Love Notes: Cannabis

Visuals are usually where we first notice the change. Colors become brighter, or perhaps more pronounced. Maybe it’s not the colors, but something’s different. The world feels warmer, richer. The sun was never brighter; the night was never darker. When we’re sober, life looks like a digital photo. When we smoke, life looks like a Polaroid. Lines and borders become more defined; things stand out against their background, almost cartoonish in their definition. The world looks cel-shaded.

Time ceases to be a fluid event, and rather divides into instances unrelated to each other. We find it hard to link events or place them into context. As we walk up the stairs, we cease to remember how we got there, or why. Events are independent; we are what we’re doing. In a sense, we’re “in the moment.” At higher doses, time stutters and lags. When we look around, it seems like we’re skipping frames. Memories bubble up to the surface; we experience the sensation of being somewhere we’ve been, feeling a way we once felt. We’re reminded of places from our childhood, experiences from our past.

Why Trip?

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us  “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

-Albert Einstein

Ask most people if they’ve ever tripped, and they’ll say no. Shrooms, acid, mescaline – no, I’d never do that. I’d never trip. But tripping – hallucinating – is unavoidable. And not only is it unavoidable, it’s a daily occurrence; hallucinations are simply immaterial thoughts strong enough to seem material. Closed-eye-visuals (CEV’s), daydreams, and dreams are all forms of hallucination, and in a sense one could even go so far as to say that all thought manifesting itself in a sensory (audiological, visual, olfactory, etc.) manner is a mild hallucination. An example is thinking of a song – you can “hear” the melody in your head, even though it’s not physically playing. That’s hallucination – perceiving things that are not “there.”

And yet people are afraid to trip. Why? Though we hallucinate daily, our waking hallucinations stay “in the back of our head” – our outer sensory perception, though often dimmed, remains largely unaltered. And dreams, hallucinations which completely alter and replace our senses, are not a part of our “daily life.” It’s not something we experience in waking. When we wake we see things as they are, and when we sleep we experience hallucinations, but they’re cut off from the rest of the world – there’s the period of unconsciousness before and after they occur. And so we separate them from our reality, and live with a dualistic mindset, with the idea that hallucinations are somehow separate from “real life.”

Transcript from an excerpt of Bill Hicks’ “Revelations”

You never see positive drug stories on the news, do you? Isn’t that weird, since most of the experiences I’ve had on drugs…were real fuckin’ positive. Who are these morons they’re finding, that’s what I wanna know.

Always that same LSD story, you’ve all seen it, “Young man on acid thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.” What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south – they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead – good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious…but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought.