Read my right hip

I don't do drugs.
I am drugs

~Salvador Dali


The man may have been more right than he knew. Or he may just have known more than I knew he knew. Or he might have been more right than I knew he knew, but still even more right than he could know.
Enough of that.

What I realized was this: drugs are compounds that alter minds in interesting ways. If human culture comprises a big mind (and if you haven't noticed, it does) than there are some people that alter reality as it is perceived by that mind. Dali was most certainly one of those folks. Duchamp probably was even more so. Along with a lot of other artists, musicians, novelists, poets, and other creative people who get digested by the collective unconsciousness (and the collective consciousness too), but not just the overtly creative people. Major thinkers are some pretty potent drugs (we ae still working on our Aristotle hangover, and we're just coming down from our Cartesian high), but the most powerful drug of all is almost certainly the enlightened ones.
Yeah thats right, the short list: Buddha, Lao Tsu, Moses (and a number of other old testament guys. I want to see the Dali quote above attributed to Ezekiel, but it might take some fancy translation), Jesus, Mohammad. Those are the psychotropics that we have not come down from yet. (That list could be a lot longer, but a lot of the names that should be on it are lost to history, and a lot of the effects of those other drugs have been destroyed by some of these ones (Jesus and Mohammad have both had that effect to some degree).
Theres sort of a butterfly effect that happens with a psychotropic of that potency, but for the most part, at the core, each of them has done wonders for our headspace. Sure, the mental digestion (is there a better word for that?) of the ideas that these guys are have created some confusion, but it's also given us glimpses of how really great things might be.
People are wont to naysay, but theres no reason we can't all be enlightened ones. And how great would that be? (SO MUCH, that is how great.)

Theres a sanskrit word for the sort of awesome glimpse the enlightened ones offer: Bodhi. It's something that happens (constantly, in the background) during meditation (see: being aware [also known as being alive]) and it's sort of like a supernova of joy, a radiant explosion of goodness and love and blissfull connectedness. With the right sort of awareness, you can find it happening deep inside yourself, basically powering your very being.

It's neat.

And it's infectious. But as it spreads through the collective mind, it fades out some, we come down. Slowly, for sure, and theres constantly the possibility of becoming a booster shot of the most powerful anti-depressant in the known universe.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, I got branded with an effect of this ongoing bodhi-psychotropic meme plague, a flash of bodhi that hit someone else before it bounced into my skull (over the phone first, but later though my eyes and ears) and made its way down onto my right hip where it's inked in a copy of a copy of sharpie on paper:
HAPPIES WILL SET YOU FREE.
It's been said a lot of different ways, before and since, but I can't thank Sean enough for letting me have his sentence. It's exactly the sort of thing the world needs.
Some people have problems with "happies" not being a word. But lots of things are happies: soap bubbles and caterpillars and flying kites and riding bikes and taking walks and house plants and long walks and frisbee on the beach and fetch with a dog or catch in the yard or jumping in puddles or crayons and blocks and grass in your toes and fizz in your nose. There's millions of them. And it just takes some awareness of how much they pervade existence to really start feeling excited about being alive.

Things are great. Theres lot's of great things. And there's no reason not to enjoy them.

So maybe I'm drugs too, and probably you are too.

Isn't this world amazing?