A MIXED BAG
This post is a response to a recent article called: I Never Smoked Pot bu Sue S. My experiences smoking pot were so powerful - both good and bad - I thought it would be of value to write this post.
Sue - I can appreciate how you abstained. I can also appreciate how others did not. What else is new? I hated the first inhaled cigarette I smoked in a philosophy class at Columbia University. It burned my throat and I never smoked a cigarette after that experience. However the first time I tried pot - it was an entirely different experience. |
I was alone in my bedroom. A friend urged me to try it. I screwed up enough nerve, lit the forbidden, and inhaled. For a few moments absolutely nothing happened. Big deal I thought. Then suddenly I began experiencing what is commonly referred to as an altered state of consciousness. I imagined that I was looking at a large roller dex that had philosophical prinicples on each card. As the cards turned I experienced what I felt was Hegel's logic - the law of threes - in action. Meaning I experienced what he refers to as a first principle of anything being a thesis. The thesis then turns into its opposite - antithesis. Then the two are combined into a unit equalling a synthesis which becomes a new thesis and so on. The whole thing was rapidly turning in dynamic motion card by card, insight by insight. What is important is not the content but the fact that for me the abstract concepts of philosophy which I loved were transformed into a thrillingly alive and vibrant experience. The experience was truly mind blowing. I kept a journal of my subsequent pot experiences, convinced then and now, that I experienced some important observations. I am uncertain if I became dependent on pot but it sure beat enduring the often less scintillating limitations of ordinary reality at the time. However there came a moment in time when my highly positive attitude to pot was changed forever to the other side of the ledger - at least for me. I bent over to lift a row boat out of the water to beach it by the shore of a lake when I felt a sharp pain in my back. This occurred about 5 PM when I had routinely smoked a joint, followed by playing darts under some pine trees. As I threw the first dart I felt a sharp radiating pain in my back clearly enhanced because of the pot. From that time on - whenever I smoked Pot it was as if I felt an automatic thick thread making a beeline to the spot of my initial back injury well after the actual injury was technically healed. It has been well over forty years when this happened to me. Convinced I would reexperience the same terrible feeling as then and never wishing to feel the quality of it, I have not smoked any more pot and don't really miss it. My conclusion is that pot enhances both positive and negative states of mind. Perhaps my negative experience was my own unconscious warning me not to continue smoking it as I was clearly flirted with getting addicted. But - to be as objective as possible - when the altered states were positive - it was a distinctly uniquely pleasurable and enlightening experience. |
Comments