I couldn't agree with you more about reality--the universe is going to do what it wants to no matter what you think or want or hope. As Jim Morrison once put it, "You cannot petition the Lord with prayer." And although reality sometimes responds to clear thought and hard work, that's no guarantee either that it's going to turn out the way you expect, no matter how conscientiously you play by the rules.

As for the utility of chemically induced altered states, I couldn't disagree with you more. All experience is potentially of value, not because it necessarily teaches you something that might be useful, but because it increases the total number of experiences in your intellectual arsenal with which you can contrast and compare what is happening to you.

Learning a language teaches you about the subtlety and shortcomings of communication, even if it is a dead tongue you never hear or speak again. Studying mathematics has been of immense value to me although I have never worked as a mathematician. Going through military training as a young man teaches you things you need to know about yourself, even if you'll never use again the skills of marching, shoe polishing, and field-stripping firearms. Loving another human being provides insight and self-knowledge that can long outlast the lifespan of your beloved. I personally feel I have crippled myself psychologically and intellectually by never learning a musical instrument, and by not having children, even though those activities would do nothing to provide me with a direct practical payoff. And of course, it's taken me a lifetime to learn how much living with a good wife has changed me--for the better.

The recreational or frivolous drug user may just be intoxicating himself to indulge some short term psychological need or physical addiction, but the alteration of our brain chemistry can also give us an alternative way of thinking--not a better or more correct one--but a different one. You can never understand anything well until you have the opportunity to study it side by side with its variations and alternatives. Just as the traveler comes to love his homeland all the more after he returns from a lifetime abroad, you will never really understand how you think until you have had the experience of thinking differently. Drugs are not the only way to achieve this, physical privation and stress can do it, as can experiencing traumatic or dangerous events, or being a part of something greater and more eternal than yourself. Education itself is like this, you need not earn your living by what you learned in school for it to have been worthwhile. In fact, it is the greatest drug of all because it provides you with endless alternatives to the mind you were born with. The study of history need not be limited to those who are nostalgic for the past.

There are those who will never understand this, and they will be frivolous and self-destructive in their abuse of drugs, but other than giving them sincere advice, there is nothing you or I can say to stop them. New experiences can be foolish, perhaps even dangerous, but they are never worthless. It may be just a cliché, but when the smiling mortician rolls by for us, we will never regret the things we did, only those things we didn't get around to doing.