If One Can Live a Beautiful Life Without Taking Drugs, Why Take Them?

From Krishnamurti’s Book BEYOND VIOLENCE

In India, in ancient times, there used to be a substance called soma. It was a kind of mushroom, of which they drank the juice, which produced either tranquillity or all kinds of hallucinatory experiences, those experiences being the result of conditioning. (All experiences are the result of conditioning; if you believe in God, obviously you have the experience of God; but that belief is based on fear and all the agony of conflict; your God is the result of your own fear. And so the most marvellous experience of God is nothing but your own projection.) But they lost the secret of that mushroom, that particular thing called soma. Since then, in India, as here, there are various drugs, hashish, LSD, marijuana – you know the multiplicity of them all – tobacco, drink, heroin. Also there is fasting. If you fast, certain chemical actions take place producing a certain clarity and there is delight in that.

If one can live a beautiful life without taking drugs, why take them? But those who have taken them tell us that certain changes take place; a certain vitality, an energy arises and the space between the observer and the observed disappears; things are seen much more clearly. One drug taker says he takes them when he goes to a museum, for then he sees colours more brilliantly than ever before. But you can see those colours in such brilliance without the drug when you pay complete attention, when you observe without the space between you the observer and the thing observed. When you take drugs you depend on them, and sooner or later they have all kinds of disastrous effects.

So there it is: fasting, drugs, which it is hoped will satisfy the desire for great experience, which will produce everything that you want. And what is wanted is such a tawdry affair; some petty little experience, which is blown up into something extraordinary. So a wise man, a man who has observed all this, puts aside all the stimulants; he observes himself and knows himself. The knowing of himself is the beginning of wisdom and the ending of sorrow.