The Natural Mind Chapter 2 Summary

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Book Report: The Natural Mind by Andrew Weil “Why People Take Drugs” Chapter two of Andrew Weil’s books summarizes his beliefs of why people use drugs. After reading this chapter along with chapter three and four, a reader may be convinced that Weil does not believe that taking drugs is wrong. He focuses on how a person’s search for an altered conscious may lead to the drug use, because drug use is one means to gaining an altered conscious. This chapter is based on his belief that “we seem to be born with a drive to experience episodes of altered consciousness (Weil, 2004, p.19). While reading this chapter, I experience feelings of frustration, irritation, confusion, and “blankness”. His views of why children engage in certain behaviors caused me to get very agitated at the fact that he would think of children this way, let alone start a book off with this idea. Personal Reaction The second chapter in Andrew Weil’s famous book The Natural Mind, was very hard to read. In disagreement with many points he discussed, I found myself getting upset, especially his discussion on children. To demonstrate his point that people have desires to alter consciousness, he used children as an example. He said that children often whirl around,…show more content…
This chapter as well as the previous chapters discuss why people use drugs and he attempts to answer the question, is anything wrong with it? In his eyes, the problem is our current view of drug use. He believes that drugs do not effect a person’s mental health and physical body as we think today. He suggests if we change our thinking and think of drug use as a natural impulse, we would get an unbiased understanding of drug use. To justify why he believe it is ok to take drugs to alter consciousness, he stated that the problems associated with tolerance “does not qualify as a good reason for not using drugs to alter consciousness” (Weil, 2004,

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