Phil-osophy

An ancient callback in my friend group is something called “Phil-osophy.” The story goes that one night, as one does, a gaggle of us smoked a prodigious amount of weed in the detached garage that my band practiced in. Getting stoned was something that I still enjoyed doing; the manic giggle fits at our impaired idiocy and groovy sensory immersion were a welcome break from reality, but for me it was never really a comfortable experience. There was a fundamental disorientation at the bottom of it all, and I spent the vast majority of my time whilst high trying to suss out what the fuck was happening to me. It was like whatever core loop my brain usually ran on was sped up or slowed down and I would be chasing forceful streams of thought, to the total detriment of my situational awareness.

So anyway one night we all got high in the garage and we had just set up recording software on my computer so we recorded our jams. And it was one of those jams where in the moment it is the transcendent song of the universe, but then you listen to it the next day and it is just deeply, comically shitty. Which is very fun. BUT what no one knew is that after they all went into the house, I took advantage of the hot mic and started to try to nail down my internal state by frantically talking though my thought process as a stream of consciousness, hoping to land somewhere. I failed, and when my inane rambling was discovered later I was the butt of many jokes for my earnest, confused gibberish. A truly mortifying experience, and it may have been the turn toward weed making me feel deeply self-conscious, causing panic attacks in social settings and feelings of alienation and paranoia alone.

My friends adapted better than I did, and it seemed like for them it became a subtle enhancement layer that ran in the background while they went about their lives. But for me it was always a completely all-consuming and debilitating chemical, and trying to “play it cool” became more and more of an exercise in pain. I phased it out, dipping back in every once in a while, most recently in 2015, to test the waters and see if i could handle it with more experience (I couldn’t). I still had occasion for some LSD in my youth, but for the most part I graduated toward the adult, normie mood enhancers: alcohol, caffeine, nicotine and sugar.

The Gummy

A lot of what I’d describe as “my spirituality” recently really just boils down to being more open to shit. I beat myself up for not having a “regular” “spiritual” “practice” or whatever, but shit is happening outside of my awareness all the time due to some subtle body muscle getting more and more relaxed in the past few years. My active and passive divination (my phone home screen shows me a few tarot cards every afternoon) feeds me a slow and steady symbol supply, and I’ve been following inscrutable exhortations to think about planetary domains in my life. The moon has been an object of particular fascination, and I have felt compelled to give it dominion over one of my devices (the phone, most used by an order of magnitude) and a portion of my online presence (hello). I have also found myself leaning more into what appear to be invitations from the universe to play in the space.

So one night a few weeks ago the app I use to pay for parking in the city sends me a push notification telling me they want to send me a $35 gift card. They’ve teamed up with a company called Nift, which seems like the sort of zero interest rate startup that should have died last year, to give me a gigantic coupon code from one of a handful of e-commerce shops. Funnily enough, they were all either wine or cbd/weed stores. I was subjected to many upsells and managed to check out having paid just $10 for “shipping”, and after briefly wondering who got ripped off by that transaction, completely forgot about it. I made a point of ordering the CBD/THC gummies, because i already have some CBD ones and they don’t really do much, plus I was curious if it was even legal for me to obtain a THC product in the mail without a medical card or something.

Apparently so! Because after a while they arrived in the mail. And a few days later, a window opens: my wife and kid are leaving around 11 for a day out with family, and I am alone in the house until dinnertime. I had approximately seven hours, completely alone in my house, with next to no responsibilities. So around 10:30 I ate a 5mg THC/25mg CBD gummy. I am told this is “not a lot of weed.”

Oops

Of course, after I had finished chewing and swallowing, I had second thoughts. For one, I do have a job, and while ordinarily it’s sort of up to me how much work to do on any given day, this week I was on a support rotation, and there’s a lot of frantic end-of-year shit that occasionally fell into my lap. I was handling ok with that but when my wife came up to say goodbye, I felt the familiar sensation of my ability to function lurch away. Oh no. I am going to be completely incapacitated for a while.

I felt immediate regret, because I can’t really afford to do that. If I were needed by my family unexpectedly, I would have to explain that I had taken drugs when I was supposed to be working, and would be in no fit state to even do the explaining. This caused Bad Feelings and what felt like the beginning of the sort of doom loop that defines a bad trip. Fortunately for me, I guess, like everything else my shame for fucking around while on the family clock was swept out to sea.

I grabbed the streams of thought as they flew by, and connected them with my knowledge tree. For the first time I made a connection between this mental churn and my ADHD-ness, postulating that this was hyperfixation on my own cognition. Some internal taskmaster that apportioned appropriate resources to simultaneously thinking and keeping track of all the other context (doing my job, running a household with my wife, possessing a human body) was completely overwhelmed, and the thoughts were running the asylum.

This is usually where I end up: aware that my mental processes are out of whack and just free associating until the drug wears off. Fortunately, I’ve recently acquired a new habit of writing things down as they occur to me, so I was able to open an Obsidian note on my phone and capture some of the stuff that would otherwise have disappeared back into the ether:

how does this make people calm?!! i feel like i’m on speed

rapid loss of context, hyperfixation on whatever my mind is farting on about that i’ve latched onto

literally lost in my own thoughts

Moon in Aquarius

I think I would have had a satisfactory time making new connections in the psychological realm, but thankfully that was just the beginning. Because I do woo shit now.

I performed a 3-card tarot draw, receiving the Two of Swords, the Princess of Cups, and the Four of Wands. I thought the thoughtforms were potent, but these symbols started to rip their way through my mind, creating a thousand new connections in their wake. I was particularly drawn to the Two of Swords, which in the Thoth deck carries the astrological association of Moon in Aquarius.

It instantly registered to me that I was in the realm of the moon. The Other World, of magic and illusions and dreams and spirits. That my solar self was diminished, a stabilizing force that constrained my psyche with rules and kept things even, and without it an astral blast shield was down, and I was being cooked with cosmic radiation that I was not acclimated to. My mind was a cork bobbing on a vast psychic ocean too colossal to fathom. Aquarius was my mind, a fragile, meticulously constructed network of identities and relationships and ideas that gave me the necessary superstructure to function in the world, and the moon was ripping through it like a softball through a spiderweb.

I rolled the astrodice. I shit you not, I rolled Moon, Aquarius, second house.

As I grasped for terra firma, paranoia set in. I worried that I had broken my brain, that my meddling would cost me everything, that I was lying about who I was, that I was incapable of love. I clocked that the thoughts were more substantial, like I could hear them. I guess I don’t ordinarily have a verbal inner monologue, but I sure did then. I wondered if these thoughts were even my own. Then I heard this:

The Moon is truth and illusion. Do not get too attached to any thoughtforms encountered in this realm!

It was voiced by a young man, with a higher, reedier voice than my own. I opened my notes app and typed:

Who are you

And then I typed:

Mercury

So there’s that.

I thought about how conspiracy theories can infect the mind with a few points of truth and hijack our pattern forming capabilities with junk data to warp conclusions. I surrendered myself to the experience, taking refuge in how fleeting each thought stream was. And then I instinctively tried hara breathing.

WHOA

Light shot through my body, I could feel my heart rate slow and the jitters subside. I was too distracted to do the laohugong form, and I really wish that I had, but instead I sat on my zafu, realizing that if I was observing my thoughts I might as well get the form right.

I felt the constraints placed upon me, starting in early childhood, that kept my spirit small and meek and contained. I felt trapped by my circumstances and my choices, and yearned for the freedom to keep my heart this open and guileless, like the mystics of old. To run naked through the forest, to stick my tongue out at the mayor, to walk in any direction I felt like until my feet were sore, then to drop on the spot into sleep and keep walking in the morning.

I bemoaned the rigid shell that my solar self keeps up, the psychic armor that prevents me from fully sharing my deep affection for my family and friends.

Then a gruff, drill-seargeant-like voice says:

The psychic armor is GOOD, you idiot!

It’s Saturn. He’s right.

I make peace with the bruises that scabbed over, giving me my shell. I realize that we all scab over where our souls get burned by the earth, and that there’s no such thing as being a human on earth without defenses against the realities of being corporal.

The true mystics exercise maximum spiritual freedom at the expense of their sanity, following their bliss wherever it goes, even if it goes to homelessness, social shunning, substance abuse, and madness. Monastics strike a balance that optimizes for spiritual freedom with the necessary sacrifice of most ties to the world and society, and a rigid social structure to keep the chain reaction going. As a householder, I have elected to strike a different balance, one that makes it that much harder to create favorable conditions for exercising spiritual freedom, but with much richer soil when I can, and with gifts more ready to share.

I look at the Four of Wands as a picture of my self and my family, a strong shield surrounding a hearty fire, each feeding the other, carving out a tiny place of safety and closeness for the work to happen. Looking at the Princess of Cups, I resolve to bring those I am close to inside the shell more often, to see the soft and tender creature underneath, and trust that they will understand and reveal those parts of themselves in reciprocity. I forgive myself for the calluses I needed to develop to make it this far, and the bruises I may inflict on others in my attempts to do what’s right.

The Comedown

After roughly two hours of this (accompanied at one point by John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”), I was able to pull myself together by performing the sort of distractive tasks that I instinctively shunned in the middle of the reverie. Through a comedy of errors, I heated some leftover pasta and made the first tea that I saw in the cabinet (“Summer Solstice”), and put on Avatar 2. The torrent was in Spanish, so I watched it in Spanish. Without understanding the words, I got the picture: a small tribe of nature-dwelling families with a direct psychic connection to the soul of the world are beset upon by industrial capitalists who want their resources. Tale as old as time.

Then the CBD kicked in and I took a huge nap. And then I woke up, cleaned the house, and cooked dinner for my family.

So what do I take away from this? What is cannabis, exactly? Why does 5mg fuck me up so bad? I got a far larger glimpse of its realm this time around, a place of Pure Vibes where direct experience is more potent, but I also saw how easy it is to get lost there, and how easy it might be to unlearn helpful adaptations for the Sun World if too much time is spent there.

I can’t help but feel like my Moon Mania was all in preparation for this, and what a trip it was to be pondering this vast, unpercieved well of my own psyche and to be surrounded by all the fucking moons I have put everywhere for the past few months.

I can see how it can be a potent tool for inner work, but I don’t get how people ingest enough kush krystals to kill a bull moose and then just go to work at subway or whatever. Is there a safe container for someone with my sensitivity to explore this space? Is that just what music festivals are?

This is the longest thing I’ve ever written, and I would love to hear your thoughts. Hit me up on Mastodon or send me an email to let me know if you’ve experienced anything similar, or different, or things I should check out now that I have fully freaked my bean.

☽︎