The passage below, is one of my favorite articulations of the fallacy inherent in depending on shortcuts to achieving true peace of mind...and especially on the false sense of achievement, when relying on external narcotics to produce a simulacrum of the peace of mind that can be achieved through the discipline of deep meditation practice.
Note: I first read this book over 45 years ago (1978-1979) - and the passage below was so memorable, I still recalled it quite clearly, decades later.
Book: Son of the Flying Tiger (K'ing Kung-Fu #1)
pages 87-88:
What K'ing did not understand was why anyone would want the opium in the first place. For, in explaining to the boy how opium was obtained from the flower called the poppy, Lin had said, “The opium poppy has been made by men into a symbol of the evil which may be drawn out of the good in this world; of the ugliness which may be distilled from the beautiful. For when the milky juice is taken from the unripe capsules below its flower, and dried in the air, and then eaten or smoked in a pipe, it produces in a person's mind a counterfeit of the peace of the Tao. The danger is this; every man longs for the peace that comes from losing the fear of his own death. You have already felt such peace in your meditations. And having found that peace, you will want to meditate again. So the opium smoker finds that he will want his peace again.
“But you, when you meditate, learn well the road to and from mindlessness, and can find your way back again from it in a flash, or can dwell in it as long as you wish. For he who has found the Way knows it with the most perfect of all knowledge, since he has made it. But the opium smoker knows not how to attain his peace without an earthly substance. Thus he depends upon things of this earth to make him forget that he is of this earth. He has not stared into the Void, but rather has turned his back upon it, setting earthly substance against earthly substance in a manner which traps him in his body. He does not know how to attain this peace without this earthly substance. Thus he does not have the strength that comes from knowledge, but the weakness that comes from flight.
“Deep in his heart, the opium smoker knows he has done this: but once he has felt his counterfeit joy, he has sold his soul to his body, and his body to his opium, and again and again he must turn to it, to keep from the hard task of facing the truth.
“He is in bondage to a substance which he cannot take with him at the hour of his death.
“Then the fear which has made him do this sets his soul against itself, and keeps him from passing peacefully into the final rest of the Tao. For to the end, his body will cry out in the manner in which he has taught it to cry out, and the fear which he has buried will well up out of him with increasing strength as he sees what he has lost. And again he will bury it more deeply with opium. And again it will strike back up at him with vengeance. Until at last he will take too much opium and it will k ill him.
“He will not have gone out to meet death face to face; it will have come upon him from behind. And if there is any death which is final, it is such a death.”
