of Mexico and then the widespread chewing of the coca leaf by the Inca in Peru. Alcohol, in the form of beer, had already attained a kind of monopoly status in the European mindset when it came to substances that bring about self-transcendence. And so the ritual use of plant- and fungi-based alternatives to beer was regarded with suspicion. Such substances were considered a challenge to Christianity at best and the work of the devil at worst. The point here is that no one had to declare an official Drug War in 19th-century Germany in order to prejudice philosophers like Schopenhauer against the kinds of substances that we denigrate today as 'drugs.' He was already primed to pay such substances short shrift in his philosophy of reality, merely thanks to his status as a European.

So it's no surprise that Schopenhauer mentions such drugs only once in his chef d'oeuvre, 'The World as Will and Idea,' namely by referencing the erstwhile panacea known as opium . He does so in a passage describing the mental preparation necessary for perceiving the world objectively, that is, non-egotistically, by transcending self. Strangely, however, he likens the drug to 'spiritous drinks' and claims that it constitutes a hindrance for those seeking to observe the world objectively. 'What is rather required,' writes the philosopher, 'is a night of quiet sleep, a cold bath, and all that procures for the brain activity an unforced predominance by quieting the circulation and calming the passions.' I will gladly take Schopenhauer's word for it that such a protocol would work for him personally, but it is surely psychologically naïve to suppose that a cold bath and a night of quiet sleep are going to help the average self-absorbed Jack or Jill to transcend self! It sounds like just the sort of milquetoast advice you'd see on the cover of a pop-psychology magazine in the check-out counter of a modern American food store, those mags that give us a set of ten-step instructions for solving every imaginable personal problem, without the use of naughty drugs, of course -- only in this case, their headlines would read:

'Ego Transcendence Made Easy: Bathe Your Way to Perfect Objectivity!'

One wonders if Schopenhauer ever used opium . It certainly does not sound like it. I myself have not done so - the American government has seen to that - but the accounts I have read of such use suggests that the drug is all about empowering the user to transcend self, at least when administered to one who is mentally prepared for such an outcome. HP Lovecraft wrote of such opium -inspired transcendence in a fictional format in 'The Crawling Chaos,' a horror story cowritten with Winifred V. Jackson. The story is set rather vaguely 'in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure.¹⁶' The protagonist tells us that he has been given an overdose of opium by an overworked physician. The nature of the condition being treated is not clear, however the sufferer describes his main symptoms as an unendurable 'pain and pounding in my head.' The opium ¹⁷ soon alleviates that pain, but in a very interesting way, indeed. It does not get rid of the pounding; instead it causes the protagonist to regard the pounding as an external phenomenon, one which has nothing to do with himself personally. It lets him literally get outside of his own situation.

'Suddenly my pain ceased, and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force... I fancied the pounding was that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its sinister, colossal breakers lacerated some desolate shore after a storm of titanic magnitude.'

This is self-transcendence on demand. It is the rapid attainment of the kind of detached mental state that eastern yogis spend a lifetime trying to achieve. It is just the kind of self-detachment that Schopenhauer himself tells us is a necessary condition for perceiving the world objectively.

Cold baths, indeed! A quiet night's sleep! He might as well have counseled us to drink chicken soup and jog around the block -- or treated us to any of the other thousand-and-one vacuous bromides that pass for mental health advice in the age of the Drug War.

Schopenhauer makes it clear throughout his oeuvre that it is very rare to find a person who can transcend self and so deny the imperious will. But he never appears to have asked himself why such transcendence is so rare. It surely has something to do with a lack of common sense, combined with the fact that western philosophers are almost totally ignorant about the psychoactive pharmacopoeia that exists all around them, in plants, fungi, and animal life. The list of such substances is already long in our own time, especially considering how few resources have thus far gone into lengthening it. It would certainly become far longer in a world in which we prioritized the self-transcendence that Schopenhauer advocates, rather than superstitiously demonizing the very substances that help bring it about.

But I intend to practice here the reticence and agnosticism that I preached above. I will not conclude this essay by declaring that Schopenhauer was wrong to tell us that 'life is a business that does not pay expenses.' I will merely suggest that he had no right to say that given the fact that he was reckoning without drugs. Nay, I will even add the exculpatory observation that Schopenhauer is in good company, insofar as almost every philosopher of our time reckons without drugs as well. They write as if psychoactive substances do not exist, and are therefore blind to what the use of such substances can implicitly tell us concerning a wide variety of psychosocial topics, including brain function, consciousness, depression, anxiety, religion, and even the ultimate nature of reality writ large. For as William James said of drug-altered states in his classic tome, 'The Variety of Religious Experience':

'No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.¹⁸'

Author's Follow-up: February 12, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

The more I criticize Schopenhauer, the more I feel the need to remind any eventual reader that I value the German philosopher's work for the hints that it contains about the nature of reality. I am simply trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, the insights from the pretended knowledge, the facts from the bluster, in the work of this occasionally ornery pessimist. In the plus column, I like his recognition that the forms of creatures has a timelessness to it, that each new chick, young puppy, or human child is just as brand-new and 'hot off the presses' as were similar chicks, puppies and children thousands of years ago, that the individual is subject to time but that the will, or the platonic form, appears to be immortal. In the debit column, however, he insists that this state of affairs represents teleology without design, that the will has no goal aside from the practical one of manifesting itself in the real world as a particular thing, animal or person. I do not say that this is impossible, merely that I am not convinced by the arguments that he posits in favor of such claims.

I particularly mistrust his tendency to argue from the basis of the kind of world that a god would presumably create, as if he knew -- or could know -- anything about such topics. This is self-contradictory on his part, for the key Kantian lesson that he himself puts forth in other contexts is that we can know nothing about ultimate realities. Schopenhauer admits this when he criticizes those who pretend to know that there is a God. 'How can you claim there is a God,' Schopenhauer essentially asks, 'when we can know nothing about such things?' And yet he himself claims to know what a god would have desired and hence created had such an entity actually existed, as, for instance, a God would have composed the oceans of fresh water that we could have drank therefrom. Such a claim assumes a raft of unknowable information: beginning with an understanding of the nature of the human self and where that self fits in in the totality of nature. Is our existence analogous to that of a fish in a goldfish tank, a creature that lives in but a small and highly unrepresentative slice of the world at large and so can never draw reasonable conclusions about that world; or are we sitting in the front rows of the drama of life and so capable of adequately conceiving the limitations with which the supposed playwright must have been working or that goal that he, she or it might have had in mind?

Schopenhauer claims that every change in nature is a causally necessary change that furthers the goals of the selfish will of a particular organism (or at least seeks to further them to the extent possible given the pushback that it encounters from the actions of other wills of other organisms). This is a plausible hypothesis, but his way of supporting it is completely invalid. Schopenhauer does so by pointing out the supposed mundane reasons behind the often marvelous adaptations that we see in nature in specific cases. He tells us, for instance, that tropical birds have yellow feathers so that they can recognize each other amid the plethora of other birds and animals in their environment. But surely there are many other reasons why their feathers might have been yellow, else the entire bird population would be yellow -- or at least the coloration of bird feathers would be evenly apportioned among the possible colors of the spectrum for the purposes of interspecies identification. He himself has the honesty to admit from time to time that such judgments may have an element of subjectivity to them (and I'm thinking, 'May?'), yet that does not stop him from using such arguments to make a case for the practical no-nonsense nature of reality. He says in effect, we may not know why the peacocks feathers are so alluring, but we can be sure that aesthetics had nothing to do with it. The peacock ultimately has fancy feathers instead of plain ones for the same reason that plumbers use Teflon tape instead of putty to prevent pipe joints from leaking. 'Nothing to see here,' cries Schopenhauer. 'Those beautiful feathers could not have been otherwise!'

Again, I do not say that Schopenhauer is wrong, merely that he has not made his case, at least when it comes to the ultimate meaninglessness of beauty and love. Of course, part of his problem was that he was born prior to the existence of both quantum physics and relativity theory. As David Bohm points out, both theories have at least one thing in common: they can only be understood by viewing the world holistically ¹⁹. This is why the physicist praises meditation as a way to see the world more accurately, that is, as a oneness. One has to resist our tendency to abstract ourselves from nature and to parcel out reality in conformance with our own feelings of separateness, which are really just an artifact of our inability to transcend self. Schopenhauer might have appreciated Bohm given the former's interest in Asian metaphysic, but he might also have failed to grasp the implications of Bohm's message. For the principles of holism tell us that it is not enough to view the world as the interaction of separate parts, of discrete wills in Schopenhauer's case. The big picture matters and cannot be dismissed a priori as an an inevitable but meaningless outcome of ultimately meaningless causal processes. The world is not just a metaphysical 'survival of the fittest,' in which separate wills compete ruthlessly for the privilege of manifesting themselves unhindered and completely.

Perhaps we Homo sapiens were wrong to assume that the human-creation known as metaphorical language could ever be successfully used to prove -- or to disprove -- anything about such ultimates as God and the meaning of love and life. But there does seem to be a kind of experiential proof available to human beings, a proof that is communicated in feelings and intuitions rather than words. This would seem to be almost true of necessity, given that our language, being a human creation, is not nor never can be consistent and comprehensive enough to permit of a precise statement about universal verities, one that could never be plausibly gainsaid in that same human language. The only absolute truths therefore seem to be ones that can be communicated wordlessly, as for instance the messages contained in great music -- especially when heard under the influence of certain psychoactive substances, which help us transcend the ego and listen objectively. True, Bohm only speaks of 'meditation' for this purpose, but 'meditation' is often a code word for psychoactive drug use in polite society these days. In the age of the Drug War, merely to use the word 'drugs' in an ostensibly scientific context would be to lose one's respectability among the thoroughly brainwashed drug-haters of academia.

Immanuel Kant

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Schopenhauer

Notes for essay entitled Ego Transcendence Made Easy: or how Schopenhauer was reckoning without drugs before it was cool to do so:

1: The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer, Arthur (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
4: 35 Facts About Goldsboro Accident Hartwell, Therese, Facts.Net, 2025 (up)
5: A Darkening Horizon: Nuclear Dangers Around the World with Matthew Bunn Bunn, Matthew, Harvard Kennedy School, 2023 (up)
6: “Google Books.” 2019. Google.com. 2019. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Command_and_Control/H0-CJckES44C?hl=en. (up)
7: Countries with the largest number of prisoners as of December 2023 Statista, 2023 (up)
8: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
9: Updated charts show the magnitude of prison and jail racial disparities, pretrial populations, correctional control, and more Prison Policy Initiative, 2024 (up)
10: US Sentencing Commission: Over 65% of Federal Prisoners are Black or Hispanic Defender Services Office Training Division (up)
11: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
12: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
13: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
14: Why we don’t have psychedelic mushrooms in beer anymore like the good ol’ days Brendza, Will, Rooster, 2018 (up)
15: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present Hutton, Ronald, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
16: “‘The Crawling Chaos’ by H. P. Lovecraft with Winifred V. Jackson.” 2026. Hplovecraft.Com. 2026. https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/crc.aspx. (up)
17: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
18: James, William. 2016. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820.The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience. (up)
19: Wholeness and the Implicate Order Bohm, David, 1980 (up)

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There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."

The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.

I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.

Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.

The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.

The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."

It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.

Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.

My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.

Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.

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Ego Transcendence Made Easy

or how Schopenhauer was reckoning without drugs before it was cool to do so

Author's Follow-up: February 12, 2025

Immanuel Kant

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Schopenhauer

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend