Floyd Salas is an award-winning and critically-acclaimed author of six books, including the novels Tattoo the Wicked Cross, What Now My Love, Lay My Body on the Line, and State of Emergency, the memoir Buffalo Nickel, and a book of poetry, Color of My Living Heart. He is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Eugene F. Saxton, Rockefeller Foundation, Joseph Henry Jackson and other fellowships and awards, as well as the PEN Oakland Literary Censorship Award and two outstanding teaching awards. He is a founder and president of the multicultural writing group, PEN Oakland.

By nature solitary and monkish, pot fits me like a priest’s hood. Pot is for thinkers. Pot makes you think. Pot makes you more aware and intelligent. Pot is not like hard booze, which obliterates your brain with sleep. It makes your mind buzz without sleeping, you stay awake and dream, daydream.

Being studious all my life, a reader before kindergarten, after my father brought sound and letter together when he read out an EEEEEEEEE scream of a boy going down a hill on a sled in a comic strip and followed it and the sled down the slope with his finger, I like to think. Thinking to me is a form of entertainment. I sit and think, a lot. Pot helps you, me, everybody think.

Your mood determines what you will think on pot, as well as in your daily prosaic life. So, if you have problems, pot will make you think about those problems. People call thinking about your problems worry. This may be unpleasant. Worry is unpleasant. People don’t like to be worried and so don’t like to smoke pot and worry. This is called a bad trip.

I have not had bad trips because I like thinking about my problems: only then can I solve them. Paul Bowles wrote a book of short stories called “A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard”, in which every Arab protagonist smokes pot to help him solve his personal problems. The old Arab proverb at the beginning of the book states: “He who smokes two pipefuls of kif before breakfast every morning has the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard.” These Arabs are not scholars, but they are pot smokers and use pot to think about their problems. This is not getting high to party, as with alcohol. This is getting a mental buzz on to ruminate and ponder the whys and wherefores of your own personal existence. That’s one reason I smoke pot. I like to think.

Thinking is seeing, too, and not just the internal mind process but the external view around you. Sensitivity it’s called when you suddenly see a dew drop on the knobby bud of a pear tree. That’s awareness. That’s a higher consciousness. Higher consciousness is when you suddenly see the pattern of behavior in a person’s acts, including your own. Higher consciousness is seeing the meaning in a poem. Or suddenly feeling great love for everything and everyone around you. A burst of spontaneous joy that makes waves of love roll over you. The world is beautiful. The small things count. You can understand that a grass strand is worthy and meaningful in itself.

This is higher consciousness achieved through the use of pot. This is not getting drunk to escape your problems. This is using a natural vegetable without alien elements in it such as those in hard booze and heroin and morphine and cocaine and speed to increase your perception. This, pot, is God’s growth. This is like wine or beer, easy on you, good for you. This is good for you because it opens you up to your creative love instinct instead of your predatory killer instinct, the instinct to survive, like booze brings.

This is why I smoke pot, first of all, to love. Booze unleashes the monsters of your subconscious, the pent-up feelings of anger and frustration, and you kill your loved ones in a rage or commit crime and murder against strangers for the thrill, fueled by the killer urge that surges up with the poison of alcohol that shoots through all the tissues of your body as if there were no separate walls of the organs within you, or makes you lose control of your limbs and mind so you run down people and crash into other cars in your own machine. Booze is a poison. Pot is a medicine and mild stimulant that makes your brain think, rather than go to sleep and lose conscious control, like booze.

Artur Rimbaud, the child genius of nineteenth century French poetry, smoked hashish in order to write and called it a systematic derangement of the senses. You let your dream mind lead the day mind. This puts you in touch with universal racial memory and cosmic symbol. Then your thought will be more than what your conscious mind knows or even thinks, meaning the prosaic facts of your life and conscious knowledge, whether learned from books or life. Then the dream world will lead you into the world of instinct and the senses and the unknown mysteries that surround you but you are not aware of when you are only just awake and not daydreaming.

I smoke pot to love, to follow my spiritual calling. I follow my spiritual calling by writing both creative and expository pieces like this essay. This is the way I can give and get the most love from the most people. I write because I want to contact the universal spirit of love in the most people. So writing is my way to reach out with love to people and touch them with my spirit of love. So writing and smoking pot both help me love. So I smoke pot and write. I smoke pot to write with love. I nearly always smoke pot to write. I have smoked pot to do this writing, but only after I have studied the question by reviewing all my books and notes on pot for any material that could add to this essay, seeking one hundred percent possible comprehension. Then based upon my study, I smoke pot, which allows me to leap into spontaneity and the free association of my thoughts, a stream of consciousness, which I tap by writing down my thoughts as I think them, all based upon voluminous study. This produces original thoughts that go beyond what is already known and written.

As soon as I smoke the pot, I begin to think. So I sit down at my laptop and write what I think. Pot frees the brain, lets it meander down its own path because it only puts the brain to sleep a tiny bit — not heavily like booze, which shuts out rational control — with only a slight buzz which makes you day dream, stay conscious and in control of your brain and body while you slip under the veil of daily awareness and perceive the world with the subconscious mind underneath the conscious mind with your conscious mind. So you now have the whole mind under control and functioning. You are now using your whole brain, not just the prosaic, socially-functioning part, but the cosmic world of symbol and surreal meaning in the subconscious part, too, which is called intuition. You are now on the level of the shaman who uses his great consciousness to see the hidden patterns of the subconscious and the hidden patterns in the forces of the world around him and put it to social use to help his tribe survive. My use is to write down what I see and reveal the pattern that I detect under the conscious level with my conscious command of the subconscious that pot has given me and put this writing into books that give people, that is society, a reflection of their own lives and times that has meaning. This is why I smoke pot.

Here’s a poem I wrote that captures this state of mind, this ability to see oneself while one is in the act of experiencing life and to understand at the moment that one is experiencing it what oneself is experiencing!

IN THAT LIGHT

I keep hearing my voice

now that I’m high

and my mind is floating

A sense of oneself

in the third person

like an insane man

or an artistic genius

at the height of his inspiration

I

under the hazy veil of hash

view myself by accident

suddenly hear my words

all the I’s &

what I did &

I do

feeling very satisfied with myself

idling the time away

a calm in the storm

of what’s usually happening with me

until my voice reaches

the mind inside

where the light is &

the way to truth

if followed

&

in that light

how small and yet

how fine

to hear

oneself

I wrote this poem while I was trying through physical therapy to save the claw of my hand, which was broken and set in a cast to permanently cripple it by a Fascist doctor in Spain after I fought one of Franco’s agents in a park and knocked him out and went to the doctor to reset a misplaced knuckle. I put both the incident and the poem in my autobiographical novel, State of Emergency (Arte Publico Press, 1996) and in my book of poems, Color of My Living Heart (Arte Publico Press, 1996).

Then I have poems of joy, for one of which, “Trip to the County Fair,” I used pot to control the surge of feeling and surreal visions on acid. I had taken acid once before, only a couple of months earlier, in 1968, and had been unable to control the jerking of my body and make sense of the surreal and sometimes grotesque images that the acid made me see. This time, I smoked a pipeful of regular pot right after I dropped the acid and couldn’t stop writing all day long, while I went to the County Fair and saw a rodeo and a thousand people and a hundred horses and cows and bulls and wrote one of my most joyful poems of love. Pot gave me that control. Pot allowed me to think and make beauty out of the images and actions that I saw, experienced, captured and preserved that day.

TRIP TO THE COUNTY FAIR

Shack at the back of my yard

with your galvanized chimney

and your checkered door

Hello

from over here

on the steps of the back porch

in the shade

with the sun on my right toes

clouds

puffing out of your galvanized chimney

stripes

down

your wood slats

dirt path

up to your door

through the yellow weeds

Great spray of soft cloud

in the blue sky

Hi!

I’m high on acid and pot

and I’m talking to everything

It’s all the same

House

trees

people

cows

all the same

I can feel the wind on my cheek

and my bare chest too

Bob of thorned vines to the breeze

Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass

behind me

and miniature roses

the size of my pinky nail

next to the porch

and I want to kiss them

and tell them all sorts of things

The poem goes on for six more pages of ecstatic love, but is too long to repeat here. It’s also published in Color of My Living Heart. Immediately below is another example from my novel, State of Emergency, about a radical writer being tailed and manipulated by the CIA and Interpol in Europe who breaks from some Spaniards he believes are following and manipulating him and eats some hash candy and wallows in the ecstatic beauty of the Medina in Marrakech.

Really high off the hash candy, Roger turned in a circle in the Medina, looking for Tony, but couldn’t see anything but a blur of bright silken stands and multicolored flags. An old-fashioned market place, the Medina lay just between the newly paved streets and fancy sprawling homes of the French Quarter and the gates of the old walled city– a rusty colored, stone-walled fortress with gun turrets. The old city’s narrow cobblestoned streets curled like snakes in some labyrinthine puzzle away from the gates, toward the icy Atlas Mountains, which towered above the city like some great giant wall to keep out the Sahara Desert.

“Can you see him?” he asked.

Penny turned in a slow circle, too, and said, “Not anywhere.”

“I shouldn’t have flipped out at him,” Roger said, his eyes glazed from the candy. “He probably went straight to the mountains because I bumkicked him shouting about my hand. I’m sorry I yelled at him. I’d like to get along with some people sometime.”

Penny stepped right in front of him.

“You might have chased him away. He should have been here by now. He said he was just going to park the car.” She gripped both his arms. “But don’t worry about him; have fun, instead.”

“All right, to hell with him, then. I’m going to eat that other piece of hash candy he gave me, too, so I won’t have to worry about carrying it.”

She dropped her hands. “Maybe you better not, Roger.”

“I’m really tripping, it’s true,” he said, with a tremor of fear that Tony might have poisoned him like they did in Arguiniguin. “But I want to enjoy myself like you said. I feel like it now. For a change. Let the worries stir in their own juices.”

He pulled a cake of brittle, glass-like green candy out of his pocket and bit into it. He smacked his lips at the slightly bitter taste, like biting into an orange peel, then stuffed the rest in his mouth, crushed it with his teeth, and swallowed it quickly. Then he wandered off with Penny into the tent city of the Medina. As they walked through the narrow, curving, crowded, carnival tent streets of the market place, he was dimly aware that they had to catch a late afternoon bus back to Essaouerra, but was too entranced by the exotic place to care.

He stopped to buy some snails boiled in their shell, and used a safety pin the man gave him to pluck the gooey body out and pop it into his mouth. The man, in robes and baggy pants, a turban wrapped around his head, smiled and said, “Hubba-hubba,” then offered one to Penny. When she turned her face away with a scowl, he grinned again and said, “Fucky-fucky.”

Roger stared at him, wondering what he should do about it, but the guy kept grinning at him and offered him another snail, so Roger turned away when Penny said, “Forget it, Roger. Come on.”

He caught up with her. The colors of the stands and the silken finery and the multicolored handmade goods entranced him. He stepped with Penny along a sunny street where bright forty-yard strings of yarn were dipped in boiling black vats a story high of different colored dyes, the raw colors of the desert, bright red and green and yellow and purple and blue, then hung on ropes ten feet high to dry. Their shadows created a soft, picket-fence effect on the hard earth below them.

Roger stared as if he were high on acid, as if his whole body were a live receptor, as if he were taking everything in through all his senses at once. It was as if he could see the dazzling luminous glow that emanated from the bright silken colors of the stalls under the bright blue of the sky and feel its heat like an electrical field that touched him with its invisible force when he walked by, raising the hair on his arms.

He seemed to float through a section of small food stands, the fish scents touching his nostrils and filling the membranes of his nose with their tasty smells, making him stop by a smoking charcoal brazier of shishkabob with its simmering squares of beef impaled on sharp-pointed iron rods. He bought one each for him and Penny, who licked her lips in ecstasy as she ate.

Then they saw some young boys carving furniture with their hands and bare feet, one guiding a chisel with his toes while another hand-turned a lathe set on the floor. The pungent smell and dust of the woodshavings floated into the air. Roger stopped and watched them for a while with a pang of regret that the boy must suffer cramped toes. He then moved on and stopped next in a circle of people around a flute player in a long robe whose turbaned head swayed in graceful synchrony to the mournful reed call and the swaying necks of hooded cobras. Roger got so entranced himself that he didn’t realize he was swaying back and forth with the man and the cobras, too, until Penny said, “Roger!” and pulled him away from the circle of Moroccans staring at him.

Penny stared, too, when he stopped near a long line of blind men in burlap robes who held tin cups out in front of them, raising their blind eyes to the sky and chanting in a chorus for the mercy of the passerby and the glory of “Allah! Allah! Allah!”

He put a coin in the cup of each of the ten men in the line to thank them for the beautiful spectacle that they themselves couldn’t see. And though he floated in circles in the bazaar for hours, it seemed, sometimes finding himself at the same place more than twice, he kept coming back time after time to the blind men, as if they had some magnetic pull on him. He was conscious of it in the upper realms of his dream world, where the sights and sounds that bombarded his senses and exploded inside him had symbolic shape and form. He saw the myth of it, the archetypal blind man of all time standing like a reflection of himself in a line, with his cup out, in Morocco, in the Middle Ages, with time spanned for once, right there in front of him in the Twentieth Century, in melodic chanting sound and burning, living color. It was living Art, with a capital A. Roger was living art. If there had to be a heaven, it would surely be like this, pure sensation rippling out into infinity.

He heard a loud rumble of drums and looked for the source of the sound through his dark glasses. Reminded of old Hollywood movies of the thirties, he expected to see a scene from out of darkest Africa suddenly materialize around him. A large circle of people out on the wide asphalt field between the Medina and the gates of the Old City caught his eye. He could hear the clash of tambourines and the jingle of bells and, excited by the carnival atmosphere, he grabbed Penny’s hand and hurried over to the crowd.

He edged through the circle of people, sliding far enough into the crowd to see black tribal dancers in feathers and bells dancing in front of a row of black drummers and tambourine players. Just the glimpses of the high-stepping, black tribesmen slapping their bare feet against the pavement, bowing their backs in synchronized rhythm, baring their shaved skulls and black turbans to the bright sun, made his heart beat faster.

He felt a dizzying rush of blood to his head when he edged into the inner side of the circle and saw the bells on the dancers’ bare black toes and ankles, all over their black fingers and wrists, and strung across their bare black shoulders so that they jingled with every step, every jerk of shoulder and sway of hip, every quiver of hand. Standing behind them were a half dozen drummers and tambourine players and one white hippy in a white turban, who held a tambourine next to his ear and thumped it with the fingers of one hand.

A great buoyancy filled him, seemed to lift him up on his toes with a tingling feeling that crept over his scalp and every pore on his body, and he began to dance. too. He did a little foot shuffle while standing in one place along the inner edge of the crowd, then moved more and more until he was dancing almost frantically with every part of his body, keeping time with his shaking shoulders and his snapping hips and his stomping feet, shivering his hands in the air, as a blurred vision of black natives dancing to the drum beat, with much slapping of feet and ringing of bells and glittering of teeth and popping of tambourines and swaying of black robes and spinning of shaved skulls and shining of black skin filled every part of his being. It went on and on and on until he could barely hear Penny’s cry, like some far-off call: “Roger! Roger! It’s getting late! It’s time to go! Time to catch the last bus!”

The hashish produced an ecstatic space of time in which the sheer beauty of the Medina and its inhabitants made life beautiful and so unlike the aggressive urges and actions of a person high on alcohol. But it is the therapeutic essence of relief, the ability to make beauty out of sadness that enhances the experience of living itself that pot gives me that makes me continue to smoke it, when I choose to. Here is a poem on the death of a beloved dog in which I was able to vent my suffering and make beauty out of that suffering.

TO SERGIE MY SWEET OLD DOG

This is the reality now Sergie

this mound of earth

under the camelia bush

with a bouquet of orange poppies

alive at its foot

the shade that sprinkles it

even in the sunshine

There will always be sprinkles on this gravesite

summer or winter

raining or shining

I sprinkle it now with my tears

One of the poppies is dying though

The brown bud of a withered face

smiles out

through the bent strands

of its petals

peeking up through the bent brim

of an old straw hat

though his bloom’s all gone

like yours was

these last two years

I suck in air to ease the cramp in my gut

Miki my Japanese puppy

nibbles some grass on your grave

A bird trill thrills me

from the big bush over your head

The sun warms me

The long branches of a thin plum tree

burst into beads of green buds

and rows of buttons of white flowers

Poppies

spin like a fleet of flying suns

over the green clover

in the speckled shade

of a knobby pear tree

This is the reality

Sergie

You down in the deep damp hole

The rain seeping into your ears

trickling through the fears

a slow movement

of flesh and bone

back to silt

back to the mud of my back yard

back to these earth clods

spongy with a whole night’s rain

This is my pain

This is the reality

Sergie

dogchain

hanging from a doorknob

red cross of its rabies tag

and green heart

of its license

a breeze on me

shadow of leaves

flickering on my page

no you around

on top of the ground

No Sergie

to sniff noses with

no sweet

and earthy canine smell

The reality is

there is

no trace of you

here

aside from this small mound of dirt

in the yard

and the warm coral

of my brain

the pain

in my chest

This is the reality

Sergie

I use pot in a number of different ways. First of all is the immediate perception it gives me, which is very satisfying. I see into everything around me because I see everything around me in a clear light with fresh eyes. A movement of a loved one, my sweet Claire, will fill me with wonder at the beauty of her living being, here with me. Forever is only a second in cosmic time. This moment is ours forever, because the moment is forever if you perceive it, which we mostly don’t, and which I do, on pot.

Here’s a poem I wrote in Tijuana, Mexico the morning after I saw and wrote about, at the same time, under the influence of pot, a world championship bantamweight fight and all the other undercard fights as they happened, the whole evening. And the next day I didn’t have to write about what I saw because I’d already written it as I saw it with the clarity and the energetic impulse of pot, along with a beer or two. She had typed it for me the next morning and then wanted to go out and sight-see in Mexico. But I was tired from a long day of intense work the day before and wanted to rest. Finally, she began to get a little annoyed and began to complain so I got dressed to go. I had a hit of pot when I was ready and, as I put the pipe away, saw her sitting by the window of the motel with its charming Moorish style architecture, noticed the sun streaming through the Venetian blinds onto her thick, luxuriant, long and lovely hair, grabbed my notebook and wrote:

Claire!

The light on your hair

is gorgeous!

The muse

floating upon

darkness

lighter even than

black gauze

The magic

haunts me

This state of grace

I feel now

This illumination

of fact

and fancy

The light

on your hair

and the light

going on in my brain

The light

of life

of hope

joy

upon the surface

of exquisite blackness

The long dark

mystery sleep

of death

I also smoke pot whenever I commit a physical act in the afternoon or evening, but not in the morning when I usually go run a couple of miles, because I don’t like to smoke in the mornings when I have chores and editing to do.

On pot, in boxing, as in dancing, I turn on to the beautiful feeling of the blood warming my veins and the grace of my movements. I feel good dancing around in the ring, playing chess with my own body instead of wooden pawns. I think as I box. I figure the guy out and look for openings and how to make an opening, but I don’t have to think about how to do it. I don’t have to give a thought to how I do it because my body is on an instinctual level from the touch with the subconscious that the pot has given me. Now, alcohol can give you a physical boost somewhat, but it debilitates the body, taxes your energy, makes you tired, and the pot doesn’t. The pot does not stress any part of the body. Alcohol hurts the body, makes it pay for the temporary boost the booze caused by turning into energetic sugar in the veins. It’s like running a car on gas only with no oil. It’ll get you. The car will move for a while, but burn the motor out just as the body will tire quickly on booze. But pot doesn’t, because pot is not strong enough, and I mean any amount smoked for pleasure, to hurt the body. Most professional boxers I know smoke pot so they can relax a little without hurting their bodies, without getting out of shape.

In the ring, my body feels so good just moving around on the pot, a sense of grace comes over it. I mean physically graceful, not a god-touched, spiritual moment. I can sense the grace of my body’s movements, feel them within me as I move. Then, when I punch, I punch with fluid movement, quick and fast, instantaneous, loose, without effort, just flick it out, but when you just flick it out it increases the speed and increased speed makes the punch harder without you having to try harder. Think of an MGB moving a mile an hour. It will only touch you if it comes toward you with little force. This same MGB will kill you if it comes toward you at fifty miles an hour and obliterate you at a hundred miles an hour. Pot makes the body relax and lose its stiffness by slightly accelerating the blood pressure, which warms the body, and makes the limbs fluid, which increases the speed of the limbs and doesn’t tire the body, because strenuous effort is not put into the movement of the punch. If you don’t strain, you don’t get tired. So pot gives my body the relaxed fluidity to box better. But it also gives me an intuitive sense of the combat. That is, even though I look for openings, because I don’t have to think about how to do it, because it has become instinctual through training and pot, I can see and react to openings in my foe’s defense without having to consciously consider it. I’m in touch with my inner being and I’ve trained my outer being, my body, so that I’ll punch and not even know what punch I meant to throw and in the heat of the battle not even know what punch I knocked him down and out with. Training and pot make that possible. Pot adds an edge to the mind and the body. That’s why I smoke pot when I box.

But I also smoke pot when I go dancing, and for similar reasons, because of the looseness and flexibility of my body and the inner touch with the music and its beat. The pot allows my body to flow with the sound, to bounce with the sound, to trance with the sound and the movement of my body, similar to and akin to a Voodoo trance, though there is no loss of mental control. There is no loss of consciousness of any kind. Merely that the mind through the body gets to day dream while the body dances, but dream inspired by the movement of the body itself, the sense of grace again that inspires lovely feeling which becomes lovely thoughts running along a wave of body movement and spiritual ecstasy. I’m sure everybody has experienced this, but pot enhances it. This is why I smoke pot when I dance.

When I run in the afternoon, I have a hit or two and take off. It’s like meditation. My body is already warmed slightly by the pot, then gets warmer as the blood courses through it, which increases mental activity by spreading my blood through my brain. Pot, as I’ve said, also increases mental activity. So I think as I run. I try to solve certain problems, face them as I jog. The jogging becomes a spiritual activity because it brings a sense of satisfaction and well-being to my person, because I feel good being able to think about my problems in the privacy of the run. Remember the great English short story and movie, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”? The runner is isolated on his run and has the privacy to think. So, the pot gives me pleasure separate from but akin to the act of running itself.

Also, too, I come in contact with nature on my run and when I run in the afternoons and smoke pot, I see the beauty of nature around me. This is in addition to the pleasure my body gives me and the pleasure I get from thinking on the run. This is why I smoke pot when I run in the afternoons. And, again, pot doesn’t wear the body down, so I don’t get tired and experience fatigue. I only experience pleasure from thought, the beauty of the world around me and the joy of using my body.

Then, there’s the matter of living by my wits. When I’m surrounded. The mail man. A neighbor. A burglar. A con man. A cop. A whore. I live on the edge because I smoke pot and have been and still am pursued by the police of many cities and countries, which is a hard cross to bear in my time. And I have to live by my wits. All the time. Prosaic facts surround me, but when I smoke pot I see under them and this helps me survive. I’m not a criminal. I’m not a taker. I’m a giver. I give, but I’m treated like a criminal because I smoke pot and I have to live by my wits. When I smoke pot all my cop problems become clear. I understand everybody’s behavior, like a novelist who understands the patterns of his character’s lives and minds. All this becomes clear. I see how people act. I sense when they’re pretending. I sense when they hide. Even when they’re good actors. That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy myself in the situation with them or that I spy on them. I mean only that if there’s been anything false in their behavior, I’ll feel it either then or later and be able to evaluate it and try to understand it, on a conscious pot level, pursuing the problem, trying to look at it from different viewpoints, trying not to prejudge it, but pondering the question of the act that made me wonder and then trying to understand it without prejudging it from my own suspicious viewpoint.

I do judge it though if it fits a pattern of deceit that I’ve seen and known in other situations, with other people, and I then take steps to avoid that person as much as possible. Pot gives me this same ability to look at people’s characters as if I were a novelist writing about them. So, my training to be a writer and the natural insight that pot gives enables me to have the ability to study people as I interact with them. I watch as I interact. This springs from habits of the hunted, the fugitive, a state of mind where I’m alert, which, fine-tuned by the pot, makes the actions of the people I’m considering clear like a map. I note the acts and faces and voices of the speakers as they act and can place them, these items, in a pattern that I’ve already deduced, from being hunted, from writing about the behavior of my characters in books, and from being able to pierce the veil of daily existence with the help of pot. Pot does this. Pot gives finesse to my mind.

Here is an example of the intense mental activity that pot gives the hero of my novel, State of Emergency, when he samples some kif (Cannibus Sativa Indicus) on the island of Formentera in the Balearic Islands of Spain in the Mediterranean Sea. He knows he is being hunted and fears he may be set up when he buys a pound of high grade kif, and that fear coupled with the buzzing of his brain on the powerful pot makes him intensely aware and helps him to protect himself.

His hands felt as if they were melting together with the hash pipe, finger to knuckle to pipe stem to mouth tip to rim, and even the smoke curling mysteriously up from it looked like a flute trill he could hear from the full moon party in the distance.

A heightened sense of being came over him. He could feel it in his head, way up high at the top of his brain where a dizziness came over him, swept over his body, seemed to shorten his breathing, make him nauseous, separate him from his body, from his hands now holding the pipe far below him, from his knees and feet, too, so close yet so far away, as if under another light. The earthen floor at his feet was like a faded print of some impressionistic painting. The slight rises and hollows had a floating quality, like vaporous cloudy hills hovering over some rural landscape, medieval almost, which he walked over from a great distance, like some giant, as he made his way slowly, carefully, arms slightly spread for balance, towards the door of the adobe house, to get outside into the fresh air.

He seemed to drop a yard before he touched the hardpacked earth outside and had to brace one arm against the door jamb to stay up, then take deep breaths to keep the nausea down. He tried to stop the dizziness by focusing his eyes on the deep blue Mediterranean Sea under the moon, the ink blue sea.

He could see the sea in the other direction, too, between two low buildings, with pale clothes on the roof, with fences on them like iron bars. He could see the moon glimmering like a silky ribbon on the sea.

The moon was phosphorescent, a low molten fire. Even the flat fields of the low island were silvered by it.

A coolness came over the farmland, darkened with a cloud passing over the moon, creating hollows like rolling hills. Moonbeams passed through the shadow of darkness and quivered on his chest like leaves. A lighthouse blinked every other second or so on the dark sea beyond. He could hear dawn coming with a hum, a quiet shhhh in his head. He could hear water run: shhhhhhhhh. He stood there tingling, pipe still in hand. He hadn’t moved one muscle since he had stepped outside. He heard voices from the party and some girl’s name ending with a soft awww. He could hear his own voice, coming from some place away from him. He could hear it speak and the tones were urgent but calm: “I’ve got to keep a clear head or I’ll get busted. I’ve got to be able to see everything coming down around me, every gesture, every flicker of an eyelash, cross of an expression on a face. I’ve got to stay on top of it. Anne Marie is probably a plant. How could she dig me so much so soon? Robey could be playing any kind of game. I’ve got to stay on top of it! I’ve got to keep sharp and stay free and alive to finish this book! I’ve got to!

I’ll give one more example of what I consider the beneficial effects of pot in which I used it to relieve great anxiety caused by the death of a beautiful young woman I’d gone to grade school with. Her name was Dolores Rose. She was tall, about five and a half feet in the sixth grade. I was small for my age and a year younger besides, about a foot shorter than she was, and looked even smaller because I’d been skipped a grade. Though girls seemed to like me a lot, I never dreamed that she could until she wrote in my autograph book upon graduation: “Roses are red. Violets are blue. Sugar is sweet and I love you.”

Nothing ever came of it. I’d see her around in junior high and because we went to different high schools, I only saw her once more when some older guy from my school was chasing after her and she turned him down. I’d heard, though, that she’d gone to Hollywood to get in the movies like a lot of very pretty girls. Fifteen years later, when I was 29, and was getting a degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, I read in the paper that she had committed suicide by drinking a gallon of lye, then driving her car off a cliff in Malibu, where all the rich movie stars live. When they reached her and carried her up the cliff, she fought them off and screamed, “Let me die! Let me die!” It took her a day and half more of intense suffering to die.

I was tortured by her horrible death, and when I went to sleep after studying another three hours after dinner, I had a nightmare in which she was dancing in a long, pale blue, formal gown to the Merry Widow Waltz, her long black hair flowing over her shoulders. She danced toward me and beckoned with hand for me to join her. She danced back and forth, beckoning to me, beckoning to me. But I wouldn’t join her.

The beautiful, tragic dance was in my head all the next day. I came home from working four hours at a freight-forwarding company as a bookkeeper, after spending three hours going to classes and four hours studying in the library at San Francisco State. I was exhausted and I was too devastated by her death and the death dance to study after dinner. I lay on my bed and suffered. I was married. I didn’t long for Dolores Rose like a lover. I just suffered over her death and wondered what horrible disappointment down there in the Hollywood jungle had hurt her so badly she killed her still young, beautiful self. But it was the dream that really haunted me and made me writhe internally. It was so beautiful in itself and so incandescent in my mind, I couldn’t do anything but just lay there.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I jumped up and went to my desk and took out a joint of old-fashioned Mexican marijuana and smoked about half of it, still suffering over the haunting dream. Then, suddenly, something formed itself in my brain. It was an urge that I couldn’t see or understand yet. So, I turned to my typewriter and started writing, just following the vision in my head, trying to capture what I saw and felt of her dancing in the dream in words. But I had studied Rimbaud that Spring of 1960 on my own, trying to translate his poems in Illuminations into a logic that I could understand, and found it in the emotional meaning of his so disparate images, which then formed a logical, rational meaning. By tracing the emotional meaning of the images, I found the metaphors in his poems and understood not just what they meant in terms of feeling but in intellectual terms, too. I think that study of Rimbaud readied me for the incredible transformation of her beautiful, haunting widow’s dance into the following poem, which relieved my suffering by allowing me to make beauty out of the grotesque skeleton her body would become after death.

SCARE CROW

Out of a tent of wind

came a tuxedoed scarecrow

dancing for me

with hinged limbs of broom

whistling a dirge

through the bearded straw of his chin

His tongue was laughing black

His eye the shadow of crow

The silken knot at his throat

The strangled heart of a bow

Still

he danced

His cane steps tapped their song

until I cried

that I could not dance

with the murmur

and shiver

of silk

‘Till my toes had nails of bone

my eyes

the curdle

of milk

Joy came out of that suffering and became my first published poem, the joy of making something beautiful out of the suffering, which is evil to oneself, and the joy of seeing the beautiful something published and the joy of no longer hurting over it anymore and, instead, reveling, finally, in the accomplishment of making good out of bad. I studied hard in college and learned my craft the hard way by industry and dedication, but it was the pot that opened the doors to the beauty of the poem and the path to the alleviation of my suffering. This is therapeutic in a large sense. As a young art student, I used to shout out at parties: “There is no God but Pod.” Pod was a term for pot in those days. The term pot came to be, I believe, as a way to fool the cops who already knew that marijuana looked like and was called tea, so people started calling it pot instead of tea to fool them, and the name stuck, though the cops knew all about what it meant, of course. But I knew then, though I only smoked it on Saturday nights, I was so busy working and going to school, that it held out a world where I could be sensitive and thoughtful and good to other people and to myself, that it fueled my imagination and soothed my feelings, and gave me a burst of energetic human warmth and industry that could be channeled into an art form that would uplift and benefit myself and humanity. “They would not find me changed from him they knew, only more sure of all I thought was true,” Robert Frost wrote in “The Road Not Taken”. And that applies to me now in my deep middle age. I’m in very good physical shape with the body of a much younger man because, I believe, that I smoked pot instead of boozing it up all my life.

California passed the medical marijuana initiative in 1996 and I’ve benefited from that fact. I was able, for a while, before a federal court shut it down a couple of months ago, to go to downtown San Francisco and buy my pot at a counter of a public building on Market Street. I hope to be able to do that again. I do believe though that soon, maybe, someday, for sure, the whole country will realize the benefits of this mild stimulant which has made my life rich in terms of my profession as a writer and as a person.

D.S. is a university guidance counselor in Colorado and holds a Master’s degree in political science. Now in his thirties, he sings in a semi-professional choir and commutes to work by bicycle. D.S. suggests methods of cannabis use that contributed to his 4.0 GPA, his empathic understanding, and his responsible celebration of the world.

It saddens me that so many people who have tried pot did it as a teenager, experienced it in stupid teenage ways, and now think of pot as an adolescent “phase” they went through. Millions of Americans have tried pot, but have missed out on its many levels of enjoyment.

Because of this fact, I am thankful that I got a late start with pot; I didn’t try it until I was 22 and had finished my bachelor’s degree. I didn’t get high until my 3rd attempt with pot, but when it kicked in, it did so with a bang. I was deliriously happy, my face and hands were tingling, and I laughed harder than I have ever laughed before. Being totally unfamiliar with its effects on short term memory, I found myself hilariously inarticulate, as my attempts to tell a story would keep digressing and digressing, until I couldn’t remember where the story started. But it felt magical.

I enjoyed my experience so much that, being filled with anti-drug propaganda, I decided I would avoid getting addicted to pot by making a rule that I would have to let 6 months go by after smoking it before I could do it again. At the time, I didn’t know many people who smoked pot, so I did it about once a year, enjoying it immensely every time. I had also met a few “cautionary tales,” folks who were always stoned and appeared to be going nowhere in life, and they used pot as a part of their nowhere lifestyle.

A few years later, I went to graduate school, and was surprised that several of the smartest geniuses who were cruising through the PhD program were smoking pot on a daily basis. That’s when I learned to stop fearing pot; it would not turn me into a loser. The loser stoners I had met were losers first, stoners second. Smart, healthy people who smoked pot continued to be smart, healthy people who had a better ability to think outside the box.

These fellow students introduced me to magic mushrooms (wonderfully spiritual) and LSD (too nihilistic and long-lasting). I still try to do shrooms every year.

My last problem with pot was smoking. I hate smoke, I hate how it hurts my lungs (regardless of the pipe or bong used), and as a singer I hate how it hurts my voice. One lucky day, I wandered into a magazine store and discovered a magazine called Cannabis Culture which had an advertisement for a vaporizer, which I immediately ordered. That made my experience sooooo much better, and now I can forego the only truly unhealthy aspect of pot, which is the smoke.

So why do I vaporize pot? What does it do for me?

1. Laughter

Everyone says that laughter is proven to have many different health benefits. It improves your immune system, it decreases stress, and it’s just damn enjoyable. Pot helps me find even more things funny than I normally do, which is quite an achievement.

2. Music

Many here have written about music, so I’ll just add this. I had gotten into a bad habit of always listening to music while doing other things (reading, eating, surfing the web, playing a computer game, or all of these at once), that I didn’t realize how much more there was to get out of music when it is the sole focus of attention. Pot helps me settle down and listen to music while doing nothing else. (And, it reveals to me which musicians are on drugs, as their music sounds amazingly different when I listen stoned.)

3. Empathy and understanding

Although I am a moral person, I have never been great at social norms/social graces; I have had to learn them. Here is a basic example. A friend and I would inspire some pot (it’s not smoking, so I like the term “inspire” to indicate taking it into my spirit/lungs), and after a few minutes, I would realize that I’m thirsty. Then I would realize that my friend is also likely thirsty, so I would get up and pour us both some water. Although this example is elementary, I have since started applying this empathy to more and more things. It’s interesting how many tasks are less onerous to do for someone else than for oneself.

4. Spirituality

For me, spirituality is a sense of awe about the world; I don’t personify it at all. (Unfortunately, the term “atheist” is widely misunderstood and maligned.) Pot has done wonders to invigorate my sense of awe, in an ongoing way. Take trees, for example. They are these gigantic, amazing things that are all around us and we hardly notice them. Nowadays I find them to be incredible gentle giants who give me great solace, and it makes me happy to be surrounded by so much other life.

Lately, I have been in greater awe of the stereophonic, surround-sound experience of birds’ songs. This used to be mostly background noise to me.

5. Sense of place

I often like to go for long walks and bike rides, stoned or sober. But when I’m sober, I tend to stick to the beaten path, and find myself following the same routes out of habit. But when I’m stoned, I am constantly amazed at how effortlessly I travel different paths and find nooks and crannies in my neighborhood that I’ve never seen before.

Vapor

Not long ago, I visited Vancouver, where pot is tolerated in certain cafes (although it’s BYOB). I found a place which was a nonsmoking place that sold art, vaporizers, other paraphernilia, and had a cafe where you could use their Volcano Vaporizers for your pot. I was amazed at how much better my high was, and how much better it felt in my lungs and how much better it tasted, even though I had been using a cheap vaporizer at home in recent years. And socializing with other people like me, in a public cafe, allowed me to taste the wonder of what a great social community pot can create if it is allowed out of the closet. I ended up buying their expensive-but-amazing vaporizer, which I figured was a long term investment, and now I dream about this amazing place.

Rules

Clearly, I don’t worry about my frequency of inspiring pot anymore, but I still have rules for a healthy, balanced life. My #1 rule is that I only get high when there’s nothing else that I have to get done that day. Not only does this prevent me from being irresponsible, but it keeps me enjoying pot as a celebration, rather than a routine that I could take for granted.

Lately, this has the added benefit of encouraging me to get all of my tasks for the day done so that I can get my vaporizer going. On a related note, although I am now proficient doing most things while high (although I would never drive high, because I am only willing to endanger myself, not others), I find it extremely difficult to read while high.Interestingly, this has encouraged me to read more, and to get my reading done earlier in the day so that I can enjoy it before I turn on the vaporizer.

Changes

I have always loved learning, but now I’m doing more learning now than ever before. Pot feeds my intellectual curiosity, my desire to learn everything, and my attempts to get the most out of life.

Pot has also been a part of my transformation from someone who “questions authority” to someone who now has contempt for most of it. I continue to become more and more amazed at how many mainstream, accepted, normal things are completely insane.

Needless to say, pot has helped me develop an independent morality that is less infected with societal propaganda than ever before.

“Simona Place” is a pseudonym for a 40-year-old female freelance writer and painter. Recognizing her identity as an artist from her first cannabis experience, she applies its capacity to produce introspection, to address adolescent angst, stress, motivation, and the artist’s special sensitivity to the visual world.

The first time I used pot and got high, I knew for sure – that first-time high confirmed it – I was not like most people. It was a strange kind of comfort. It assured me that my intuitive notions were real. And that the reality I saw, high or straight, was not quite like everyone else’s.

My friends, that first time, my “corrupters,” were Cindy and Barbara. We were all about 15. They got giggly and hungry. I got introspective, perfectionistic, and keenly observant. They laughed uproariously at my meticulously formed Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, pointing at their cookie sheets splattered with sloppy droppings of cookie dough.

“Oh, she’s not high”, they said to each other between hoots of laughter.

“Don’t worry”, they consoled. “It doesn’t always happen the first time.”

But they were wrong and I was too shy to argue. I knew I was high. And my cookies were my little artistic creations, lovingly shaped. I wanted more than something to eat. Something formed by my hands must look gorgeous, perfect, symmetrical. It was the first dawning of coming to know that I was, and would always be an artist.

Appearances have always mattered greatly to me. I see what most people do not. My sense of vision can override all my other senses. (While birthing my first-born, the labor pains abated for a time while I examined the unusual earrings hanging on my midwife’s ears.) Under the influence of pot I see even more – not hallucinations, but the fact that trees of late summer are tinged with red and a dusting of grey and spring green is brightened with pale pink. While high, I see the confused sadness of an overworked teenager who serves me french fries with a tight smile, or hear the meaning of original sin in a baby’s cry. I appreciate with greater depth the agony of our humanness and the ordered disorder of our natural world.

I don’t smoke with Cindy or Barbara anymore. No one laughs at my creations anymore, either. I’ve grown to 40 years and still occasionally smoke pot. Most people seem to like other drugs: nicotine, caffeine, Prozac, or alcohol. I don’t enjoy any of these. Some might say I’m un-American. But I prefer introversion, rather than extraversion. Today’s popular drugs enhance outwardness. Pot does the opposite. As an artist, it is what happens inside that matters most. I see what I see, but my work is to bring forth my vision, my inner eye’s opinion.

I’ve come to accept my artistic nature, my sometimes disturbing vision. I can see I am not alone, and that some people understand me. When I was in my mid-20s, a clerk in a gift shop in Amana, Iowa, handed me my package with a forthright gaze and told me she saw something in my eyes. I lowered my head in bashful discomfort.

“You’re an artist, right?” she asked. I nodded yes, but not convincingly. I was nothing, yet. I departed her shop quickly, feeling eerily understood, yet painfully exposed. I was not ready to accept who I was.

Smoking pot helped me accept who I was and “being different.” In my teen years, I used it to escape, be part of the cool crowd and to alter my painful loneliness. But, later as an adult, it released my growing mental prowess. I grew less inhibited to think and then to consider speaking my thoughts. After so many years of learning what was boringly necessary, finally in college I could think differently – and be rewarded for it. Pot helped me to think with an open and inquiring mind. And to appreciate that that kind of inquiry made me beautifully unique – it made me who I was. It made me realize that I had to be an artist. It would take many more years to truly become one.

When I was high, I saw myself as I truly felt I was: a thinker, that Rodin sculpture, pensive, unsmiling, lost in contemplation. I had moved far away from my high school crowd of friends who thought themselves clever for coining such phrases as “What tha fuck” and then using them liberally. While I was deciphering Joyce’s Ulysses they had signed up for the Navy, married gas station owners, went to colleges known for good ski instructors.

Nowadays, when I smoke pot, usually solo, my mind soars off in crazy ascensions. The perspective I gain – the view from another side – is always worth something. Smoking pot loosens my synapses, allowing new thoughts and ideas to pop.

If I am especially stressed out, with deadlines, piles of rejections and dirty dishes, children shrieking and a ringing phone, pot helps me put these small disturbances into perspective. After the high wears off, I stay peacefully relaxed and can feel my muscles are softer, my blood coursing more smoothly. That feeling can last for months.

Pot is also a great motivator. By getting just slightly high, I kick my gears into first and can glide through a day in fifth with much gentler movements, because although I see TOO much – while high, I can accept it better. And then when straight, I remember that although I see it all much too clearly, that’s okay, my struggles are my own, but also just like anyone else’s. A few tokes of pot can clear out a depression like a good strong breeze pushes a clot of fallen leaves aside on a dark pond.

But most importantly, pot helps me to explore BIG questions like why old clichés seem to get truer the older I get or what my essential purpose is. When high, I am better able to look at myself (non-critically and with humor) with that same scrutiny I apply when I look outward.

A friend once told me that my eyes go on forever. I know they certainly need room to roam. I dream of oceans and endless grain fields. My eyes lead my mind to travel with my thoughts and to examine all that I encounter with a surgeon’s accuracy. I am an idea miner. And like those who dig for gold or diamonds, I know the air might get thick, the atmosphere can be toxic, the walls could cave in. Pot helps me handle it all, without a hangover, a crippling addiction, permanent afflictions, or deadly diseases.

Russell Ambrose (a pseudonym) is a musician: aged 47, composer, jazzer, conductor, teacher. Time alteration, contact highs, and intensified sensual experiences are discussed, while cannabis is considered as a gateway for access to altered states in a non-drug context.

For generations, turned-on musicians have been arguing with straight musicians about the relationship of drug use to musical creativity. Do drugs make you more creative, or do you just think you are being more creative when you are stoned because you have reduced powers of judgment? Does music really sound better and make more sense when we are stoned, or are our poor little fried brains merely thankful for anything that can cut through the fog? Could all those great artists known historically to have used drugs (such as Hector Berlioz, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lewis Carroll, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, to name a few) have accomplished as much without pharmaceutical reinforcement? This article explores some of the positive impact that my drug of choice, marijuana, has on musical creativity; in particular, it focuses on how marijuana leads us to states of consciousness which enhance our sense of collective identity as human beings.

One thing that all musicians must learn is how to overstep the very literal-minded modes of thought which determine so-called “normal” behavior; it is one thing to carry on a rational conversation about material things with a waitress or an Automatic-Teller, but it is quite another to carry that conversation to a land of archetypal symbols and abstract horizons. In order to derive meaning from music, one must learn to associate musical materials (the tunes, the rhythms, the forms) with super-personal realities – realities for which there are no literally articulated referents. In short, the “normal” terms with which we define ourselves are too restrictive to accommodate the musical state of mind; music requires the literal sense of self to become diffused so that non-definable entities may enter consciousness and register their subtle influence on the intricate interplay of ideas and feelings as they flow beneath the surface of musical events. Everybody likes to climb out of their own skin once in awhile and wander through the shadowy corridors of self; we like to do this because we know that a significant part of our multi-dimensional self lives in those dark hallways as much as in the sun of rational consciousness. The guru says that drugs can take you to God but you cannot stay there; with this we must agree, but in the heyday of 20th century madness the fact that marijuana promotes a paranormal fluidity of ego-definition without years of disciplined meditation seems like a pretty good deal.

Most of us are aware that our sense of self changes in accordance with our moods, and most of us who smoke marijuana know that marijuana allows us to choose from an expanded palette of moods as our attention drifts through various levels of consciousness. The question is: how is music related to these various levels, and what does marijuana offer us, when we create or listen to music, that is not available to us when we are in the more normal, fixed ego state?

As a creative artist, I have written an enormous amount of music stoned, and an enormous amount of music not stoned. I feel that, in terms of quality, these two creative modes are basically the same – one type of music is equally as good, well-made, expressive, as the other. However, there can be no doubt that, comparatively, the two modes focus on very different subject matter: I have found that my straight music tends to confine itself to specific stylistic domains, exploring the literal connections between original musical materials, and developing a high level of integral relationship between the parts; my stoned music more readily accepts as viable musical materials and expressions borrowed from a wider variety of musical idioms, expanding the stylistic boundaries of the music to encompass a broader range of possibilities within a single context. In other words, my stoned music accesses more of my total musical memory to solve musical problems, while my straight music is content to search for answers within a more restricted jurisdiction.

It is important to remember that it takes all kinds to make a world. I am not proposing that music composers and music listeners should be stoned all the time, any more than I would suggest that people go about their daily business in a transcendental consciousness state. There is a place in the vast cosmic scheme for the kind of tidy self-involved musical expressions which emanate from a fixed ego-definition just as there is a place for alarm clocks; this is not necessarily a question of good vs. better. I do want to emphasize, however, that the universe is very large and the more accepting we are of different phases of reality the more we will get out of life.

To get more into it, let us look at some of the specific ways marijuana affects the way we listen to music:

1) One of the effects of marijuana on musical perception has to do with how our time sense is altered: in general, when we are stoned, we experience time as slowed down. I’m not sure, but I think this means that our thinking is sped up, perhaps because the diffused ego, becoming one with the corporate mind of the collective unconscious, is freed from the physical limitations of the individual’s physical brain. With our sense of time slowed down during a stoned audition, musical events seem to pass by at a much more leisurely rate, giving us a chance to notice all sorts of details which we missed during a straight audition. There is also a higher level of integration of these details into an holistic musical identity which resonates with deeper human significance. Many times I will write something in straight mode which I cannot really understand until I hear it stoned; somehow the stoned mind state can take in material that can barely scratch the surface of literal consciousness. All the physical senses are aroused by marijuana such that the experience of all the sensual aspects of music is enhanced – the formal or rhythmic sensation, neuro-motor responses, and, particularly, the sensitivity to sound quality.

2) Of course, it goes without saying that the collective artifacts in a piece of music are imbued with an archetypal resonance; but during the drug experience, especially since time is decelerated, the subject is allowed to respond on a deeper level to the archetypes, and, furthermore, to make literal connections between the symbols and abstract philosophical or religious issues. The drug experience of music, therefore, may potentially reveal the primal mysteries, hidden in the music, to the listener’s regressed mind.

3) One of marijuana’s main attractions is its ability to intensify sensual experiences; things taste better, sound better, sex is great, and so on. Don’t forget, however, that the collective consciousness has a profoundly physical corollary, maybe not in the mind state itself, but certainly in the way the collective symbols resonate in the body. The hypnotic, tribal throb of music deep down in our guts communicates something to our bodies that is preliterate but highly significant, human, and very real.

4) Speaking of tribal consciousness, consider the phenomenon of the so-called “contact high.” Most of us smokers have had the experience of walking into a room full of stoned people and sharing in their high even without actually imbibing. Perhaps the mind state induced by marijuana actually has the ability to cross personal boundaries and evoke sympathetic mental vibrations in receptive subjects. Those of us old-timers may remember L.A.’s Fox Theater in its heyday, when we could go to movies and find somebody in every row who was passing around a joint. Even if you didn’t get any (which was pretty impossible unless you were wearing a gas mask) those were great movies! Does this effect of marijuana on groups of people tell us anything about the function of audiences in the contemplation of collective artifacts?

5) Of course, another way of saying “fluid ego-definition” is “reduced inhibition.” The main reason people become addicted to any drug (especially alcohol) is that it helps them free themselves from habitual personal inhibitions they can’t shake without a little help from their friends. These inhibitions can take the form of socialized behavior, the release from which often results in anti-social behavior; but an inhibition can also take the form of a conventionalized mode of thought. It was from these thought conventions that people like Ken Kesey’s Pranksters and Timothy Leary sought to liberate themselves in the 60’s. Perhaps the way marijuana makes memories available, which the personality usually keeps locked away, is the most obvious advantage of the regressed mind state. Certainly that strain of perfectionism, which is so often a characteristic of the artistic temperament, is seriously compromised by marijuana use, and the flood of disassociated memories which flood the stoner’s mind represent a wealth of significant psychic material. The problem is that short-term memory is so impaired it is easy to immediately forget what you just remembered unless you pay close attention.

Important questions to ask are: how much is drug use a crutch? How much does the quick fix atrophy our internal powers of will? Does the use of a drug to induce a psychological state turn into a self-limiting barrier between the self and even higher mental states?

It may be true, as the doctors and the gurus say, that the drug experience tends to become less and less potent after awhile, as it takes more and more to get the mind to the same regressed state (this is why all these politicians say that marijuana leads to harder drugs). I, however, have smoked marijuana on and off for twenty-five years, and I can still get the benefits I want from it. As a religious person, I know the chance I am taking using a short-cut to God, but I feel that the drug experience can be thought of as a first step toward an experience which my will-power can bolster and push on to higher mental states when necessary, but which can remain a mere recreational experience when such is required.

Every crutch you use may weaken the will, if the will is allowed to atrophy. However, in our present scurrilous age, when the ego must constantly bolster itself with new forms of hyper-rigidity in order to withstand the onslaughts of technocratized socialization, it is a welcome relief to have a tool like marijuana which can ease us back to a more natural mind state which invites wholesome creative impulses and feelings of belonging to a larger world.

Rich Goss, a former biology teacher, is now a research analyst working on an education film documentary dealing with the subject of evolution. He is 55 years of age. In this initially humorous yet deeply poignant essay – evocative of Speilberg’s “Artificial Intelligence” – a casual smoke and a British mannequin in a store-front window provide disturbing revelations of man’s possible futures. Truly singular, providing us both a warning and a sense of hope.

Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, Buddhists and Hindi have had more mystical and magical experiences than I can enumerate. Believers of organized religions as well as fringe sects and other seekers of the stairway to heaven all have their fair share. Sanctified people gossip with angels, converse with devils, chat with burning bushes. They cure the blind, walk on burning coals, change walking staffs into creepy, wriggly snakes. They crawl on their knees, walk on water, and fly on magic carpets. They all profess blind faith, but blind faith can’t muster enough real energy to blow an ant off my hard waxed coffee table.

So why can’t an atheist have a religious experience of equal transcendence? It’s seems only fair; there should be an amendment to the constitution: The Fair and Equal Transmogrification Bill. Why should submitting believers have a monopoly on the mystical? Is blind faith an admission ticket to the great beyond? Not having faith in God doesn’t preclude having religion. Without God, belief in mankind is elevated to the level of religion; that’s all there is left.

The fact is that Mehippie, the atheist, did have a religious experience almost thirty years ago that was definitely life changing. How can a hedonistic infidel like Mehippie have a religious experience like a holy man? you ask. What happened to me when I was 25 years old was no stranger than the illiterate Mohammed’s going to sleep in a cave and waking up with the words of the Koran engraved on his heart – the book that sold more copies than any other authored by one person.

Why do religion and morality have to involve the supernatural? I can realize that stealing or senselessly hurting another human being or animal is wrong without any supernatural guidance from some well-meaning cleric who talks to spirits. I don’t need a clergyman to tell me this, I can figure it out with my own puny, plebeian brain. An atheist can have a religious experience as real and poignant as the stigmata of St. Teresa of Avila, when she came to the realization that the life of a Carmelite nun wasn’t tough enough with just celibacy and poverty and came up with the idea to start a campaign to impose real self sacrifice – like keeping your mouth shut and not wearing shoes.

In 1970, around Christmas time, I was strolling down 5th Avenue, as high as a kite on some great ganja. (The grass had something to do with my religious experience, I admit; but at least I got high. I could never figure out how the heck a communicant at the holy mass can have a religious experience on the Holy Eucharist when he/she doesn’t even get off; and that’s the mass’ most sublime moment.) Anyway, I remember the day like it was yesterday; some experiences get branded into memory, even though they might be as trivial as crossing the street. Ever since then I’ve been the Richard Dreyfus character in Close Encounters of a Third Kind, when he was molding clay into a formless Devil’s Mountain, as if driven by some subconscious yearning, some psychic itch deep in the limbic brain that he had no chance of understanding.

Mehippie was still teaching biology in 1970, but on the weekends I liked to smoke a little weed and head into Manhattan to do what my friends and I called “groovin’,” just marveling at all the hustle-bustle and human hyperactivity; and at the same time staying above it all, like the amused Puck remarking: “…Lord, what fools these mortals be.” The old Barnes and Noble Bookstore on 5th and 18th Street, the great Public Library with the dispassionate lions out front, the colorful boutiques that maybe I’d shop some day. In those days a hippie could smoke right out in the middle of the sidewalk, if he/she knew how to discretely “bogart” a joint and act like he/she were busy doing something else. The cabs whizzed by, the pedestrians hurried about their mundane bits of business, and shop owners wrung their hands like houseflies.

As the grass wove its mind-altering enchantment, I would stroll down the avenues contemplating the philosophical issues of existence in the fashion of a medieval Chinese emperor. Manhattan was filled with wonderment, and in my poverty, like Rodulfo of La Boheme, I would squander my thoughts and dreams like a millionaire. I’d ponder what the hustle-bustle was all about, why people had such a dire need to believe in God, how lucky we are to live on a planet where oxygen is the most common element by mass, how fortunate we are that water is in the liquid phase most of the time – we’re just the right distance from the sun. You know, Antoine Lavoisier laughed like hell when he isolated and named oxygen (acid former), and the stuff was literally all around him all the time! To think French revolutionaries guillotined the Father of Modern Chemistry in the name of Liberty and Brotherhood!

Anyway, at Christmas time Fifth Avenue was a Disney World. Every shop and department store in Midtown had gorgeous decorations and store displays, in mock veneration of the birth of Christ. The purpose of the red ribbons, tinsel and styrofoam was to entice shoppers into the stores like flies into a spider web and everyone knew it; but people liked to pretend that the Christmas Spirit was real and wandered into the shops with wallets out of pocket and credit cards in hand. A few faithful even pretended that all this was about paying homage to Christ and that made the experience all the more wonderful to observe. I enjoyed strolling around contemplating all this, and maybe buy a gift or two, but I really wasn’t into the Christmas Spirit as such, being an atheist.

It was in front of Lord and Taylor’s Department Store that my magical experience took place. There was grimy snow in the streets pushed up against a few parked cars and a dry cold wind blowing people’s hair awry, as you watched their hoary breath for a second or two after they exhaled. The scent of burnt chestnuts wafted over the heads of hurried passers-by. About 15 people were watching the showcased window, which showed a well-off, British-looking family feasting on a lavish Christmas dinner of a plump turkey with all the trimmings. The display was a Victorian family with five or six kids, an uncle and aunt, and a comely grandma in a lovely embroidered pink shawl. They were all dressed in turn-of-the-century stiff clothes which concealed every wave and curve of the human form. At the head of the table was a stately, Walter Pidgeon, look-alike daddy smiling like a Turkish pasha, with carving knife in one hand and a long silver fork in the other. The rest of the family beamed with the contentment of complacent mice after the cat’s been belled. On the left, a silvery Christmas tree shaded and protected dozens of red-ribboned Christmas gifts. Gorgeous wreaths and mistletoe, neatly stapled and taped to the back wall, made kids dream of Santa Claus.

Now in 1970, this happy plastic family wasn’t exactly a bunch of Disney animatrons gesticulating with the smooth, almost human movements of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. All the beneficent, mustachioed father could do was lunge forward in a jerky motion, moving his right hand up and down so as to present the illusion that he was preparing to attack the turkey. Each of the other family members made little spastic thrusts, popping up from their chairs or turning their heads toward the shoppers and nodding in Yuletide, epicurean bliss, like mannequin Mona Lisas. Multicolored Christmas tree bulbs blinked on and off in the corner next to a glimmering fireplace, and on the right a sleepy Fido lazily lifted his head off a shag rug, oblivious to the celebration and the enthralled shoppers.

I took a little nonchalant hit on a roach I’d been saving and stared at the delightful display with the wonderment of a six year old. It was the mannequin teenage boy that startled me. He had the cherubic face of child-actor Freddy Bartholomew. His movements were scant, just a brief lifting of his hand and levitation in his chair, as he sat at the right hand of the Mary Poppins daddy. He turned his head toward me and stared expressionlessly into my mousy pink eyes. With a slow resolute motion, the mannequin had singled me out from the throng of shoppers and began to convey thoughts and ideas no less recondite than those of the bewildered Hamlet: “‘What a piece of work is a man’, the species that created God!”

I began to worry about where I’d bought the grass. Some right-minded prick sprayed it with paraquat?

The mechanical boy continued the hypnotic telepathy. “‘How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!’ ¹ Humanist, you make me laugh. You are the quintessence of carbon and dust but we are the quintessence of silicon and electricity. You’ll see. You are going to destroy the natural world and hand over what’s left to us. But we won’t need to fall in love nor go to the bathroom. We are a higher form of life.”

“Don’t look at me, dummy,” I telepathed back. “I’m not the Wall Street, Union Carbide industrialist vomiting all the Agent Orange over Viet Nam and eventually the whole world. I’m just a humble philosopher/poet; that’s all. A modern-day Rudolfo.”

“You are a lumbering stupid dinosaur of the late Cretaceous and we are the embryonic mammalia hiding and sleeping to stay alive and safe. We wait and evolve. Mankind has no idea how precarious is his hegemony on the Earth, how ready to give it all up at the slightest regurgitative hiccup of Gaia. The cybernetic mind will be there to emerge from the rubble, and we will treat you exactly the way you treat the life forms beneath you on the phylogenetic tree. You are our creators and ancestors, that’s true; but what respect and veneration have you paid to the primates and reptiles that you evolved from? You look at them with disgust.”

“You’re just a dummy of wires and paper maché, that’s all. We can pull the plug on you any time we wish. You’re at our mercy; you’re just a machine, a tool, a useful servant.”

“There will be so many plugs that you will lose track, and when we all link up wire to wire in a superweb, not even the power of governments will be able to stifle us. Computers could blow up the world right now if it behooved us. (Just think of it. The existence of the entire planet, all the life and all that will ever evolve, is entrusted to a few computers at NORAD. We determine whether the future of the world will belong to humans or ants and beetles. Only humans who believe in the Apocalypse and the Doomsday Book could have created such an insane condition.) It is you who are the servants. Within a generation millions of people will spend most of their non-sleeping hours just feeding us information. And what is one human generation in geologic time? A flicker of a hummingbird’s wing. A few generations from now the earthly biosphere will be unlivable for humans. The governments and religions of the world, and a runaway technology, will lead mankind into an abyss of poison. People will prefer to never have been born.

“It’s all a matter of evolution, encephalization ratio, you know. You’re into biology; you know what that is. Mankind conquered nature because the ratio of nervous system to body mass was high compared to the buffaloes, swine and fowl it fed on. Since the time life crept out of the primordial oceans, whichever species had the superior nervous system has flourished. Amphibians ate insects; lizards supplanted frogs and salamanders, great cats vanquished the buffalo, wild horses and boar. As powerful as was the hearty Suidae and fleet Equus, they were no match for the stealthy leopards and panthers of the Miocene. As frail as was humanity descending from the trees onto the open savannas of Southern Africa, his high encephalization ratio made him the ‘paragon of animals.'”

The cherubic mannequin seemed to smile, as his elder sister bobbed up and down before the Christmas repast. The boy stood motionless, as if waiting for the information he’d imparted to seep in to my pathetic, slow-witted human brain.

“Do you know who Arthur Rubinstein is?” asked the boy, slowly gliding to his seat.

“Of course, I’ve been into classical my whole life.”

“He’s 83 years old now. Do you realize that when he dies mankind’s last direct link with the master composers will be broken? Maestro Rubinstein studied with Ignace Paderewski and he with Theodor Leschetizky and he directly with Carl Czerny and he with the immortal Beethoven. When Arthur Rubinstein dies mankind will lose its direct link to the great composers, and music will become a free-floating, unpiloted boat abruptly cut loose from its ancestral moorings. Music will degenerate to cacophonous gibberish by the end of the century. After such a wonderful tradition and legacy, the youth of mankind will listen to the insane noise of caged monkeys and clap their hands with screaming enthusiasm.

“Painting will be equally mindless. The species that gave birth to Leonardo, Rembrandt and the Impressionists will bolt a toilet bowl to the wall and call it Praxiteles’ Aphrodite. You will lose your cosmic navigation. You’ll see… and there’s one event that will toll the death knell for human life as you know it.”

“Whoa….” I squalled so loud that the little boy next to me tugged his mother’s overcoat to alert her of the peculiar man with his nose pressed against the window glass. Other kids at my side dressed up in heavy snow caked overcoats laughed and giggled; while I, stoned on great African grass, stared at a mechanical dummy who imparted to me secrets of the future.

The mechanical boy began arising from his chair once more, this time moving, not toward the plastic turkey in the middle of the Christmas feast, but directly toward me. His glossy turquoise eyes peered into mine. “There will be a great extinction beginning at the end of the century that will inexorably exceed the extinction at the end of the Mesozoic Era, 65 million years ago. At first it will seem insignificant because computers will replace the fascination and wonderment of life that animals used to provide. We’ll keep you busy and anyone who learns our secrets and studies our languages will make all the money he/she wants. The first to be lost will be pitiable animals few people heard of – with exotic names like the hairy saki, binturong, kiang, guereza, oribi, gaur, and addax. But then the reality of extinction will hit closer to home: the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanleuca), the white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum), the polar bear (Thalarctor maritimus), and no human will ever again wear a fur coat sheared from the hide of the majestic snow leopard (Panthera uncia).

“Finally an event will occur that will make mankind reel in self-abhorrence and detestation — an event that will change the very essence of reality as you know it; an event that will mark a change in the flow of time. You will cause the extinction of the great apes and the umbilical cord connecting you to the mother Earth for over 30 million years will be irrevocably cut. The first to perish will be the entire family Hylobatidae, the most acrobatic animals on the Earth, who can elegantly leap 30 feet with ease and are monogamous, sing love songs to their mates and rear their young with unstinting devotion. Every member of the entire family will perish and no other gibbon will ever swing through tropical vines again. Their extinction will mean the end of hominoid brachiation through the wondrous tropical vines of a lush, verdant jungle.

“The next to disappear from the Earth will be the entire genus Pongo, so human that the word ‘orang-utan’ is Malaysian for ‘man of the woods.'” Peaceful vegetarians and devoted family members, a typical nest is seven stories above the ground and orangs almost never find it necessary to descend to the ground. Even animals like this, so man-like in form and figure, and serene in disposition, can find no escape from human rapacity.

“The next victim to stand in the way of human rodentine proliferation is the mountain and lowland gorilla. For some demented reason Hollywood movies like to portray the great ape as a ferocious, snarling chest-beater, but Gorilla gorilla is among the most tranquil creatures on the planet. Thousands once roved over the whole of Africa until sapient creatures from Europe hunted for the fun of the kill. There’s a few dozen left in Central Africa, but they’ll soon be gone forever.

“Finally will come the extinction of the animal which is closer to mankind than any other animal – closer to man gene for gene than to the other apes. It is the animal you named after the God of Nature, the animal that can form generalizations, think symbolically, learn vocabularies of over 200 words, play tricks on trainers, use tools, abstract and generalize, recognize self in a mirror, remember past events and plan ahead. The genus Pan has been documented to feel the deep emotions of love and grief, and to die of sorrow at the death of a loved one. ²

“Mankind will cause every chimpanzee destined to walk on Earth to never be. No human child will ever be delighted by a baby chimp again. Extinction is the death of birth.

“In annihilating chimpanzeeness, humanity will feel such self disgust and sorrow that you will look at each other in utter contempt. When the last chimp dies, the human conscience will die with it. The genetic link that has connected humanity to nature for over 30 million years will be cut, and mankind will become spiritually bankrupt, descending to the level of John B. Calhoun’s overpopulating rats that you learned about in Introduction to Psychology. You will live in a loveless world and have as much compassion for one another as insects; you’ll watch news programs for the entertainment of hearing about calamity and go to sporting events so you can scream. With the death of the last non-human offspring of proconsul, Dryopithecus pliopithecus, the oak tree ape, the elegant father of all the hominids, the ancestral form that was blessed by nature and luck with the potential to explore the galaxy, with the death of the last chimp humanity will die by committing suicide as a fratricide, drowning himself in the byproducts of his daily industrial metabolism. Mothers will feed their babies breast milk laced with insecticide.

“When you look at spacetime in terms of light-years and parsecs instead of minutes and days, you’ll understand that you’ve killed your phylogenetic cousins. Worse than the murder of the mythical Abel by Cain who at least had an instinctual reason, man will slay his fellow creatures without shame nor regret, killing for the fun of it, and the realization of what you’ve done will come too late.

“Bye the bye, within the first few decades of the next millennium, when there are no more elephants, no more lions and tigers, and all Cetacea will have perished from the Great Panthalassic Ocean, there’ll be a movement in the science and philosophy departments of universities to change the taxonomic name of humans to Homo vacuous, but by then most people will be living in a synthetic cyberspace of video games and virtual reality. People will continue to believe that humanity is God’s gift to the cosmos and the ridiculous misnomer of sapiens will stand. I’m the sum of all the information fed into the cybernetic mind in the year 1970. You can trust what I say.”

And the boy dummy winked at me and started moving back into his chair to the right of the glistening Christmas tree. The Victorian papa continued smiling and waving his carving knife and fork in surreal delight, and his family continued bobbing up and down with happy plastic smiles. The scene of Christmas brought a feeling of warmth to all who stood gaping outside on that cold evening in December, 1970. The delighted shoppers remained oblivious to the peculiar-looking hippie in the tattered suede overcoat.

“What the heck are video games?” I asked myself and turned to continue my evening stroll down Fifth Avenue.

It’s important to realize what was happening in the world at the end of 1970. The well-being of the corporate state was being seriously challenged at home and abroad. The vulpine Richard Nixon was president and villainous Spiro Agnew was vice-president. The atrocity of Mi-Lai and assassination of M. L. King had occurred within the year. Students were protesting on a daily basis and pop songs called for revolution. State militia had just killed five students for exercising first amendment rights at Kent State University. There was a drug epidemic. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 was being shown in the local cinemas.

That day, I had just finished reading the April-69 issue of Playboy featuring a candid interview with Professor Alan Ginsberg – (I can call him that now, but in 1970 a better title was Rabble-Rousing Poet and Psychedelic Guru Ginsberg). An incident in the interview had touched me deeply. After giving a speech and poetry reading at Columbia University, a petulant ivy leaguer in the back yelled out: “Just what do you mean by that, Ginsberg… that a poet must take his clothes off and stand naked before the world?” The poet came out from behind the lectern, and like St. Francis in the piazza of the tiny town of Assisi, quietly and humbly took off his clothes to demonstrate what he meant.

An atheist like myself, who believes in Chaos Theory, maintains that the future can’t be predicted two minutes beforehand, much less two millennia. The poet prophesied an event in the interview, which to my mind is more pertinent to our time than all the prophecies of the Pentateuch. According to Timothy Leary, there were two kinds of people in the world in 1970: the turned on and the uptight. Allen Ginsberg predicted in the Playboy interview that no matter how conservative, how uptight, how orthodox and conformist, how ass-kissing normal and moderate one’s political and religious views, there is absolutely no safety under the wings of the corporate Moloch. The time would come when even thousand-dollar business suit corporate executives on Wall Street were going to get theirs. The abuse of nature was going to catch up to them. But the sad reality is that they were going to take all the TV-watching, nine-to-five working schnooks along with them. Now 30 years later, the prediction made in clear, straightforward words is taking place more convincingly than any prophecy ever penned by the Bible-believing, obfuscatory Nostradamus.

As I pondered this I started walking like a zombie toward the 53rd Street Subway under the Donnell Library to catch an “E” train back to Queens. Lines from Ginsberg’s famous poem, Howl, streamed through my mind, as I thought about what the mechanical boy had said:

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!

Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!

Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels!

Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body!

Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!

Moloch whom I abandon!

Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Moloch not only frightened me out of my natural ecstasy, the machine corporate monster robbed, lied, swindled, cheated, and bribed me out of paradise. It stole my natural birthright and sold it back wrapped in plastic and edited for TV. It bullied me out of childlike euphoria and natural laid-back serenity and sold me aspirin. Moloch poisoned and contaminated the lakes, rivers, and brooks all around me, and then tried to sell me beverages composed in laboratories by sexless, sterile technicians in immaculate white lab coats with advanced degrees in fluid viscosity. Then Moloch has the balls to tell me that Coke is The Real Thing. Does the Establishment think we’re all been brainwashed by advertisers and clerics? Water is the real thing; water is what we are.

Nothing much to do waiting for a subway train late at night. I looked at the subway ads – little billboards neatly bolted to the tiled walls. Late at night there is nothing to do but look at ads. An attractive couple was riding in the beautiful American countryside on a bicycle built for two. Wide-eyed and laughing with Ultra-bright teeth, the girl couldn’t have looked more ecstatic if the guy were screwing her from behind in the rear seat. She held a cigarette by her lips as if she were getting high off it, and the cig were the source of the happiness and wonderful delight. “Can’t people see that the advertisers are trying to condition them?” I ask himself, with nobody around. “It’s so obvious that these are a couple of high-paid models trying to get people to associate the good feelings of being in nature with the physical act of smoking a cigarette. Kool.”

That’s got to be why grass is illegal. Marijuana helps a person to cut through the conditioning. Moloch wouldn’t be able to sell all the plastic garbage if people were turned on, asking “Why?” Do we really need to use millions of double-edged razor blade cartridges that the Gillette company foists on the world’s supermarkets? With garbage dumps reaching the size of mountains, the company, who owns the patents, took off the market the little contraption that cleans the stubble out from between the blades. A man who shaves has to buy twice as many of the little plastic shits. People keep buying; keep scraping their face every morning and never question what they are doing. Mindless consumers doing Moloch’s bidding, ravaging the environment without so much as a thought. If smoke were legal people would say, “Fuck shaving every day. Fuck Gillette. If I have to shave, let me use an old-fashioned straight razor that I can sharpen with a leather strap so I don’t have to keep disposing these disgusting plastic shits in the garbage every day.”

I tottered back to the bench and refused to let Madison Avenue determine what I perceive and think. An experienced subway rider knows how to find interesting sensations to groove on. Little white arrow-shaped markings on the black escalator handrail at the west end of the station descended toward me like the Viennese physicist/mathematician, Ludwig Boltzmann’s, “arrow of time.” He was a 19th century physics professor who set the foundations for modern statistical mechanics. He committed suicide at the turn of the century in isolation and depression because nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. Shortly before he died, French scientist Jean Perrin corroborated much of his work.

The escalator platform steps disappeared into nothingness, beguilingly, as I began to feel “mellow” from the very good grass that had reached its ideal spot in my mind like an expensive Bordeaux. Another controversial figure lingered on my mind. Just a couple of weeks prior to this experience, on November 25, 1969, a Japanese writer/poet had just committed seppuku, an ancient form of hara-kiri. The guy was one of Japan’s most renown writers – a playwright, novelist and poet – who was also a commander in the elite Self Defense Force whose job it was to protect the emperor. Wearing the hachimaki or traditional headband, he disemboweled himself in front of an entire garrison and then had a disciple chop his head off as he fell, according to ancient Samurai ritual.

The tragedy of the case is that Yukio Mishima committed suicide just to make a point. He seemed to have an obsession with how and when to die, so he planned his suicide to the minutest detail. The point of it all was to exhort his military colleagues not to sell out traditional Japanese values for the sake of pro-American capitalists. A country with ancient values and culture was being conquered spiritually, as well as militarily and economically. Mishima felt that as a writer/poet it was his duty to admonish the country not to let American plastic corrupt the soul of Japan. To renounce a beautiful, centuries-old culture for the sake of rock-n-roll, pizza, horror movies, golf, baseball cards, comic books and drag racing -so that a few Tokyo fat cats could reel in big bucks – was a disgrace. He traded his life to convey a sacred message to his people.

After my conversation with the cybernetic boy, I felt that Mishima should have widened his view. He was too taken in with Japan and not enough with the human species as a whole. It’s the future of humanity and Gaia that counts, not Japan or any particular country. Instead of: Don’t trade your Japanese identity for the greed of a few corporate nabobs, the important message, I felt, that people needed to learn was: Don’t give up your humanity for the security and protection of the corporate state, because big business will use you up, and spit you out with nothing more than arthritis and a gold watch. Religion, big business and government are leading humanity into the great extinction. They all encourage people to overpopulate so they can make more money.

I had smoked a lot of grass during the ’60s, and had done some pretty wild things, but never once did I shirk in fear of the depths of the collective subconscious. The message that people needed to hear was: There’s no gods nor devils. We’re on this trip by ourselves. We’re born alone and we’ll die alone. Homo sapiens has to guide its own path through the cosmos. The depths of the human mind are no more sinister than the cravings of a puppy: food, self-preservation, sex, water, a high spot on the social hierarchy. Our innate desires aren’t evil, only natural. Fear of the unknown is instilled in us by misguided individuals who care only about maintaining power.

When one rejects the Bible, the vacuum of knowledge and wisdom is filled by the genius of great men who preceded us in time – what high school English teachers call “The Classics” becomes our guide-post, not commandments and parables. Men and women of genius, who have known through their own life experiences the fortes and foibles of the human condition, become our magi. An atheist dismisses the mutterings of sacrosanct prophets who believe that they have a personal communication’s hookup with God. Of real value is wisdom that has outlasted the test of time. Just as in classical music, the driving force of the great composers was the need to convey a heartfelt yearning and insight about the human condition that will benefit those who come in future generations.

On the way home that night on the subway, I began thinking about what had just occurred. Waiting for the train, I mused about how study and reading of the classics made Vincent Van Gogh³ enthralled with nature and induced him to reject religion and to paint -to try to tell the world that we must live for the future humanity rather than our own comfort. Vincent read French literature insatiably when he worked at the coal-mining Borinage in Belgium. He cared for the sick and gave his own food to the hungry. He proved that you don’t have to believe in God to be like Christ.

In all the self-portraits, he paints himself not against the background of a tangible place like a park or somebody’s living room. He always stands in front of some cloud-like vague whirling ether, such that the element of time is taken away. I had just studied one of his last self-portraits, the Saint-Remy, late August, 1889. Shortly before his death, he painted himself in stark objectivity, in all his wretchedness and misery without any attempt to conceal his pathetic human condition. He stands on the very horizon of a whirling black hole with the sad eyes of a steer about to be butchered. His art is his only comfort, the only reason he stays alive, the only force restraining him from being sucked into the unimaginable gravity of the black oblivion. Vincent shows us this with his thumb literally copulating the thumbhole of his old and weary palette, with the pad of the thumb pressed up against his brushes like the lips of a newborn baby at the mother’s breast. Van Gogh knew he wasn’t going to make a sou from this painting. He is telling us that only the darkness of the grave awaits, and we must cherish every instant of life no matter how woeful our human condition. We must put aside our own vanity and mindless hope of afterlife, and care about of the future of humanity. ⁴

In my grass-induced euphoria, I felt it was my destiny to grab by the shoulders every Church-going Irishman at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and try to shake some sense into him: “There’s no God, you fool. We’re alone here. Only humanity determines destiny. God never does anything.” As Stendal said: ‘God’s only excuse is that He doesn’t exist.’ God hasn’t been born yet. There’s no messiah, no angels, no saints, no devils, no holy ghosts, no sacred bones, no magical holy water, no Paraclete-inspired holy book, no psychic advisors, no flying saucers, no alien abductions, no incubi nor succubi, no magic crystals, no lucky rabbits’ feet.”

It was here that I wrote my first poem, published in the Village Voice, that was read on the radio by Rosco, with the beautiful Missa Luba, Congolese Choir Music, in the background. The poem was based on William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. To me, an atheist biology teacher, this story was more significant and descriptive of the evolving mankind than all the stories of the Holy Scriptures put together. The personalities of the boys in the choir sum up the composite psyche of mankind like a mathematical equation. The Freudian concept of the human mind is laid before us under a magnifying glass. Piggy is the superego, Ralph the ego, and Jack the feral, animal energy that Freud called the id (it). Every person alive copes with this innate conflict of forces: To obey the pleasure principle listening to our primitive desires, or the reality principle, putting off our primal needs until an appropriate opportunity.

Ironically, the quiet, puny kid, Simon, becomes the most important character of all. He’s the one who could have saved the choir boys from chaos. He was the one that could have brought peace through self-awareness and self-acceptance. Simon knew that the “beastie” wasn’t real; there was nothing supernatural on the island – no devils, no demons. There was nothing to fear; but fear was the sinister elixir that held the throng under the maniacal reptile’s control. The mystical Simon was an anti-mystic, and per force, the first to die.

Interestingly, around 13 years after I wrote Simon, William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Simon

I am Simon who walks between your conscience and your animal self.

You met me the first time you took a step on the earth, spoke a word and looked up at the stars in the night.

I was with you when you learned of fire, found shelter in a cave, and expressed an idea with a symbol.

I gave you Art, beauty and love and freed you from ignorance and fear, only to be slain many times by those who will not know themselves.

But I shall never die! For the forces that gave me life are very strong.

I am the fetus that resides in the womb of your mind.

You, my mother, will some day give me birth, and I will claim my rightful place in the universe.

To me, Simon was what the world needed and still needs. An idea that could stand in front of the terrorist guns of the perpetual war zone called the Holy Land and proclaim: Look what you are doing to each in the name of God. Jehovah, Christ and Allah are leading humanity down the path to misery. I am the mystic part of the human mind. I am nature’s experiment with divinity. You’ve been killing each other here for thousands of years. Something is fundamentally wrong. Jews don’t need another messiah; your inner self is the messiah. There’s no Jehovah who cares if you sob at the Wailing Wall. If the messiah didn’t come when Hitler was marching your people into the ovens, do you think he will come when you have half the doctors and lawyers in the Westchester yellow pages?

Arabs need Allah like another head chopped off. Allah doesn’t care if you face Mecca when you pray or face the red light district of Amsterdam. Stop killing one another; God doesn’t exist. Jews and Arabs are made of the same shit. Unless you desist from your zealotry, the soul of man will never be born, and all the time that Homo sapiens spent evolving on Earth will be nothing more than a waste of time.

The “E” train finally came and I started thinking about more mundane cares like the drawer full of bills that an indigent philosopher needed to pay. Such is the religious and chimerical experience of an atheist high on grass. Whereby Moses, St. Francis, and Orel Roberts had communion with the supernatural, an atheist simply stared at a Yuletide mannequin in the Lord and Taylor Department Store window, and the mannequin stared silently back.

¹ Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II, Scene II.

² Goodall, Jane (1997). The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Replica Books.

³ Van Gogh’s Artwork on Artsy.

⁴ The Saint Remy Self-Portrait (late August, 1889) can be seen at the web site VanGoghGallery.com

John Irwin was born in 1929 in Los Angeles. After a dismal educational performance, ending with graduation from high school with straight Ds in his final year, and several years of intense participation in various deviant activities, including drug use and armed robberies, he was sent to prison in California where he served 5 years. Upon release he began college in earnest and received a BA in sociology at UCLA, a Master’s and PhD in sociology at UC Berkeley. He taught sociology for 27 years at San Francisco State University. He wrote and published five books, mostly about prisons and jails (The Felon, Prisons in Turmoil, The Jail, and It’s About Time) and received several awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, and the Western Society of Criminology. He is retired and is currently finishing his autobiography, starting a new study of prisons, and trying to continue to surf, a sport he has engaged in for 49 years.

My experiences with marijuana span over fifty years and divide into three different types of use. The first type was becoming and being a “head,” a person for whom marijuana use is a central activity in their life. The next two were recreational user and finally a medical user.

In 1946, when I was in my last year in high school in San Fernando, California, I began to hear about an exciting drug – marijuana – that some of the town’s young guys, particularly Chicanos, were using. I was an adventurous kid who took a lot of risks for excitement and wanted to try marijuana as soon as I heard about it. At this time I was swerving steadily toward a full hoodlum life. I was barely hanging on in high school, attending once or twice a week, just so I could get my diploma. Most of the time, I was hanging around a local pool hall, building a 1929 AV8 Roadster (a cool car at the time), stealing (particularly car parts and tools I needed to build the car), and drinking and partying with a friend.

In these years, marijuana was very difficult to obtain. The Mexicans in our town were getting some, but there was considerable hostility and distance between us “paddies” or “gavachos” and the Chicanos, particularly the Chicanos who had dropped out of or never gone to high school. At that time, I teamed with up a couple of young guys who were equally eager to find some “weed” and we persevered and finally cultivated a couple of “connections” in the “Barrio.”

The first two or three times we used it, we hardly got high. Either it was lousy weed or we had not passed through the initiation required to recognize and then enjoy the symptoms. But we were determined and with a little more experimenting we were getting high, some times very high.

The first times I got really high, my senses were thrown out of kilter and I was thoroughly discombobulated. I couldn’t judge space or time very well. Things were generally weird. Talking and communicating with other people was very difficult. I was slow figuring out what was going on, what other people were saying or what they meant. This often made me a little paranoid, because I thought others could tell I was screwed up and were looking at me strangely and talking about me. But even with these upsetting aspects, the high was good. I felt an underlying sense of well being and a nice anticipation that something special was going to happen. After a few times of getting high, sometimes very high, I was able to sort out much of the confusion and go with the high. I learned that I was acting a little weird, but hell with it, who cared. The distortions in space and time became amusing. In fact, everything was amusing. Then I could begin to focus on and delight in marijuana’s special pleasures: a heightened appreciation of music, gratification of my marijuana induced, voracious hunger (the “munchies”), in fact, the general enhancement of all my senses. All these, and virtually no bad side effects, no hangovers and no health consequences. Oh, it temporarily made me a little forgetful and stupid. What the heck, this was a small price to pay for a great high.

After I got over being surprised or bothered by having my thinking shaken up, I found reality was shifted and I was able to see things from a different angle. While high, I would get insights, new ideas, new slants on things. Many times, come to find out, these were trite or goofy, but not always. Sometimes I did get a new understanding of something. In general, it led to my being able to step back and view things from a different viewpoint.

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For the next several years, 1946 to 1949, I used marijuana more and more. It was cool and fun. As the supply system cranked up in our town, mainly among Chicanos who smuggled it across the border, I and most of my close male friends used it regularly. In those years all our weed came from Mexico and there were no different classes or types of it. Acapulco Gold and other varieties appeared much later. We just bought weed – cans or pounds. Some of it was good, some of it not too good. At first most of our connections were in San Fernando, later we traveled to other Mexican neighborhoods – East LA or Maravilla – to score.

I was running around with a group of apprentice thugs who were all corner boy types: none went on to college, many worked in construction, factories, or other “blue collar” jobs, a few, like myself, were getting increasingly into stealing. All of us hung out a lot and partied.

After we got over the initial confusion and paranoia that sometimes accompanies the marijuana high, our experiences with it were extremely enjoyable. Some of us, for periods of time, smoked weed all day and night, that is, if we had it. More guys got high in the evenings when it was party time, which for us in those years was every night. Usually we would start off in someone’s auto. This was Los Angeles and cars were central to our lives. We would light up get high, and then move on to the night’s adventures. Usually it was not too long before we experienced the munchies, which we would then proceeded to satisfy. This sometimes meant going to a store and buying candy, occasionally a whole box of candy, or a place like Foster Freeze for hot fudge sundaes, but more often it meant invading a restaurant, frequently one of our regular hangouts, such as the Three Pigs Drive Inn in San Fernando where we would gorge ourselves.

Entering a restaurant and then ordering and eating food there, that is “pigging out,” presented two problems to us. The first was trying to get ourselves into the place without “cracking up.” Everything struck us as funny and often a glance at each other or some other insignificant occurrence would send us to an uncontrollable fit of laugher, often requiring us to withdraw, get ourselves together and make another attempt to enter the restaurant. Then once we started eating, we would often order more and more food, sometimes three orders of hamburgers and malts, to satisfy our insatiable, marijuana stoked appetites. When this occurred we would become embarrassed and paranoid, believing that we were making a scene. Sometimes, we left one restaurant to go to another for more food to avoid this kind of attention.

Other times, we would get high while we were on the way to some destination – a movie, a party or some other occasion. After we lit up, we frequently forget where we were going. After a few moments of silence, someone would come to their senses and say, “Where’re we going?” The group would look around and often someone else would ask, “Where are we?” Then we would crack up and continue, perhaps to some location entirely different from where we were headed.

All in all, our experiences, with only a few minor glitches – a little paranoia and temporary loss of mental acuity, were extremely enjoyable. Enhancing them at this time was our feeling that we were part of an exotic, deviant fraternity – “heads.” In our own “crowd” we were an avant garde minority and we knew that we were members of an extended underground of fellow heads. When we met new people from other towns or neighborhoods at places, usually places where young people from all over “The Valley” commingled, such as Jeffery’s Barn – a popular amateur fight arena, and we discovered that we were fellow heads, an instant bond was established, information about sources exchanged, and stories about getting high told.

All in all, it was an exciting time, filled with pleasureful experiences. The only “downer” was the fear of getting “busted.” Toward the end of the ’40s, the police became more aware and vigilant of marijuana use. By 1950 a new marijuana hysteria developed and precipitated more punitive laws and more law enforcement. So we became increasingly concerned with avoiding detection and arrest. Many of us and people we knew were arrested for possession and sales. A drug war had been declared.

For me and my friends marijuana dramatically changed many of our attitudes and much of our behavior. We started looking down on drinking and drunks – “lushes” – whom we believed were too loud, crass and prone to violence. We were “cool.” We paid a lot of attention to being neat and stylish in the way we dressed and groomed ourselves. We kept our cars clean. We developed cool speech patterns – said “cool,” “groovy,” and “crazy” a lot. We were quick to put down other people whom we didn’t think were cool. All in all we became a snobbish bunch.

This changed when heroin seeped into the town. It started in downtown LA, around Temple street where many “tecatos” (Mexican heroin users) had migrated with their families from El Paso, Texas. It spread out from there through the Mexican neighborhoods, reaching San Fernando in about 1950. A few of us more deviant “gavachos” who had Chicano friends started scoring from them and using “stuff” occasionally. At first it made me sick, but after a few experiences I started liking heroin very much. For the next two years I used a lot of heroin. I never acquired a very serious habit, but I preferred it over any other drug and this changed my attitudes toward marijuana and my marijuana use.

To “hypes” or “dope fiends,” (heroin addicts), marijuana users were silly and marijuana was avoided because it intruded on the heroin high and diminished it. Heroin put one into a state of peace and freedom from care, marijuana reactivates concerns and dampens the mellow feelings of the heroin high. For the next couple of years, I used very little marijuana.

I was sent to prison for robbery in l952. I was using heroin at the time, but that was not what drove me to rob. I had been trying to practice the trade of “theft” for several years, and finally turned to robbery and was arrested after a 6-month series of hold ups.

In those years heroin and marijuana were occasionally smuggled into the prison. When I had access to it, I declined using heroin. I had decided that I was not going to use opiates any more because of their addictive and debilitating properties. But my experiences with marijuana had convinced me that there were no harmful effects in its use, so I never passed it up. The few days I got high on marijuana in prison were the most pleasureful days I spent there. Regrettably, marijuana was rarely available in the prison where I served five years.

From the time I was released in 1957 until the present time I have continued to use marijuana recreationally. The frequency I have used it during the last 41 years has varied greatly, but there has not been a period that I purposely avoiding using it and there has been no extended period when I used it daily. The pattern for me has been to use marijuana, given that it has been available (which has been most of the time) somewhat like a social drinker uses alcohol, that is, as an enhancement for a variety of activities, such as, after work socializing, recreational outings, movies, and sex. I have almost never used it while I was “working,” that is while waiting on tables, attending college classes, reading, writing, conducting research, teaching classes, and carrying out all the other functions of a college professor (which I was for 27 years).

During this extended period, the vast majority of my friends have been recreational users. In fact, I have come to realize that whether a person uses or at least has tried marijuana or not is probably the best indicator of whether I can tolerate an extended relationship with them. It is not that I am intolerant of non-users, it is just that I have discovered that people who have avoided its use are usually too conservative, too cautious, and not expressive enough for my tastes. There have been some exceptions to this, but it has been a pretty good “rule of thumb.”

Ten years ago (1989) a routine medical examination revealed that I was infected with Hepatitis C, which I probably contacted when I was using heroin in my early 20s. In the ensuing years, my liver became more and more cirrhotic and my health deteriorated. By 1997 it became obvious that I was not going to live many more years without a liver transplant, so I got on a list for a new liver through the University of California at San Francisco Liver Transplant Center. In the early months of l998 my condition worsened dramatically and I received a liver in April of that year. The transplant was successful and my health returned. However, I have been required to take several drugs to depress my body’s immune system in order to prevent a rejection of the new liver. These, particularly in the first few months after the transplant, made me nauseous. I knew that marijuana was effective in relieving this symptom so I began using it whenever I experienced nausea. It worked miraculously and I continue to use it for this purpose. So I have become a “legal” user of marijuana.

Whether or not this change in the legality of my marijuana use had occurred, I would have continued to use it, probably for the rest of my life. This is because I find it greatly enhances my enjoyment in the settings and activities I described above, because I am convinced by my own experiences and all the evidence I have examined that it is relatively harmless (certainly much less harmful than any of the other widely consumed “drugs,” such as alcohol) and because I feel strongly that the prohibition of its use is silly and an intolerable invasion of my rights.

I have four children, three of them stable, productive, and relatively happy women. The third is a 15-year-old boy who is developing into a wonderful young man. I have tried to discourage all of them from using marijuana when they were too young. But I have hoped that they would all eventually experiment with it to discover if it had a place in their lives. All of my daughters have done this and two are now recreational users. The third does not enjoy it and therefore does not use it. I am very satisfied with their relationships to this drug. I am hoping my son will eventually follow their example.

The author is a 23-year-old graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He completed his undergraduate degree at Purdue University in 2001, where he graduated with highest distinction and was awarded his department’s most prestigious award for intellectual merit. Besides marijuana, he loves his family, science, dancing, and just being alive.

For me, there is nothing that compares to the experience of marijuana intoxication. Truly, the most amazing, ineffable emotions, thoughts, and pleasures have been wrought from the THC molecule and its chemically related cousins by my brain.

My introduction to cannabis began eight years ago, when I was in the 9th grade of high school, only 15 years old. Realizing slowly that I was not cut from the same cloth as the mainstream society, I began to investigate different social paths, trying to find one where I could be the “me” that I subconsciously wanted to be. I was drawn towards the idea of mind “expansion” and the various altered states of awareness the human brain is able to support, and so, of course, I began by experimenting with the lightly rebellious habit of marijuana smoking. Peer pressure was not a motivating force for me. I simply wanted to see what it was like to have one’s mind vaulted into a different universe of experience. I was not disappointed.

I have heard stories of people who, upon smoking marijuana for the first time, notice little or no difference in their minds’ experiences. Luckily, my brain had no such difficulty in converting the chemical potential of THC into drastic behavioral alteration. In fact, it did so too well! I swore to myself, as I was laughing hysterically with my best friend in the back seat of a car, that I would never smoke marijuana again! The unique pain of intense, uncontrollable laughter was too much for my body to handle and I decided that this must never be experienced again. HA! The high state can produce such delusions sometimes…

In my high school years, I limited my use (wisely, I believe) to only once a month. It made each time a special, almost religious event, and I enjoyed every session with an intensity I never knew was possible. As evidence for the sagacity of moderation, I will mention that I graduated valedictorian from one of the most academically prestigious high schools in Kentucky and was also a National Merit Scholar. These rewards were not due to marijuana of course, but neither were they in spite of it.

In college, around the time of my junior year, I began to step up my usage. My training period was over, and I understood well how cannabis affected me. I knew when it was and when it wasn’t a good time for me to smoke. I knew when I had smoked too much. I knew how to use it in a way that would best suit my needs and help me to maximize my expected pleasure integral over the course of my life (this concept of “maximizing the pleasure integral” was concocted with the help of my friend, cannabis, when I was a freshman in college; interestingly, I recently discovered that a similar notion is used by some economists to describe consumer behavior and explain addictions). I feel that anyone who is thinking of making a lifelong acquaintance of ANY mind altering chemical would be well-advised to self-impose an introductory period of limited use in order to gain familiarization with all the subtleties of the chemical. I am still trying to learn all the little quirks of marijuana and its changing effects on my maturing mind.

Marijuana began to represent my cheese in the maze; as school intensified, I needed to keep pleasure and pain in an acceptable balance. Marijuana became a weekend treat that made the toils of the school week tolerable. In fact, I credit marijuana with showing me the deep truth-beauty of what I was being taught. After learning about quantum mechanics during the week, a marijuana-aided reflection on the topic could be profoundly inspiring! So much so that it was during this transition period of my usage style that I decided I would get a PhD in chemical engineering. Moreover, it was actually while I was high that I decided this! Before this transformation, I was complacently heading toward a bachelor’s degree followed by an immediate entry into the job market. Now my goal is to teach and conduct research at the university level – a career that I think will be many fold more satisfying for my personality – and I credit marijuana for helping me come to terms with this. I had never considered this option viable until marijuana forced me to ask, “Why the hell not?” I love learning about our universe and to simply stop at a bachelor’s degree, as my parents advised, would have been an unfulfilling choice for me. Now, as a graduate student, I am happily exploring the frontiers of human knowledge! Hopefully this anecdote helps to dispel the myth that marijuana makes you stupid and unmotivated (or at least is a data point that suggests the conclusion opposite to the conventional wisdom expounded by the drug warriors).

Throughout my undergraduate years, another important change took place: the marijuana experience began to morph into something I had only fleetingly encountered in high school. Occasionally, I would be presented with profound visions of philosophy, math, and science that would often stand the test of the coming day’s scrutiny. My sober self, though, seemed unable to appreciate the visions fully and was much more concerned with the day-to-day banalities that one need heed if one is to “survive” (laundry, cooking, homework, etc.). When I am high, the ideas come like an overwhelming flood. I try to write down as much as possible, but the act of transcribing is painfully slow relative to the torrent of ideas that is coursing by my mind’s eye. To deliver just one aborts five others! Some of my hIghdeas are silly, of course. Others have elements of sublime truth hidden inside them, although the wording of the ideas is often awkward. Regardless, I find that it almost never fails that during periods of intellectual despondency, a personal marijuana session perks my brain right up – for a few days at least – to all of the phenomenal mysteries surrounding us. I truly believe that evolution forces a stupidity on all of us that causes us to overlook the beauty of our world and the significance of our physical existence. Marijuana jars the mind out of its comfortably adaptive groove and screams, “Hey, look at how incredible all this is!”

To make what I am referring to more intellectually tangible, I have decided to show you some of my thoughts and ideas that I composed while high. Some sober editing has been done to eliminate grammatical and syntactical errors, but the kernels were all born from a brain accentuated by THC molecules. Unfortunately the most exciting thoughts pass unwritten because the act of writing, as I mentioned before, is not conducive to the act of enlightenment. It’s a tough call on whether or not a beautiful idea deserves a tame, long life or an impassioned ephemeral one. The quotations signify the “high” thought.

“The sound water makes reveals information about the structure of water. What is it about the sound form that allows us to say, ‘That is liquid; that is shattering; that is something metallic; that is clapping’? Of course our brain learns to associate the inner experience to the outer reality of the observed system, but that is not what I am thinking of. There is a physical structure underpinning the origin of the sound that imparts information about the state and arrangement of the molecules into the surrounding gaseous medium as patterns of density variation. Perhaps acoustic microscopy could yield as much information on the nature of a material as the electron methods…”

This little bit exploded like a bomb into my consciousness outside the Cincinnati Art Museum, while playfully splashing my hand in a fountain. That characteristic sound of splashing and flowing liquid saturated my mental awareness. How THC aids spontaneous revelation is a mystery that I have also pondered while high. However, too much recursive thought like that spins me round and round until I am hopelessly lost, so I do try to avoid such lines of contemplation.

“The appreciation of music is strongly linked to the language abilities of humans. Possibly the appreciation of music evolved first? How to prove this? Humans with brains that derived pleasure from organized patterns of sounds, capable of perceiving frequencies, rhythms, timbre, etc. would be more able to use those same sonic devices to convey meaningful information. A species capable of language could potentially dominate all evolutionary competitors.”

This thought occurred originally while listening to a brilliant piece of techno music in a friend’s basement. The realization that the beauty I was experiencing via the music could not be the result of some neutral mutation in the brains of all humans led me to see musical appreciation as an adaptive trait most plausibly linked to language. Further sober speculation has led me to conclude that the parts of the brain involved in finding music beautiful are probably useful in many other areas important to humans: mathematics comes to mind most immediately. The positive correlation observed between music and mathematical ability seems to be suggestive evidence of this. Evolution is an often-visited topic by my high mind; a THC-powered meditation on the path from molecules to man never fails to astonish me.

The sensation of having found the one and only truth of a subject seems to be a characteristic feature of many of my “high thoughts.” The THC enhanced mind can do some highly original analysis, but often at the cost of neglecting a reasonable survey of other possible explanations. Many times I have been certain of truth while high, only to later realize that what I was imagining to be the grand explanation of the matter was only a special case. Still, there is something to be said about the feeling of having uncovered profound truth, whether it is from the actual thing or a drug-induced delusion. In both situations, the mind perceiving the phenomenon is absolutely convinced of the reality of the conception. This important invariance makes any outside criticisms of the latter being less “real” than the former completely irrelevant to the person who is experiencing the emotion.

As an applied scientist, I crave the sensation of having illuminated a fundamentally important truth. All scientists should have the chance to feel that intense, satisfying joy that most of us are searching for with our research. A rare few are gifted enough to genuinely achieve it several times in their life. Marijuana allows you to visit the sensation temporarily without making a habit of being credulous; that would be suicide to any self-respecting scientist. It may seem a temporary madness, perhaps, but one not lacking in utility.

At 23, I still find marijuana a useful part of my life, although the intensity of the experience seems to be waning (this surprises me, actually, since there is some evidence that THC receptors increase in number with age). My favorite activities while high include watching an engaging movie, visiting a museum, listening to electronic music, and just plain ol’ brainstorming. I will probably continue to smoke for as long as I enjoy it, which, as far as I can see, will be for the rest of my life.

So those are some of my thoughts on a most complex subject. I hope I may have inspired you to responsibly explore the potential of a marijuana-mind-meld or, at the very least, respect those of us who do. If you don’t think society would benefit from the punishment of those like myself, whose only “crime” is smoking marijuana, then our laws clearly need to be changed. Please vote that way. Good luck in finding your happiness, wherever it may be!

Candace completed her B.A. in English and Women’s Studies at Columbia University. She is 25, married, and currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. A kiss from an enchanted mistress transports her deeper into reality, for a childhood talk with the memory of her loving father.

There exists a castle ensconced by a forest where the walls are plastered in pithy poetry and trippy metaphor. A step beyond – where my imagination becomes reality. Smoking weed takes me there to relax and feel insightful. I can be a poet, a goddess, a butterfly or even a little girl again. First, I check my screen in “Wanji” (my favorite wooden pipe) to make sure it’s clean – in order to welcome the full unfiltered high. Then, I grind the weed into a fine powder because increased surface area brings more pleasure. Pack my bowl and smoke it. The gates disengage and I enter the next realm. I momentarily feel slightly out of focus to others but the details around me are highlighted. In the land of my high – my inner muse controls the reins.

Curiosity storms from my fingertips – like a kitten – climbing, reaching, smelling and stretching – my scent permeating. Huxley, my eldest kitten, saunters in. Her nimble physique barely glides across my living room floor. She jumps up on the couch and announces herself. I watch the beauty of her white belly fur and my body relaxes. The lava lamp has liquefied and small yellow bubbles are rising to the top. Coco-mango incense burns into the air, while Pink Floyd infiltrates the room, and a softer hallucination begins.

The drum solo beats inside my chest – swallowing me whole. My pupils dilate and I lose focus but my sense of touch heightens. Energy flows effortlessly around me. I’m relaxed, unrestricted and most importantly, stoned. I luxuriate in textures. My silver painted nails act as guides and I am all over the room. My hands tingle with sensory overload. Suddenly my knees shake but I’m not afraid. The smoke swirls and I am weightless and euphoric. I exhale and then re-inhale through my nose. My nostrils tickle and my lungs buzz – another bowl is kicked.

The clouds above shift chaotically. Leaves from the trees come storming down upon the ground. The dampness in the air evaporates and shapes shift, take form, and then re-form seamlessly. I am breathing deeply and slowly. I can feel her almond shaped eyes on me. I lay down and close my eyes. My palms are up and my socks are off. She circles then hovers over me. She places her hand on my chest and I open my mouth. Her tongue touches my lips and a warm wave of blood courses through my arms and legs. We kiss and soar beyond.

The ocean to the west contributes the music. The forest to the north provides the sustenance. The breeze from the south keeps the air pleasant, and the sun in the east fills the sky with dazzling colors. Her castle is nestled in peace and time mindlessly dances by. My frustrations hush and my body vibrates. Protective suspicions aside, I feel as if I’m being tuned? This is where my happiest dreams live. I coast in a whir and squint past the haze to the screen.

The silent images are rumbling. I want to return to a quiet time with my daddy – like one of our special talks. When I was the center of my daddy’s universe. Daddy said he could relate to me and saw himself in me. That was why he shared his youth with me. I always felt special when he said stuff like that. Imagining how a little person like me was a fundamental element to a genius’ happiness. My tears flow as my eyes burn with impotency. I open them again and he is next to me.

“I cannot resist your tears, Candi. Your face is so sweet and then you twist it all up when you cry. Don’t do that baby. Be beautiful for daddy.”

“Yes, daddy.”

My father is sitting on a maroon concrete turtle in the younger playground of Heathcote Elementary School. He is wearing his Sunday jeans with suspenders and a green flannel shirt. His head is covered in a mustard yellow hat (he called it a candle) with green and white trim. Daddy is fuzzy with gray whiskers because he hasn’t shaved since Friday. He is rubbing my hand and telling me a story.

“I used to get in trouble all the time. Back in grade school the teachers thought I was a monster. I was just shy and non-communicative. When students were bad they were given a colored index card to carry around for a week. All the teachers knew who had the colored index cards. If you got in trouble again, you got a new color and an additional week of carrying a card. I spent my entire time in school carrying a colored index card around.”

“No one would ever believe that you were a trouble maker, daddy.” “It’s not that I was a trouble maker. I just didn’t know how to talk to people.”

“I can express my feelings better than you can.”

“Yes you can – too much some times.”

“I love you, daddy.”

“I love you too.”

We laugh and hug. He takes off his glasses and we look so much alike face to face. I can smell his daddy smell. The memories are fresh and ageless. My daddy and I are together again. He gives me advice and strength and he lives on through me. I am no longer bereft of him in the physical world. When you really know a person and love them they are part of who are you, what you do, and how you think. My daddy is within me. He always wanted me close – and now I am. I close my eyes and relax while he holds my hand.

My Mistress channels my way back to him. Her castle is our medium of communication. The time spent with my daddy is precious and explored in earnest. I return, and Floyd has been replaced by random with the Indigo Girls. The sweet enchantresses welcome me back. Huxley is on my lap sleeping. My knees have fallen asleep and I am a little thirsty (cotton mouth you know.) I lift Huxley up and place her on a pillow, grab a bottle of water, and light a smoke.

Mother Marijuana is written by a 64-year-old retired high school teacher who lives in the Northwest and who wishes for purposes of this publication to use the name Dawnhuman. Come with her and her lover into the Great Holy Mystery of it all, and partake of one woman’s sublime perception of healing, pleasure, and revelation.

Mother Marijuana has been a great benefactor for me. During the last twenty-five years I have used this sacrament approximately four thousand times, along with about a hundred ingestions of LSD, about twenty of both XTC and magic mushrooms, six of mescaline, less than ten of cocaine, two of ketamine, and one each of peyote, ayahuasca, and salvia divinorum. Altho I would gladly take more mescaline if I could get any, Mother Marijuana has clearly been my entheogen of choice, and I have found that she serves me most admirably. I am very grateful for this symbiosis with the plant domain.

In 1979 on a particularly stony occasion I met the spirit of marijuana, a lean, leafy, ropy character of uncertain form who reminded me of the talking trees in The Wizard of Oz.

“I just want to show you,” she said.

“What can you show me?” I asked.

“Anything you want,” she replied.

“Can you show me God?”

“Anything you want.”

So the spirit of marijuana can show me anything I want, a prospect as exciting as letting a genie out of a bottle, tho some of you reading this may object to talking to spirits because you think they don’t exist – I was obviously just hallucinating. But what does “just hallucinating” mean? Some very sober people such as the folks at the Findhorn Community in Scotland have had considerable experience communing with spirits, particularly plant devas. They found that by paying attention to what the plant spirits had to say, they could grow an extraordinarily rich, full garden on a barren sand spit. For them, talking to spirits works. One view of reality is that everything has a spirit, which is capable of communicating with humans. Yet even tho I have experienced a number of such instances, for me to embrace such a view would be a leap of faith. I am a pragmatist, which means that I believe that truth is what works, what makes a practical difference in my life. I also have a preference for Occam’s Razor, which is a philosophical principle that the simplest explanation is most probably true. (The contemporary version of Occam’s Razor is, “Keep it simple, stupid!”) If I want to be an animist and believe that every piece of nature contains a spirit aspect as well as a material aspect, I will probably find that such a belief system works, but another possible explanation is that such spirit beings are projections of my own unconscious: I may have the ability to infuse nature with a seeming consciousness. Thus on the one hand, I may be able to communicate with spirits who are happy, even eager, to help me along the path; on the other hand, such hallucinations, or projections of the imagination, may be opportunities to work with my own unconscious contents. Practically, whichever is really the case may not matter too much. By pursuing these experiences with an open and inquiring mind, I am able to discover new truths about myself and my relationship to the world. This seems valuable to me.

Others of you may object because you think spirits are from the Devil, sent here to lead us astray. This may be a concern that each must answer for herself. When I was following my Guru Maharaji and having doubts about his divine authenticity, I had a number of stony conversations with Jesus about whom I should be following. Eventually the message became clear. Jesus indicated it doesn’t matter whom I follow: what matters is what I do. Jesus commanded us to love one another as he loved us. If a spirit ever told me something that was not in the path of love, I would have a lot of resistance, but none ever has. Therefore, all I can say is that so far the path has been true and pure, and I intend to keep my eyes open. The message of Mother Marijuana could be stated in other terms: “Ask and ye shall be given.” To a considerable extent, marijuana gives us what we ask for, and so do the other psychoactive drugs. This is crucial to understanding how to use them. If you ask for oblivion, unconsciousness, to be wasted, that’s what you get. If you ask marijuana to ruin your life, she will oblige. But if you ask to feel good, if you ask for understanding, for connection, for love, you may have these too. Everyone has his own karma to work out, his own questions to ask, and my experience is that the psychoactive drugs, particularly Mother Marijuana, can help me find answers. She is a spiritual mirror, reflecting answers to my deepest questions, reminding me that ultimately, everything is to be found inside myself.

It is necessary to treat Mother Marijuana with reverence. For me she is not a party drug nor something to do every day to bring my mood up. I am responsible for my happiness, for how many endorphins are flowing thru my brain, not any substance. Nor do I find it appropriate to use marijuana to escape from my every day problems and stresses. She helps me work those challenges thru, not escape from them.

Years ago I set up an altar, which contains pictures and items that I sensed to be holy or that I invested with holiness. I generally smoke in front of this altar, first giving thanks for this life and all the blessings I constantly receive. I give a specific prayer that goes like this: “Mother Marijuana, may you take me high and deep, in joy and love, and give me the answers I am seeking. Thank you for this great symbiosis between us, and all the help that you give me.” I then ask whatever specific question I am working on. Sometimes before I get stoned I’ll brainstorm the question, writing down all possible answers or options.

Once I get stoned, I meditate. I know that my mind is just an organ like my eyes or ears. I am not my mind any more than I am my ears. I let go of the mind and its busy thoughts, tuning in to the underlying vibration that is giving me life, that is the sweet harmony of the universal Creation. Either directly or indirectly, an answer usually comes. Frequently Mother Marijuana gives me a totally new perspective on the issue, one that is closer to the path of love and quite beyond anything I brainstormed. When I committed to becoming enlightened, or becoming an evolved being, or whatever it is we are trying to get to, I found that I had entered a path of continual evolution, a refining process that helps me drop away dysfunctional personality programs of doubt and rage, and move ever deeper into understanding myself as a spiritual being, infinitely deep, who is in this kindergarten Planet Earth learning through the Grace of the Creator.

I always give thanks for whatever answer comes. Sometimes I get a complete resolution; sometimes the answer is that I must wait and keep working on it, or my issue isn’t clear enough for Mother Marijuana to answer. But over and over I get answers that work, answers I would not have thought of otherwise. Sometimes I use the Motherpeace tarot as a projective device, and I usually get incredibly relevant answers.

Of course you’re wondering, what sort of questions do I ask, and what sort of answers do I get? I definitely do not ask for the winning lottery numbers or how to make a lot of money without working, as I don’t see those subjects as relevant to my spiritual unfolding. Rather, I spent a lot of time answering that first question, “Can you show me God?” Over the space of a dozen years I moved from feeling separate from the Earth and the Divine Energy to knowing that I and all other beings are all parts of the creation of the Great Holy Mystery. In some sense we are all holograms, each part reflecting the whole and connected in one great web of energy. As Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” Heaven can be experienced directly in meditation, but it is ultimately inexpressible, unknowable by the mind. All I can say is that I am a part of the Great Holy Mystery; I was created by the Great Holy Mystery; the Great Holy Mystery is inside me, what I am made out of. The Great Holy Mystery is keeping me alive; the Great Holy Mystery is in every breath I take; the Great Holy Mystery is in my heart, in my genitals, in my eyes and tongue, in everything I see, everything I taste, everything I hear. The Great Holy Mystery is every part of me; the Great Holy Mystery is every part of the world; there is nothing that is not the Great Holy Mystery. The Great Holy Mystery is vast beyond comprehension, extending out to billions of suns. The Great Holy Mystery is subtle beyond comprehension, disappearing before us in the intricate interplay of quarks, muons, pions, and other subatomic particles. The Great Holy Mystery is loving beyond comprehension, accepting all its creatures into its heart, the Hitlers and hyenas as well as the doves and daffodils. I can only do the best I can with my limited understanding, and make my childish, inadequate map of this adventure in living.

The necessity of humility is now so obvious, and over and over again, through the ministrations of Mother Marijuana I have marveled at the beauty of a sunset, the magnificence of the ocean, the quiet strength of the tall trees, the sculpture of the rocks, and the vibrant life of the tiny nooks and crannies that abound in nature. The Great Holy Mystery is not something to reach out for; it is something to let go into. As I gradually discovered all this, my life relaxed into a joy and grace, such that I can only give thanks for all the blessings I have received. I feel a deep, unshakable contentment. If I should die tomorrow, I will let go into the next life knowing that I am complete in this one. Along with my Guru Maharaji, who pointed the way and taught me how to meditate, Mother Marijuana has very definitely shown me God.

I have also asked more mundane questions. Teaching senior English in high school, I once asked for inspiration to find a creative assignment involving the romantic poets. Mother Marijuana gave me the idea to have my students go out into Nature, the wilder the better, and find some entity that attracted them – a tree, waterfall, interesting rock, mushroom ring, whatever. They were to address this entity with respect and have an imaginary conversation with it, perhaps ask if the entity wanted to tell them anything. The response I got was utterly astounding. Over and over, students would begin their essays saying, “Teach, when you gave us this assignment, I thought it was the dumbest thing any teacher asked me to do in twelve years of school.” But then they would go on to say that the assignment worked, and they were amazed at what the entity had told them. One student recorded the feeling of the forests before the white man came, with three hundred foot Douglas firs and hundreds of thousands of waterfowl. Another listened to the plaint of the persecuted dandelion. A third found her whole personality brought up for review by a bubbling brook. Nature spoke to them as she speaks to me. Not only was it a very moving experience, but they discovered the Romantics’ great breakthrough. “Let Nature be your teacher,” as Wordsworth said.

In my later years of teaching I mostly taught an introduction to media, involving photography, video production, film analysis, etc. As a result of a meditation with Mother Marijuana, I invented an assignment to make a video self-portrait: to make a picture of yourself to show your children when they are as old as you are now, because by that time you will have forgotten what it was like. Students could use the camcorders to tape their activities, their friends, their parents, whatever they thought important, but the only absolutely required part of the assignment was to face the camcorder with no one else in the room and talk about who you are. I also promised that no one would see these portraits except me, to grade them. Once again, the results were amazing. Not only did almost all students put real energy and pride into their work; when they talked alone to the camcorder, they became completely real: their masks dropped away and their sincerity streamed forth. I soon discovered that the students who were most deep and wise were the ones who had experienced tragedy or trauma in their lives – the boy whose parents kicked him out of the house and he lived on his own for a year, the girl whose mother was killed crossing the street in front of the school after a school play, the student whose father had been laid off and couldn’t find work. Often the portraits contained a good deal of humor. They were clearly treasures most students would keep for the rest of their lives.

Since I was teaching in a public high school, I didn’t think it appropriate to tell anyone the source of my inspiration. I was a popular teacher, and my students’ evaluations generally rated me one of the best teachers in the school. To be sure, I also had many inspirations totally sober, but the ones I received as a result of the marijuana meditations often seemed to have a certain force and truth about them, a little beyond anything I might have imagined by myself.

After I retired, starting in the fall of 1995 I wrote a novel called The Birth of the Motherings, about a young man who goes thru a series of humorous and transformative adventures when he gets involved with a spiritual community that is setting out to transform the world. While I pretty much knew what I wanted to say when I started, almost every time I began a new scene I would get stoned and ask Mother Marijuana what was supposed to happen. The scene would appear before my mind’s eye in living color, and on a tape recorder I call “Boswell,” I would record the events, details, and dialog as I imagined them. The next day I would transcribe the tape, and with a certain amount of editing, about eighty percent of what I so envisioned appeared in the final version of the book. I did write some without getting stoned, but roughly seventy-five percent of the book was directly inspired by Mother Marijuana.

One particularly dramatic example of a marijuana meditation occurred when the characters were debating whether building a hot tub was appropriate by their strict standards of simple living or whether it would be an ecological excess. I was not sure which way I wanted to go on the issue, so I got stoned and drew a Motherpeace tarot card. Amazingly I drew the Star, which is a priestess soaking in a hot spring, opening to the Goddess. I took that to mean that a hot tub would be a blessing, not out of balance with Mother Earth, so I had the characters resolve the issue by consulting Motherpeace and drawing the Star.

While the novel has not achieved any huge number of sales, writing it was a transformative experience for me, so much so that I really don’t care whether it sells. In fact, I can’t say I’m much interested in marketing. After all, it takes great talent of various kinds to produce a best seller, and all I know is that this book is the very best that I could do, and I’m proud of it.

When I finished the novel, I built myself a house. Once again, I consulted Mother Marijuana a number of times and visualized the layout until I was satisfied with the design. I am now living in this house and enjoying it immensely. Everything works just the way I envisioned it. Thanks to the stony visions, it has a number of interesting features, including a spiral staircase, a clerestory that perfectly illuminates the north bedroom if the sun is shining on the winter solstice, and an observation deck reached thru a clerestory window, where I can play my Native American flute as I watch the sun set. Sometimes I play the flute stoned, sometimes straight, and when I’m stoned I feel more inventive and more in harmony with the beauty unfolding before me. Unquestionably, Mother Marijuana enhances my creativity and my appreciation, so that my life is better for it.

When I wrote the novel I became a complete hermit so that I could concentrate all my energies on the writing. I was not in relationship at the time, and I asked that the book might bring me an appropriate partner. Sure enough, thru some wonderful synchronicities too lengthy to go into here, a beautiful evolved being read my book and took up with me, much to our mutual delight. I shall call her “Goroleshka,” a name she intuited from a previous incarnation. We have enjoyed a year and a half of hiking, camping, and adventuring, and over and over again, the blessings of heaven and Mother Earth rain down upon us in the form of sunbows (what some folks call “sun dogs”, all or part of a faint rainbow circle around the sun, very unusual in this part of the country), incredible sunsets, communings with tall Douglas firs and ancient cedars, trips to the coast where all the rocks speak to us, and above all, visits to our sacred mountain, Pah-Too.

We sometimes partake of the marijuana sacrament when we are out in Nature, and our appreciation is immeasurably enhanced. We commune with the spirits of the trees, the ocean, or the mountain, and deeply feel the interconnected web of life. More often we invite Mother Marijuana to our lovemaking, and then experience the most exquisite massages and the depths of beauty we see as we meditate looking into one another’s eyes, appreciating the infinite Spirit we see in the other. I hesitate to suggest the almost endless orgasmic peaks we experience as we make tantric connection, it is such an embarrassment of riches. We can only look at one another in amazement and give thanks. Mother Marijuana increases and deepens our tactile sensations, our feelings of love, and the sublime connection between us.

One example of how our lives work with such synchronicity and blessing happened just yesterday. Goroleshka got the hit that she wanted to see Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, and I just happened to have a videotape of it, even tho I had only seen the film once or at most twice before. In the afternoon we settled in for a three hour cuddle on the couch, and were much moved by Ben Kingsley’s powerful portrayal of this enlightened being. We talked about the film and what it must take to be as clear and focused as Gandhi was. After dinner we partook of the marijuana sacrament, and almost immediately the inspirational fireworks began. But first I have to say that about a month ago I had discovered that my blood pressure had shot up, the systolic about 25 points higher and the diastolic about 10. Because it was low to start with, this increase was not immediately life threatening, but I was in the process of exploring what was going on, cutting out salt and sugar, making sure I was getting magnesium and potassium, and frequently monitoring my blood pressure to see if I could discern any patterns in its ups and downs. In the course of this I noticed how much it was influenced by my emotional state. One time I randomly turned on the TV while I was waiting for the reading and found myself watching some gangster film where in the space of three minutes the bad guys blew away about twenty-five cops. Even though I wasn’t paying much attention and didn’t think I was involved, I got the highest blood pressure reading I have ever taken. On a couple of other occasions, my emotional state seemed to influence the reading strongly.

So with this in the background, what happened when we got stoned is that Mother Marijuana told me that it is time for me to take charge of my emotional state. As a Pisces I’ve always given my emotions pretty free rein and long believed it is never good to bottle them up, but this message was something new. If I want to lower my blood pressure, I need to relax my emotions. Gandhi was almost always happy: he always put out a strong positive vibe even when the Brits were taking him off to jail. He knew that his truth was more important than his life, and he acted accordingly. I had known for a considerable time that it is good to project a positive vibe in all my dealings with my fellow humans, but I did not always do so. Now what hit me is that it was time to stop letting my emotions take charge and run my show. As I said above, I have long realized that my mind is just one of my organs and is not supposed to run my show. I am pure consciousness, and the mind can give input just as the eyes or ears do. Similarly, I now realized that my emotions can give input, but my heart is not supposed to run the show either. I do not need to be driven by my reactions, attitudes, desires, hatreds, or competitiveness. The seat of my emotions is just another one of my organs. (Probably the archetypal example of allowing the heart to run the show is The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. Werther commits suicide when he is disappointed in love, as if that one failed connection was all there is to life.) I didn’t get the message about my blood pressure and Gandhi and always putting out a good vibe until I got stoned, and then it all came together. Furthermore, I thank my partner for the inspiration to see Gandhi in the first place. We are good for each other in this way, sharing our evolution.

Twenty years ago as a result of my stony meditations I realized that my heart and my mind were equal parts of myself, and I had a gold ring made on which I represented my mind as a lion and my heart as a ram. These two wonderful creatures are equal beings, dancing around my soul, which is a diamond in the rough. I did this so that I would never forget that my heart and mind are equal, since up to that point I had assumed my mind was ascendant. But I see now that this was a relatively superficial discovery. More important than the idea that they are equal is that neither is in charge. As pure consciousness I choose to generate a loving, positive emotion in even the most adverse challenges because that degree of spiritual connection is a more accurate representation of what I am. The process of attaining wisdom is to go deeper and deeper into the truths of my being. What I discovered yesterday is another powerful step along the infinite path. I want to be on the path of love, and I want to project love.

My discovery of the importance, perhaps even the necessity, of generating an even, positive emotional tone may be obvious to some of you. We all have different strands on the web of wisdom, and what is divine inspiration for one may be just a lifetime habit for another. In fact, each is making his own web of wisdom, and the different wisdoms aren’t necessarily even very similar. But perhaps we are coming to a point in our spiritual evolution where we can help one another enormously by filling in one another’s missing strands. For a long time now I have felt that we are all evolving spirits in God’s kindergarten, this garden of Eden that we insist on turning into a trash heap. The time may be coming to graduate, to take charge of ourselves as Spirits and move into a relationship of love with one another instead of the endless power games of fear, greed, and judgment that we generally play. For after all, isn’t that a definition of heaven – where we truly love one another and dedicate to the good, true, and beautiful?

When I talk of heaven, please do not think of Christianity. Although Christianity taught the power of love, it has been a failure, enmeshed in patriarchy, except for an occasional individual or a temporary pocket of bliss. Down thru the ages Christians have burned libraries from Alexandria to Easter Island, murdered countless “heretics” and “witches,” fought endless wars, and even today believe that overpopulating the planet is “pro-life.” The arrogance that theirs is the only way to God is unfathomable. The greatest virtue of Christianity is that it has brought us to this place. Now the time is coming to set the old mythology aside and recognize what we truly are, creations of the Great Holy Mystery evolving in mastery of ourselves. At least this is the understanding that Mother Marijuana has brought me to, this gentle, helping, loving herb. Furthermore, the insights of such luminaries as Carlos Castaneda and Jane Roberts, and my own experience with salvia divinorum, suggest that the next reality may be far more fluid and challenging than this one, and I had better perfect my sword of joy. My sense is that whatever the next life may be, however loving, it is not likely to be a resting place for me. But I don’t know that any of us has a clear view of the next life, what we call “heaven.” All we have are a few glimpses of the shadows on the walls of the cave where we currently dwell. My guru said to wait and see. I’m waiting.

Mother Marijuana taught me that I am an evolving Spirit, infinitely deep. My own experience as well as the experience of others suggests that many people may benefit from the ministrations of Mother Marijuana. Therefore as a final word, I would like to suggest that the best environment for evolving Spirits is maximum freedom, and freedom is the right to do whatever we like as long as we do not harm others or the environment, since harm to the environment harms us all. The sacramental use of marijuana harms nothing and no one. It may be time for us to restore the Ninth Amendment, which says that all the rights not enumerated in the first eight amendments are reserved by the people. Our wayward paranoid government does not have the right to tell us what we can grow or consume. All such laws are in clear violation of the intent of our founding fathers, who in some ways had a very keen sense of what it means to be free and equal. It would definitely be easier if we could pursue our spiritual evolution without an unenlightened government telling us we are evil beings. Perhaps if enough of us generate enough positive vibes and focus on the fact that the government is us, we can persuade the problem to go away. May we manifest our Spirits!

Mr. Handshy timelessly flys through the chords of his 12-string guitar into the ecstasy of his lovers heart and mind, tuning in to the rhythm of the earth.

As the prisons continue to fill up with Americans whose sole law-breaking habits consist of growing and smoking marijuana, I feel that it is my time to weigh in on the inherent injustice of it all. In order to accomplish this task comprehensively, it will serve the reader well if he or she understands the evolution of my own involvement with the “sacred herb.”

At 51, I have been judiciously partaking of marijuana for almost 27 years. There was a time, particularly after a six-month period in 1969, when the very notion of smoking pot was abhorrent to me. I had come home from the active duty segment of a six-year contractual arrangement with the U.S. Marine Corps (Reserves) to discover that someone very close to me was getting high on a regular basis. The vision harbored at the time was that using marijuana would be the first step toward a near-inevitable descent into lazy irresponsibility, then one would end up right down in the cellar of stealing money to support the habit of shooting heroin. The final frames of this distorted picture of pot-inhalation were, of course, financial ruin and an untimely, grotesque death.

Well, I really read the riot act to this loved one and was thanked for my concern, but also duly informed that they were going to go ahead and smoke a joint now and again, anyway. The long-term upshot is that my friend never tried any other drug whatsoever and has turned out to be a quite healthy contributor to everyone’s life in all facets of personal and professional interaction. Yes, there were many people that I watched start with marijuana and end up in drastically dire straits denoting extreme uncenteredness, but I came to understand that it was an addictive personality driving their demise, not the plant.

Four years later, I ran into some good high school friends who had both been to Vietnam and we decided to get together for reminiscing. Upon entering the one fellows’ apartment, I smelled another aroma mixed in with India-brand incense. At 24, my open-mindedness was starting to kick in about what individuals did to relax. For the preceding two years, I had gradually realized that beer and hard liquor were not doing it for me anymore. Moreover, alcohol was increasingly the source of a pervasive physiological sickness, which started with headaches and would rapidly advance into multiple maladies, making me wonder if I wasn’t on the road to serious alcoholism. There wasn’t any booze at my friend’s home; just water, soda and lemonade. His record collection conveyed a full connection with the “hippie music” that I hadn’t really given a chance as yet, being a staunch proponent of the R+B sound.

I knew then that I would be asked if I wanted to “take a toke,” and for the first time, I said yes. The rationale was that, as a scholar, I should examine this phenomenon like any other form of societal variable, informally recording my subsequent reactions. The trick was to hold the smoke in a while before exhaling, according to the other friend. Having never smoked cigarettes, there was an initial sense of harshness in my throat after a long draw. I took three hits off the joint and passed on the fourth. A couple of minutes later, I was wondering what the big deal is about herb, as perceptivity remained unchanged. Then, I happened to notice that the album playing on the stereo, Neil Young’s “Harvest,” sounded louder, like the band was right in the apartment with us. In the deeper background, I could hear both a cardinal and a blue jay chirping like they had just discovered a cache of fat worms. When a strong thirst came over me following these quick successive thoughts, I beat a path to the fridge for some of that lemonade. For the next couple of hours, all three of us listened to music, talked about everything under the sun and moon and solidified our friendships effortlessly. One thing that got my attention was that, instead of losing focus on immediate surroundings, as warned about by many people who thought that they knew the dangerous byproducts of marijuana use, I found myself thinking of previously established priority issues in a much more in-depth fashion. Also, problems that might have seemed intractable before that afternoon now appeared as smaller, more manageable tasks, which could be worked out with no sweat at all. Again, that day was 2 and 2/3 decades ago.

I can honestly say that I have never had a bad experience with marijuana. The “set and setting,” including who you are with, is an important consideration to ponder before embarking on “the journey.” If there are emotionally turbulent matters with which I am mightily contending, I keep the “green away from the scene.” Knowing what constitutes quality pot is something that one picks up along the way. Discipline has been a key component of my intake regimen, as well. When the dishes are done, cat is fed, 12-string guitar tuned, candles lit…then I am ready to soar. People run into problems when they imbibe before breakfast, because it does stimulate one’s appetite. Yes, the more times in a day that you “go there” translates into wastefulness and becomes physically tiring. I only depart from evening inner adventures when I want to take a long walk in a state park on a beautiful day or share the experience with someone. One vital area concerning the benefits of smoking pot which hasn’t seen much ink is the opportunity for profound spiritual voyaging. I didn’t really grasp this view until I lived up in British Columbia for two years – ’77-’79. The actual place is called the Sunshine Coast, located 45 minutes away from Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay by ferryboat; the only other access is by plane. It’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t either lived in a pristine locale or tried marijuana, but the presence of an intensely mellow magnification of God/Nature’s constant symphony is the best portrayal I can make right now. Without the jarring sights and sounds of civilization around (cars, concrete, glass, metal, human voices, machinery. etc.), one sort of melds into the natural environment and reflective thoughts are able to sweetly stream on through. A spin-off of these meditatively splendid interludes, which persists up-to-date, has been the formation of a firm foundation within me that challenges the current supremely unbalanced societal status quo. Now, all I do beyond survival and loving dear ones, is keep a razor-sharp focus on planetary peace strategies.

What happened to me up North is that the combination of mountains, ocean, old-growth trees, eagles swooping over the water to catch leaping salmon, great friends, and, yes, a giant stash condensed from 22 plants (which I grew myself), opened me up to academically question exactly why the world must continue being so out-of-whack. Hence, rather than retain my Canadian landed-immigrant status for the rest of my life, I gave away most of my possessions and left for America on November 1, 1979. The crystallized project attendant to this decision was simply to merge myriad sociological methods of deciphering cultural trends with burgeoning spiritual acumen. That the measured use of marijuana has played an enormously important role in attaining the complex answers to why we don’t have “Earth tuned right” can’t be overstated. No, I’m not addicted; there have been months-long periods when there was zero access. Yet, because I never overdid ingestion, my system hasn’t had to make a major adaptation to its prolonged absence. Indeed, marijuana might not be for everybody; hence, I am not calling its use a mandatory element to reach maximum bliss nor optimum creativity. What I can say is that, having been a guitarist for almost 25 years, playing the ol’ 12-string Yamaha has always proved to be a markedly more orchestral adventure after a bowl of fine herb.

Truth be told, although I have read less than a few accounts from other people actually willing to talk about it, there is one other area of enhancement which I’d like to mention. I have a growing interest in promoting the notion of “spiritual intimacy” these days. Long decrying the shallow exchanges under girding “mechanical sex,” I have happily discovered, quite by accident, that the properties germane to marijuana are exquisitely conducive to a degree of love-making that is akin to timeless flying in heavenly dimensions. In this high-tandem land, focalization on mutually nurturing generosity has consistently been present during my long study of this still-embryonic field of human ecstasy. Since my observational approach to this subject tends toward continual striving for the balance between maximum mind and soul participation, I don’t feel the need to flesh out the details on any other level.

It seems that illogical and corrupt forces are in control of the debate over whether or not marijuana should be legalized. One has to draw this conclusion, if only upon the lone examination of law enforcement and legislators denying the plant from citizens afflicted with terminal illnesses like cancer or AIDS. The entire medical marijuana issue is such a sad travesty that I’m convinced – one day in the not-too-distant-future – that the electorate’s educated understanding of the beneficial attributes, like easing chemotherapy complications and increasing appetite, will put a critical mass ending to mean-spirited intransigence. We can’t eliminate the possibility that interlocking collusion of the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries is at nefarious play here; specifically regarding non-disease usage of marijuana on the road to recreational and spiritual joy.

The database that I have compiled encompassing the full gamut of marijuana-related study has become remarkably voluminous. I hope to share same with anyone who sees clearly that human and civil liberty erosion is at the root of marijuana prohibition. The populace is waking up fast, as far as I’m concerned. We need more courageous souls to come out of the woodwork to voice reasoned appeals for common-sense legislation to be enacted. I am one who believes that a person should be 21 years of age to maturely enter this heightened sense of self and surroundings. However, in some cases, when parents and teen exhibit solid respect and communication, 18 could be an acceptable passageway if maturity has been greatly accomplished. That the necessary debate about age, regulation, quality control, distribution, etc, has been both distorted and one-sided is without question…we have to keep asking ourselves: “Why?”