Gateway, Thought

It is said of marijuana that it can be a gateway drug, leading to harder substances - and which, regardless of the substance marijuana in itself, so to speak, is a pretty unarguable fact or aspect of it. I imagine very few people end up in the realms of the harder drugs without in some sense coming via the route of marijuana. 

I’m just interested here though in the gateway notion, and specifically how we should look at thoughts in the same manner. At the more obvious level seemingly benign thoughts can function as stepping stones onto more and more extreme thoughts; that there can be an internal logic at play here in these invisible directions. 

This internal logic justifies itself as progress, goes something like, “The first thought was good. It was liberating (And maybe in some sense it was.) This was thought led to the second thought. That must be good also, And that led to the third step. Good again.” And so on and on. The progress is sanctified! And there are certainly people who end up with things like heroin addiction via something very like thus route.

Similarly a looseness of behaviour, seemingly relatively harmless, can, through this looseness and lack of alertness or self-awareness and discipline, be a gateway to other less benign forms of behaviour in a very general sense.

The importance of alertness!