Program Notes
Guest speaker: Stephen Gray
Stephen Gray
Date this lecture was recorded: April 2017
This week we talk with Stephen Gray, the editor & writer who pulled together the excellent collection of essays titled:
“Cannabis and Spirituality: An Explorer’s Guide to an Ancient Plant Spirit Ally”
In other vital news, if you’ve spent the last many years listening to Lorenzo on the Psychedelic Salon, go sign up for his Patreon site to support his work creating a postmodern form of autobiography.
And if you want a taste of what he can produce, I found his book of maxims titled ‘Scattered Thoughts’ to be one of the best of its kind I’ve ever enjoyed:
Here are three examples:
“Few activities give one such a complete sense of accomplishment and pride in a job well done than successfully completing a drug deal.”
“Humans are Gaia’s opposable thumbs.”
“I’m a free-lance iconoclast who is just trying to make the world a little safer for anarchy.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon
00:00:23 ►
2.0, and I’m really looking forward to listening to today’s talk with you.
00:00:29 ►
If you remember a while back, I mentioned the fact that there was an author who had contacted me about doing an interview about his new book.
00:00:37 ►
But at about that time that I received the request, well, that’s when my old computer crashed.
00:00:46 ►
request, well, that’s when my old computer crashed. And since I’m not very good about filing things,
00:00:52 ►
I had misplaced his request, his book, and on top of that, my old email program had crashed as well.
00:00:58 ►
So when I saw that the Symposia team had scheduled the interview that we are about to listen to,
00:01:03 ►
well, it all came back to me. And now I’ve also found my copy of Stephen’s book.
00:01:06 ►
It was in the box where I put everything that was on my desk while I was dealing with setting up a new computer.
00:01:09 ►
Actually, I hadn’t looked in that box in over a month
00:01:13 ►
and I just now found all kinds of things in it
00:01:16 ►
that have obviously slipped through the cracks.
00:01:19 ►
In any event, Stephen’s new book was there
00:01:21 ►
and this afternoon it will be providing my
00:01:25 ►
reading pleasure about well the most important ally in my own medicine kit so
00:01:30 ►
Stephen I apologize for not getting back to you but I’m very pleased that the
00:01:35 ►
symposia team made contact with you for today’s podcast so let’s join Lex now
00:01:40 ►
Lex now.
00:01:52 ►
I’m Lex Pelger of Symposia, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:02:02 ►
We’ll be talking with Stephen Gray, who is the editor of Cannabis and Spirituality,
00:02:06 ►
an explorer’s guide to an ancient plant spirit ally.
00:02:10 ►
It’s a really excellent collection of essays around the spiritual uses of cannabis that often get forgotten today amidst all the talk of the medical value
00:02:15 ►
and the industrial value of the old cannabis plant.
00:02:18 ►
Stephen Gray pulled together a bunch of great essays,
00:02:21 ►
including Kat Harrison herself, who wrote Who Is She? Dr. Julie Holland
00:02:26 ►
wrote the foreword, and then her husband Jeremy continued that excellent essay he wrote called
00:02:31 ►
Thoughts on Pot in here with Thoughts on Pot 2. One of the strong points of the book is the number
00:02:38 ►
of different directions that these different essays go. They talk about mixing sacraments,
00:02:43 ►
they talk about harm reduction
00:02:45 ►
around pot use, and they have very specific, helpful advice for making your cannabis use
00:02:51 ►
more spiritual. Here to tell us more is the editor, Stephen Gray.
00:02:57 ►
I first wanted to hear about how you got started on this journey and pulling together a book like this?
00:03:08 ►
Oh, let’s see where to start. I think it was in my 15th previous life.
00:03:18 ►
Well, I could go back to, you know, I’ll confess right off the top that I’m from that baby boomer generation. And so I encountered cannabis and other entheogens back in the late 60s.
00:03:26 ►
My connection with that particular plant goes back to then, and I liked it from the get-go.
00:03:33 ►
But the other entheogens, at the time we called them psychedelics, of course, and in particular LSD,
00:03:41 ►
also pointed the way at the possibility of some of these substances for spiritual use.
00:03:48 ►
And the long and the short of it is that I went through a variety of different channels and paths,
00:03:53 ►
left all the psychedelics behind for a number of years, got involved with Tibetan Buddhism,
00:03:57 ►
and eventually found my way back, largely due, frankly, to Terence McKenna and an article that I read by him or about him in the LA Weekly in 1988, I think it was, where there was this aha moment where he reconnected me to this whole idea of the connection between spiritual work and psychedelics.
00:04:21 ►
And that didn’t directly immediately lead to linking that up to cannabis as a spiritual
00:04:27 ►
medicine. But again, one thing led to another. I got involved in organizing the conference up here
00:04:32 ►
and so on. And a few years ago, I was having a conversation with the wonderful Kathleen Harrison.
00:04:38 ►
It had started to occur to me that cannabis was being ignored as a spiritual medicine,
00:04:47 ►
even while it was spreading rapidly in the culture. This was like four or five years ago. And I was telling this to Kathleen,
00:04:51 ►
and she, who, if people don’t know who she is, and if they do know who Terrence McKenna was,
00:04:58 ►
they were married together for 15 years. And so she was set right in the middle of this work for a long time. Anyway, she said,
00:05:07 ►
oh, I think if you put a book together like that, it would be really important and I would contribute
00:05:11 ►
to it. Well, I’ve seen some of her writing. She doesn’t write books, but she writes some articles
00:05:16 ►
and she’s a beautiful writer and she’s a very knowledgeable, insightful human being. And I
00:05:22 ►
thought, oh, if she’ll contribute to this, I’m going to go ahead with this project. And that was about four or five years ago. One thing led to another. I ended up
00:05:28 ►
with 17 contributors plus me and the wonderful Julie Holland as writing the forward. And timing
00:05:36 ►
was right, I guess, because Intertraditions Park Street Press picked it up. They sent the proper
00:05:43 ►
book proposal to them on a Sunday evening, and on the Monday
00:05:47 ►
morning, the acquisitions editor wrote me back and said, right up our alley.
00:05:52 ►
Wow. What a Genesis story. That’s really perfect, to just flow together like that.
00:05:58 ►
Yeah, it feels like it, because quite honestly, I had inner traditions on my radar from the get-go.
00:06:06 ►
honestly, I had inner traditions on my radar from the get-go. I’ve probably got 15 of their,
00:06:13 ►
you know, titles on my bookshelf behind me here. And I, you know, I just really like the,
00:06:18 ►
they seem like the right size and the right kind of focus. And I, Jim Fadiman is kind of a semi friend. He’s a colleague and I guess he’s a friend really. And he’s got a book with them and he was
00:06:23 ►
really happy with them. So I only sent, you know,
00:06:26 ►
I did the proper book proposal,
00:06:28 ►
like 40, 50 pages, right?
00:06:29 ►
Including samples and stuff.
00:06:31 ►
And I only sent it to them.
00:06:34 ►
I never sent it to anybody else.
00:06:35 ►
So yes, it just seemed like it was,
00:06:38 ►
I do really feel like, you know,
00:06:39 ►
I don’t think this is boasting or anything.
00:06:41 ►
I just feel like it was meant to be,
00:06:43 ►
you know, sort of like beyond me, you know, just like it was something that needed to be talked about.
00:06:49 ►
Absolutely. And you did really get a great place to channel all of these incredible people
00:06:55 ►
from the community. It’s really a who’s who of the great thinking on this stuff.
00:06:59 ►
A lot of it. Yeah, a lot of them. Yeah.
00:07:03 ►
Were there any contributors that really surprised you to this book that you didn’t see coming in the beginning?
00:07:08 ►
Hmm. Gee, I don’t know, to be honest.
00:07:14 ►
Let me think about who’s in there.
00:07:16 ►
Well, you know, I can’t think of anyone in particular.
00:07:20 ►
There was one fellow, not exactly that but he well
00:07:28 ►
actually Julie Holland was a nice surprise I’ll come back to that other
00:07:32 ►
guy in a second I had Julie has a book called the pot book she’s the editor of
00:07:39 ►
this book called the pot book which a compendium many different approaches
00:07:43 ►
aspects of cannabis use legal
00:07:45 ►
medical recreational spiritual etc and there’s a article in there by a guy named jeremy wolf that
00:07:52 ►
i thought was really interesting really insightful um called thoughts on pot and uh you know him
00:08:00 ►
don’t you yeah um you were at that alchemist Kitchen event with them. Yeah. Anyway, he’s
00:08:06 ►
brilliant in my opinion. And I wrote him and asked him if he would contribute to the book. And he
00:08:11 ►
said yes right away. And at the time, I didn’t know that he was Julie’s partner. And when I
00:08:16 ►
figured that out, or when I finally realized that, I asked her or asked him if he would,
00:08:23 ►
if she might be interested in writing a forward.
00:08:27 ►
And she got on board right away.
00:08:28 ►
So that was really cool.
00:08:33 ►
The other guy I was going to mention was an interesting little story.
00:08:35 ►
It was Mariano da Silva.
00:08:39 ►
He’s doing some very interesting work.
00:08:44 ►
And he has to remain essentially incognito with all this work.
00:08:50 ►
And for that reason, he wasn’t going to contribute anything at first.
00:08:56 ►
I met him personally and done ceremonies with him, ayahuasca ceremonies with him.
00:08:59 ►
And he works with a community, and they’ve had issues.
00:09:00 ►
He’s from Brazil.
00:09:06 ►
They’ve had issues down there with cannabis because cannabis is seriously illegal in Brazil, as I understand it.
00:09:16 ►
And he didn’t want to do it because they have been advocating for ayahuasca ceremonial use, not just in Brazil but in a variety of countries.
00:09:19 ►
And this cannabis issue had resulted in some problems for them down there
00:09:23 ►
because the government can be
00:09:25 ►
pretty heavy-handed about it so it took several conversations with him and he finally agreed
00:09:30 ►
to do that and he’s i consider this fellow a really remarkable person he’s sort of what you
00:09:35 ►
might call an elder and i can’t even say you know what organization or anything he works with
00:09:41 ►
for this reasons that i just mentioned. But he kind of at
00:09:46 ►
first reluctantly agreed and then he just had some really interesting insights about cannabis as a
00:09:52 ►
spiritual medicine. One or two of my favorite quotes from the book are by him or thoughts,
00:09:59 ►
I guess you could say. And one is, he talks a lot about frequency of use, which is something we might discuss if you want to.
00:10:06 ►
But he said something to the effect of that he can that cannabis, what he calls Santa Maria, can can open one up into transcendental realms.
00:10:21 ►
And then we talked about this was something I wanted to get into the book, too.
00:10:24 ►
And it’s one of
00:10:25 ►
the themes I don’t know if it’s on your list or not Lex but of questions but the commingling of
00:10:30 ►
medicines there’s a chapter by another fellow and him both talking about how cannabis can support
00:10:36 ►
the use of other spiritual or spirit plant medicines and he had this one Mariano had this
00:10:42 ►
wonderful little comment in there where he said what when they do it within the context of an actual ayahuasca ceremony, they do it well into the ceremony after they’ve worked with the ayahuasca for quite a while, like after the second round of medicine.
00:10:57 ►
And he only does this with private groups. He doesn’t do this in any public situation because he has to know who the people are and how they can handle it because it actually further empowers or strengthens the ayahuasca effect in a really sort of unique way.
00:11:15 ►
And the way he described it in his chapter in the book was he said the ayahuasca takes you to the top of the mountain and the Santa Maria gives you wings to fly in the wind.
00:11:25 ►
Wow. Wow.
00:11:26 ►
Yeah.
00:11:27 ►
Wow.
00:11:27 ►
That’s great.
00:11:28 ►
Isn’t that a lovely little statement?
00:11:31 ►
That’s really beautiful.
00:11:33 ►
The other one that I liked from him that stuck with me when he talked about mixing them,
00:11:39 ►
one of his answers was the effect is like having the moon and the sun in the same sky.
00:11:44 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:11:44 ►
That’s another one of my favorites. Yeah. Lovely. I would say the moon and the sun in the same sky. Oh, yeah. That’s another one of my favorites.
00:11:46 ►
Yeah.
00:11:46 ►
Lovely.
00:11:47 ►
I would say the cannabis is the moon in that sense.
00:11:50 ►
And the ayahuasca is the sun.
00:11:52 ►
It kind of burns and it’s super powerful that way.
00:11:56 ►
Cannabis, just while we’re on that topic, actually,
00:11:58 ►
and Francisco in his chapter also talks a little bit about this,
00:12:03 ►
that when you do the cannabis oh
00:12:06 ►
and by the way mariano says it’s really important that when you do the cannabis you know later on in
00:12:13 ►
the ayahuasca ceremony like that it’s got to be done in both external and internal silence
00:12:19 ►
um to let it do its thing you can’t be in your head and you can’t have a bunch of things going
00:12:25 ►
on no songs no chat nothing um just sitting in silence with it and then when it has that effect
00:12:31 ►
of taking off from the top of the mountain but francisco also talks about how it has some other
00:12:37 ►
interesting effects where it can sometimes actually not diminish but actually sort of smooth out the sort of sharper or almost harsher ayahuasca
00:12:48 ►
energy if you do it later in the ceremony like that and also they use it sometimes for reflection
00:12:56 ►
at the end that tends to stimulate the verbal centers when they’re kind of doing a sharing session afterwards sometimes.
00:13:07 ►
So it can sort of soothe as well as strengthen the effects of other medicines.
00:13:12 ►
And as long as I’m talking about that, I just want to end up by saying that anyone who’s listening to this,
00:13:17 ►
who’s considering doing something like that, please be very careful.
00:13:21 ►
We’re playing with powerful energies here, okay?
00:13:29 ►
That’s good advice. And there’s a lot of harm reduction to be done about cannabis, even in a moderate spiritual use. Absolutely.
00:13:36 ►
And what are the cautions and obstacles and sidetracks and objectives that
00:13:43 ►
were most important to you to lay out in this?
00:13:46 ►
I think you meant objections, didn’t you?
00:13:48 ►
Yes, I did.
00:13:49 ►
Yeah. Yes, that’s pretty much the title of a chapter I threw in near the end.
00:13:55 ►
Let’s see how much of it I can remember.
00:13:58 ►
Well, okay, so there’s a few things, I guess. Thank you for asking.
00:14:02 ►
So one of them is this frequency of use issue and I can’t do it full justice in a short time because it’s not a simple one way
00:14:11 ►
or the other I know a bunch of people and I’m sure you do as well who
00:14:16 ►
skillfully use cannabis daily and that actually before even going there medical
00:14:23 ►
use is another thing lots of people need it for medical purposes
00:14:26 ►
on a daily basis. And, you know, no one’s going to question that. Certainly not me.
00:14:33 ►
And then I know people, mature, focused, disciplined, you know, very spiritually awake
00:14:40 ►
people, more or less, who use cannabis daily and use it effectively but I think we both know
00:14:47 ►
that a lot of people also use it ineffectively and it’s that’s addressed here and there in the
00:14:54 ►
book as well Steve Dyer in the chapter conversation with two medicine shamans he said most people he
00:15:01 ►
doesn’t think most people actually know how to use cannabis properly, effectively.
00:15:06 ►
That it can actually, because this is one of my kind of main themes, it’s an amplifier.
00:15:11 ►
So it can amplify whatever’s going on.
00:15:13 ►
So, you know, it really matters that you have intention, some skills, some discipline, some focus,
00:15:20 ►
and presumably some experience with how to channel that energy and how to use it skillfully rather than it using you so part of the thing with frequency of use
00:15:30 ►
is there’s a couple things there I suppose one is that for some of the
00:15:35 ►
deeper spiritual work I think most people understand their most cannabis
00:15:41 ►
users understand that if you’re doing it all the time, it becomes, there’s a tolerance effect, and it’s also a familiarity effect,
00:15:48 ►
but also it just sort of softens the sharper edges of some of the deeper spaces
00:15:55 ►
you can relax and open up into if you’re doing it less frequently.
00:16:00 ►
Mariano, again, says five to seven days in between is good.
00:16:05 ►
He only does it on, like I guess he works a lot
00:16:08 ►
during the weekend with clients,
00:16:10 ►
or the week I mean, with clients and so on.
00:16:12 ►
And on the weekend he says he’ll go out in the woods
00:16:15 ►
and do some special meditations.
00:16:17 ►
But he says if I do it, these transcendental realms
00:16:20 ►
that I can access, if I do this every day, gone completely.
00:16:24 ►
So there’s that part of it.
00:16:26 ►
And again, it’s not necessarily not spiritual to use sort of lightish doses two or three times in
00:16:32 ►
the day and have yourself into a zone that works for you. And I know people like that. So that’s,
00:16:38 ►
in a sense, spiritual. But for kind of deeper exploration in the way that you might, you know, link it in with other entheogens, for example, I think it’s probably important to do it less frequently.
00:16:53 ►
I actually just had a really interesting confirmation of that in my own personal experience.
00:16:59 ►
I was away for two weeks recently down in Florida and I couldn’t find any place to find any cannabis.
00:17:05 ►
So I actually went for close to three weeks without having any at all. And my normal pattern
00:17:11 ►
is maybe twice a week. And at least one of those, I just sort of sit down in silence,
00:17:17 ►
do some meditating, maybe jot down some ideas, things like that. And so I went for almost three weeks and then I had two puffs and some, you know, typically
00:17:26 ►
strong commercial cannabis from our area. And it was psychedelic, you know, with my eyes closed and
00:17:35 ►
in the darkened room, I was seeing moving patterns that reminded me of ayahuasca visions.
00:17:42 ►
I attribute that to the fact that I took you know three
00:17:45 ►
weeks off so for deeper work there’s that and then there’s this other issue
00:17:49 ►
okay so there’s the sharpness versus dullness continuum thing going on there
00:17:54 ►
and then there’s this other issue which we most of us are very familiar with as
00:17:58 ►
well which is it’s such a when you when it when it works well for you it’s such
00:18:03 ►
a beautiful plant it’s such a an exquisite space that you can enter into it that, you know, it’s very normal to want to repeat something that is really enjoyable, obviously, right?
00:18:15 ►
Like anything, you know, whatever it is, sex, chocolate, you know, whatever.
00:18:22 ►
But the problem is, again, the more you do it in a sense
00:18:26 ►
there’s a diminishing returns thing so that’s one part of that and the other
00:18:30 ►
part is that you can become very dependent on it I don’t really like to
00:18:36 ►
use the word addiction although I’m not completely against it but I would say
00:18:40 ►
it’s a psychological addiction I think it’s pretty much agree that it’s not a
00:18:46 ►
it’s not an intense physiological addiction issue but the psychological addiction or dependence can
00:18:54 ►
be intense for a lot of people um and uh and you know we get thinking we can’t do anything without
00:18:59 ►
it or whatever you know um but there’s again it’s sort of like she’s you know if you think of her
00:19:05 ►
as a as as your guru or as your as your you know guide your pachamama mother mary whatever you want
00:19:12 ►
to language you want to put it i like to think of her as a she as kathleen harrison does uh she’s
00:19:17 ►
kind of like she starts slapping you around a little if you if you’re if you’re you know too
00:19:21 ►
sloppy and too demanding uh too seduced by your desire, continual desire for her.
00:19:27 ►
Does that make sense to you?
00:19:29 ►
Absolutely.
00:19:30 ►
Yeah, it’s a really great image, in fact.
00:19:34 ►
And it speaks to something that the activists and the stoners can be really arrogant about, which is these negative downsides around cannabis. Yes, it’s non-toxic, you can’t
00:19:46 ►
overdose on it, but the science is clear that there is a slight physical addiction to this,
00:19:51 ►
and there can be a really strong mental addiction. I think the best example is the first couple
00:19:56 ►
chapters of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It’s a person completely addicted to cannabis,
00:20:01 ►
and just like you can get addicted to sex or stealing or any of this other behavioral stuff to the point that it is incredibly detrimental to your life,
00:20:09 ►
that can absolutely happen with weed. And the problem is people are always like, well,
00:20:13 ►
it’s just weed. And they stop and think about that this is a really psychoactive plant that can
00:20:20 ►
really get ingrained into your life without with it sneaking up on you because it’s just weed.
00:20:27 ►
Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, if you’re using it all the time, and especially if you’re
00:20:31 ►
not really sort of as Terrence McKenna used to say about the other entheogens, sitting down,
00:20:37 ►
shutting up and paying attention. You know, I, you know, like, it’s really, it’s really
00:20:42 ►
obvious to me, if I’m doing something, like if I’m reading something or even if I’m playing music or if I stop doing that and just sit in silence, the power of the plant is much stronger.
00:21:02 ►
Like you notice it way more.
00:21:04 ►
And I think this is really important for spiritual
00:21:06 ►
work with cannabis actually is you know I talk about it a few times and I think other people in
00:21:11 ►
the in the book also do is that you know at least for part of the time you spend with her if you’re
00:21:18 ►
wanting to use cannabis as a spiritual ally you have to to sit down, shut up and pay attention. You have to get
00:21:25 ►
out of your own head and allow yourself to surrender to absolutely total, full attention to
00:21:34 ►
her. You know, I sometimes think of the metaphor of making love. You know, if you’re thinking about
00:21:40 ►
what you’re going to do later or just in your head in any way while you’re making love with someone, you’re not fully there for them.
00:21:47 ►
You’re not fully responsive with them.
00:21:50 ►
And the medicine is like that in a sense, too.
00:21:54 ►
Excuse me.
00:21:55 ►
It’s very clear and it’s very powerful when you are paying full attention to it.
00:22:01 ►
And you might not even realize how powerful your medicine, your cannabis medicine can be if you have never really done that. It’s easy to spill that energy
00:22:10 ►
off with cannabis. That’s one thing that’s really different about cannabis than the other so-called
00:22:16 ►
major entheogens is you take a sizable dose of ayahuasca, except in a few situations where it
00:22:22 ►
sometimes doesn’t actually do anything. Basically, you’re in you know they grabbed you by the scruff of the
00:22:29 ►
neck and thrust you into the vehicle and you’re
00:22:31 ►
gone uh cannabis you can unless it’s super super
00:22:35 ►
strong dosage uh you can generally um just slough off
00:22:39 ►
that energy and not even really realize what a powerful beautiful
00:22:43 ►
clear medicine this is.
00:22:46 ►
So sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention is essential.
00:22:50 ►
That’s great advice.
00:22:52 ►
It actually reminds me of a great old character I met, and he had started a cannabis church,
00:22:56 ►
and the idea was only two puffs and only on Sunday morning at 5 o’clock.
00:23:01 ►
And they had done this for 1,000 Sundays.
00:23:04 ►
Sorry.
00:23:06 ►
Yeah, 1,000 Sundays. Who is this for 1000 Sundays. Sorry. Yeah. 1000 Sundays.
00:23:13 ►
Who’s this? Or can you say? I shouldn’t say, but that was his idea. And actually someone at the same spot told me that their practice was smoking a little bit of a joint and then going for a long
00:23:18 ►
walk. And that was the only way they’d allow themselves to do it. So they could really sit
00:23:22 ►
with that energy and grok it,
00:23:25 ►
like what you’re talking about. Well, she really resonates with nature.
00:23:29 ►
No, the reason I asked you that might be is because I’ve got a chapter in a book that’s
00:23:33 ►
supposedly coming out around now by a guy named Bernard von Nothaus. He’s the editor,
00:23:41 ►
and he’s collected a bunch of people. And his book is called One Toke to God.
00:23:46 ►
And he told me the story of how he hadn’t used cannabis for a number of years, but somebody had
00:23:51 ►
given him a joint. And normally he was busy on the weekends with family, but they’d all gone away
00:23:57 ►
that weekend. So he laid down on his bed on a Sunday morning and had one toke. And he claims
00:24:03 ►
that he had this really powerful devotional spiritual experience.
00:24:08 ►
And so he started doing that every Sunday for years after that, just one toke on his own in the morning, which is actually a good point.
00:24:17 ►
I think I address it briefly in the book.
00:24:27 ►
the book uh it uh it also can make a big difference if you’re well rested um when you when you when you do use cannabis for spiritual purposes because it has this sort of even though it can be extremely
00:24:32 ►
powerful there’s a kind of a refined sharpness about it that if you’re tired you can more go
00:24:38 ►
into more toward the tired sort of feeling or it can make you dozy or sleepy or whatever you need good energy for working with
00:24:45 ►
cannabis i think that that’s really good practical advice it’s going to bring out what’s going on
00:24:52 ►
there yeah and you know what can i just say one more thing about the uh the caution aspect of it
00:24:59 ►
because kathleen harrison has about a page and a half in her chapter, Who Is She?, where she really addresses
00:25:06 ►
that in a really clear way. And I was very impressed with that. And she talks about how,
00:25:11 ►
especially young men that she knows, have a tendency to get really seduced into what this
00:25:17 ►
kind of comfort zone of using cannabis all the time. And she said, they become wedded to it.
00:25:23 ►
And I think the word wedded is an important word to use in that regard, because she says that even more than they become wedded to their cannabis practice.
00:25:34 ►
Practice isn’t really it’s too uplifted a word for that. But you know what I mean? Their cannabis use patterns more than to their relationships to the external world.
00:25:46 ►
And as I think she put it, something like they don’t want to come out of this sort of
00:25:51 ►
seeming safety zone that they’ve created for themselves into what she called the daylight
00:25:55 ►
world of relationship and responsibility.
00:26:00 ►
So yes, absolutely, cannabis can be misused.
00:26:03 ►
Actually, one more thought on that.
00:26:05 ►
One of the people I wanted to try to get to write for the book, and he almost did, and then he sort of disappeared on me, is a fellow named Baba Rampuri, who has a book with inner traditions, actually, called The Autobiography of a Sadhu.
00:26:19 ►
Not to be confused with Paramahansa Yogananda’s book, Autobiography of a Yogi.
00:26:24 ►
with Paramahansa Yogananda’s book, Autobiography of a Yogi.
00:26:32 ►
Anyway, he has long been involved with a group of the Nagabhabhas,
00:26:34 ►
the naked sadhus in India that use ganja.
00:26:38 ►
And I wrote him, and he’s originally from the States,
00:26:40 ►
but he’s been in India for like 40 years now,
00:26:42 ►
and he’s the guru of this group now.
00:26:45 ►
And I wrote him, asked him if he would contribute to the book. And his first reply was, no, because you people in the West don’t know how to use this
00:26:52 ►
plan. And I wrote him back and I said, well, that’s exactly why I’m wanting to do this book,
00:26:58 ►
because I want people like you to help straighten us out because it’s not going away anytime soon.
00:27:03 ►
So he wrote back and he said, okay,
00:27:09 ►
as long as I can have the time for it. But then somehow I wrote him again and he never replied.
00:27:13 ►
And I don’t know what happened to him, but just, I wanted to say that because here’s this fellow who’s been working with a group for 40 years that uses cannabis as part of their practice.
00:27:18 ►
And he didn’t think Westerners even deserve to, you know, to be talking about it really,
00:27:25 ►
Westerners even deserve to be talking about it really because they just didn’t get it.
00:27:29 ►
Yeah, it’s so true.
00:27:39 ►
And it speaks to one of the things I think is the most helpful from your book that I really appreciated was you laying out ways of creating your own rituals here in the West. Because for a lot of us, we don’t even have the idea of how we would go about making a personal church to this plant.
00:27:47 ►
And then you give us these open source adaptable templates that we can use for creating a ritual.
00:27:53 ►
And I think it’s really a helpful thing.
00:27:56 ►
How did you come up with these?
00:27:58 ►
By practice, actually.
00:28:01 ►
And I just want to, as a sort of of disclaimer say right off the bat that I
00:28:05 ►
like the term for cannabis the people’s plant actually I kind of twisted a term
00:28:11 ►
that Jeremy wolf had which was the people’s psychedelic so I just ended up
00:28:17 ►
start you know calling it the people’s plant and what I mean by that is it’s a
00:28:23 ►
very flexible gracious kind. And if you can
00:28:26 ►
make use of it spiritually with some skills, some experience, some intention, etc.,
00:28:32 ►
there’s lots of different ways that you can create ceremonies. I would say much more flexible than
00:28:37 ►
other entheogens. I’ve worked with a number of these other entheogens extensively, psychedelics
00:28:42 ►
again for anyone who doesn’t know the word entheogens
00:28:45 ►
like ayahuasca psilocybin mushrooms peyote plants like that in formal ways like i for 12 years was
00:28:52 ►
involved with the native american church using peyote ceremony doing peyote ceremonies and
00:28:58 ►
they create an amazing container for this kind of work a very powerful effective container for this kind of work very powerful effective container for this
00:29:05 ►
kind of work as do a number of the ayahuasca people there’s you know
00:29:09 ►
pathways so cannabis is very flexible that way and we’re also at this time
00:29:13 ►
where we don’t have examples around us very much so I wanted to add a little
00:29:18 ►
bit in there and let people know that you know if you have experience with
00:29:22 ►
other kinds of ritual formats structures bring those in and start experimenting.
00:29:28 ►
That’s one of the beauties of cannabis is it’s very flexible that way.
00:29:32 ►
You’re not going to create harm, particularly by experimenting with different ways to do ceremonies alone or in a group environment.
00:29:41 ►
The one caution in that regard is, you know, watch out for the dosage.
00:29:45 ►
environment. The one caution in that regard is, you know, watch out for the dosage. I talk about that a little bit in the book, especially with sensitive people or inexperienced people, and even
00:29:49 ►
more especially with oral and orally ingested cannabis, because anyone who’s experienced it
00:29:56 ►
knows that can get very weird and disconcerting, and you can even end up in the hospital freaked
00:30:01 ►
out, as they do. My family doctor does not like cannabis
00:30:07 ►
because his only contact with it is people who come to him
00:30:11 ►
claiming they’ve had an overdose of cannabis.
00:30:15 ►
So that comes back to how do you use it effectively?
00:30:20 ►
So I’d say dosage is important for starters.
00:30:23 ►
Start small, especially if you’re inexperienced
00:30:25 ►
again all bets are off if you’ve already been using it daily because it’s going to diminish
00:30:31 ►
the effect overall and dosage is less of an issue or you might have to do more
00:30:35 ►
one more reason to give a break in between times if you’re trying to use it spiritually
00:30:40 ►
strains can make a difference and that’s a large, you know, not definitively nailed down question either, but
00:30:50 ►
for people who are not really thinking about it, the sativa end of the continuum tends to be more energizing,
00:30:57 ►
uplifting, potentially more thought-provoking, etc.
00:31:01 ►
And the indica end of the continuum tends to be more body oriented body stone often drowsy
00:31:08 ►
inducing couch lock doctors prescribe indica oftentimes for sleep as a sleep aid etc so people
00:31:17 ►
have to experiment with that too a number of us lean or prefer strains that lean a little bit
00:31:22 ►
toward the sativa and because of the sort of sharper upper energy to that. But the trade-off there is that it can be a little more challenging
00:31:30 ►
to get out of your head with those strains. But basically, people have to experiment for
00:31:35 ►
themselves on that. Find strains that work for themselves and maybe keep going with them.
00:31:41 ►
I would say the key to the whole thing overall, not trying to be too reductive about
00:31:47 ►
exactly what you do with this, but the key in my understanding, such as it is to open the door of
00:31:56 ►
cannabis’s strongest potential as a spiritual medicine or a spiritual ally is the ability to
00:32:02 ►
get out of your head, to create a situation where you’re not going to get to get out of your head to create a situation where
00:32:06 ►
you’re not going to get to be out of your head all the time I mean you know
00:32:09 ►
just sit down and meditate for half an hour how many of just just straight I
00:32:13 ►
mean you know like no no no cannabis sit down on a cushion meditate how much of
00:32:18 ►
that half an hour are you going to be just sitting in silence gently paying
00:32:23 ►
attention to your breath perhaps and how much of that time are you actually going to be in your head?
00:32:27 ►
Well, I think most of us are going to be in our heads for at least part of the time.
00:32:31 ►
And cannabis has this sort of extra thing that it does because it stimulates thought for a lot of people.
00:32:37 ►
So that becomes really interesting, really tricky because that can be both a positive and a sort of a negative
00:32:44 ►
in the sense that, of course, you can use cannabis for creative stimulation and so on. But those ideas,
00:32:51 ►
you know, that amplifying factor makes those ideas look pretty shiny oftentimes,
00:32:55 ►
and you can get really seduced into them and not realize that what you’re actually doing
00:33:00 ►
is you’re doing the same thing that the Buddhist and other traditions talk about as the
00:33:05 ►
obstacle to awakening. You’re filling your mind with thought, that the discursive thinking mind
00:33:12 ►
is considered to be the way that we build a cloudy veil around us between us and unconditioned
00:33:19 ►
reality. So it becomes tricky if you’re going, oh, this is the most interesting thought I’ve
00:33:24 ►
ever had. I must entertain this thought and go with it, et cetera, et cetera.
00:33:27 ►
Well, that can be really useful sometimes if you’re doing it in a directed way.
00:33:32 ►
But when you’re trying to find out what cannabis can do in terms of actually changing you,
00:33:37 ►
actually waking you up over a period of time, which is another issue we could talk about,
00:33:42 ►
but it’s not a quick fix.
00:33:44 ►
It’s not meant to be a quick fix. it’s not meant to be about the high in that
00:33:48 ►
moment necessarily either it’s gradually understanding that there’s a way to be
00:33:53 ►
in the world which is very connected to the earth to our bodies into the world
00:33:58 ►
around us and a lot less in our heads than most Westerners tend to be most
00:34:04 ►
indigenous people who will say oh my god you European people you’re in our heads than most Westerners tend to be most indigenous people who will say
00:34:06 ►
My god, you European people you’re in your heads way too much, you know
00:34:10 ►
so so being able to enter into some
00:34:14 ►
Some amount of degree of time
00:34:17 ►
That you spend with cannabis even if it’s just coming and going even if it’s just recognizing
00:34:23 ►
Ah there. I was just this is what you do in basic meditation practice anyway.
00:34:27 ►
You don’t judge the fact that you’re thinking or the content of your thinking.
00:34:32 ►
You just notice at some point, oh, yes, I’ve just been fantasizing about this woman I’d like to date
00:34:39 ►
or what I’m going to have to say to my boss tomorrow or what I did yesterday or whatever.
00:34:44 ►
And then when you recognize that, just gently kind of acknowledge that
00:34:48 ►
and come back to just being present in the space,
00:34:51 ►
perhaps using the breath as an anchor to come back,
00:34:54 ►
gently attending to the breath because it’s just a natural thing
00:34:59 ►
that you don’t have to control, obviously, right?
00:35:01 ►
So use that as an anchor to come back.
00:35:03 ►
But at least work with that idea so
00:35:06 ►
that you don’t have to my experience anyways you don’t have to be spending all it you know even
00:35:11 ►
if the thoughts are coming fairly often and you’re having to do that a lot the even short amounts of
00:35:18 ►
time that you can spend in some kind of silence like silence, where the thoughts are just quiet, gone, can, because of
00:35:27 ►
the amplifying energy of cannabis, the amplifying potential can really open up some beautiful,
00:35:32 ►
deeper spaces, open up the heart, can enter you into a state of peace, ideally, ultimately,
00:35:38 ►
it can do that. And in fact, you know, in stronger doses, you know, almost all bets are off.
00:35:45 ►
You know, Terence McKenna himself said in the right kind of circumstances,
00:35:49 ►
it’s almost right up there with the major entheogens.
00:35:52 ►
But again, that’s really important to pay attention to because, you know,
00:35:56 ►
I think what I said in the book at one point is the one way of thinking about the optimal dosage
00:36:01 ►
is how much you can and want to handle in any given session. But the can part
00:36:07 ►
is really important there because if you’re having physical symptoms, dizziness, nausea,
00:36:13 ►
anything like that, or getting scared or paranoid or any kind of physical or emotional and mental
00:36:20 ►
discomfort, then you’ve either done too much or you need to learn how
00:36:25 ►
to work with that energy. And that’s actually a key as well. I would say, as I think I said in
00:36:31 ►
the book, just because you’re having some disconcerting experiences doesn’t necessarily
00:36:38 ►
mean you’ve done too much. It just means that you’re not effectively working with the amplified
00:36:43 ►
energy in that moment.
00:36:47 ►
But there are ways you can learn to do that.
00:36:56 ►
So, again, I would suggest with people that are trying to explore these territories is to start with smaller dosages, see if you can sit with it.
00:37:03 ►
And then if you want to try to keep going deeper, just gradually up the dosage, you know, and see where that goes.
00:37:08 ►
If you can stay present, calm, you can go into some deep spaces.
00:37:10 ►
Just don’t try to drive an airplane.
00:37:16 ►
Yeah, that’s great.
00:37:20 ►
It must be really interesting to watch these Westerners change their perspective and put cannabis in this new category or try to figure out how for themselves to put it
00:37:25 ►
into this spiritual spot with we always reserve for mushrooms and lsd and ayahuasca and such
00:37:30 ►
yeah well the thing is you know really what it really comes down to is that you know i was
00:37:36 ►
involved with tibetan buddhism for quite a while so i like buddhist language and basically
00:37:40 ►
what buddhist teachings say is that your natural state of being, once all the confusion and all the obstacles are relaxed and let go of and seen through, etc., is what they call the awakened state.
00:37:53 ►
And you can’t really explain it too well and you can’t really say what it is until you’ve at least had a glimpse of it.
00:38:00 ►
But that’s what this work is all about, whether it’s cannabis or any of these other
00:38:05 ►
antigens.
00:38:06 ►
They’re allies and they’re tools when they’re used effectively, but they’re not
00:38:12 ►
the moon.
00:38:13 ►
They’re fingers pointing at the moon, as it were.
00:38:17 ►
You know what I’m saying?
00:38:19 ►
So what the culture really needs to understand is that we are all Buddha already, right? That we’re already,
00:38:26 ►
that we are, we all have this unforced, natural, unconditioned or unconditional
00:38:32 ►
awakened quality, which is not a position of any kind. It’s not a dogma. It’s not a philosophical
00:38:40 ►
stance. It’s a reality that many people in the course of human history
00:38:45 ►
have understood in their own experience. But most people, almost all of us, either have never
00:38:54 ►
experienced it or in the glimpses of moments that we have, haven’t recognized what it is.
00:39:00 ►
For example, I think a lot of people have probably had, Japanese call it Satori, like a sudden enlightenment experience.
00:39:09 ►
Japanese Zen people, I mean.
00:39:13 ►
I think a lot of people have probably had a Satori experience in lovemaking where, you know, it’s been so powerful with your partner and the climax is so powerful that for at least a brief period of time you’re in this kind of altered state, you know.
00:39:46 ►
recognize that there’s no time and that there’s a potential of being in a place of total peace that is unarguable, which is also extremely heart connected, then, you know,
00:39:56 ►
you haven’t quite understood what we’re capable of. And I think that’s what we need to understand
00:40:00 ►
in this culture. And that’s actually what will turn this trajectory
00:40:05 ►
of where we’re, where we are and where we’re going around as well.
00:40:11 ►
That’s beautiful. And it, and it makes me want to ask you with your Buddhist background,
00:40:17 ►
I know Chris Bennett, who wrote an essay on the history in your book and has a great big book
00:40:22 ►
on cannabis, cannabis and the Soma Solution.
00:40:26 ►
He makes some ideas that perhaps the Buddha himself was exposed to ganja as a prince of
00:40:31 ►
Sakyamuni. Do you have any opinion on that one way or the other? Well, I don’t think my opinion
00:40:36 ►
would matter because it’s not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of whether it happened or not.
00:40:41 ►
But I could say something about it. First of all, yeah yeah there’s a story you know you know who knows
00:40:45 ►
I mean we’re we can’t even get straight news out of the way that White House from yesterday are we
00:40:50 ►
able to get accurate news from 2,500 years ago in India I’m not quite sure about that but the
00:40:59 ►
story supposedly is that the Buddha existed on one hemp seed a day for six years.
00:41:05 ►
Well, that could have been sort of apocryphal,
00:41:07 ►
or maybe he was actually eating more hemp,
00:41:10 ►
and maybe that was the source of some of the visions
00:41:12 ►
that he supposedly experienced during that time.
00:41:16 ►
So there’s no way of proving that.
00:41:18 ►
There’s no way of knowing,
00:41:19 ►
and I’m not on board with a lot of wild speculation
00:41:24 ►
about those sort of things anyway, sort of beside the point, I think.
00:41:28 ►
However, there is maybe one aspect of this which is important because of the misunderstanding, repression, suppression, denigration, et cetera, of entheogenic medicines,
00:41:39 ►
is that they have been here for a long time, and most cultures have found them because there are plants growing around them.
00:41:47 ►
Before we had giant grocery stores where you could go down two blocks and get your food,
00:41:55 ►
pretty much every community on the planet had to know all the plants in their neighborhood,
00:41:59 ►
and soon enough they were going to find out whether it was going to kill them,
00:42:03 ►
whether it was going to be medicine, whether it was going to be medicine, whether it was going to be food, whether they could use it to build their houses or whether they could use it to see God, you know.
00:42:11 ►
So it seems to me and then we didn’t have that sort of like, you know, the acceptance of psychedelics, so to speak, has come and gone in different cultures at different times. But I’m pretty sure in India 2,500 years ago,
00:42:26 ►
we probably didn’t have the same kind of update, you know,
00:42:31 ►
restrictions in that regard.
00:42:33 ►
And so whatever plants were around, I would think they used them.
00:42:37 ►
I think it seems obvious.
00:42:39 ►
What happens with, you know, the recording of history,
00:42:42 ►
as most of us know, is that’s people writing
00:42:46 ►
history. And a lot of times they’re revising, you know, things and deleting things as they go.
00:42:52 ►
Oh, I don’t want that in there. You know what? People using medicines to achieve enlightenment?
00:42:57 ►
No, no, no, no. It has to go through the church hierarchy. So we have no idea what people in the
00:43:03 ►
past have done with psychedel with, uh, psychedelic
00:43:05 ►
or entheogenic medicines.
00:43:07 ►
So I, I think in terms of your question that there’s a very good chance that the Buddha
00:43:12 ►
may have been using, um, cannabis and any, uh, a number of other, uh, you know, there
00:43:19 ►
may have been mushrooms around that area.
00:43:22 ►
Um, you know, who knows?
00:43:24 ►
I know, who knows? I just want to get the kinks
00:43:27 ►
worked out of the time travel machine to find out. Yeah, it’d be one of the first questions.
00:43:32 ►
You know, there’s a guy named Giorgio Samarini. He’s a scholar from Spain. He traveled through
00:43:39 ►
North Africa and found the ruins of Byzantine, is it Byzantine or Byzantine era churches,
00:43:49 ►
which is we’re talking maybe two, three hundred years into the Christian era.
00:43:54 ►
And he had photographs at a conference that I went to of these things.
00:43:58 ►
And he wasn’t one of these sort of like rabid people trying to say, yes, absolutely.
00:44:02 ►
It’s like this. He was just saying, look at these and decide for yourself.
00:44:06 ►
And the mosaics on the church walls that were still standing,
00:44:10 ►
they had the world, most of them or many of them had the world tree
00:44:13 ►
created out of mosaic tiles, different colors.
00:44:16 ►
And they had a very obvious mushroom on the end of the branches of these trees.
00:44:24 ►
So, you know, to me, that’s just one
00:44:26 ►
of, you know, many examples. Are you familiar with Eleusis, the ceremony at Eleusis?
00:44:33 ►
Yes.
00:44:34 ►
Yeah. A lot of people aren’t. And just super briefly, I believe it went on annually for over
00:44:40 ►
a thousand years. And as I understand it it anyway from the little I’ve read about it
00:44:46 ►
pretty much all the influence leaders of Athens the intellectuals the philosophers the Plato’s
00:44:53 ►
the Socrates the Aristotle’s and all these people all went there for an initiation and there’s not
00:45:01 ►
much doubt I don’t think that they don’t know what it was exactly, but there was a powerful sacramental spiritual medicine involved in this.
00:45:12 ►
So here’s a thousand years, over a thousand years of an annual ritual
00:45:17 ►
in what was arguably the sort of leading cultural center,
00:45:21 ►
at least of the Western world at the time,
00:45:24 ►
and created the foundations
00:45:26 ►
for Western philosophy. So from that point of view, you could say, I don’t want to go too far
00:45:31 ►
in this direction, but you could say that our current sort of philosophical understandings
00:45:39 ►
are sourced in the West, the Western versions of them are sourced from ancient Athens,
00:45:48 ►
and those were influenced by psychedelic experience.
00:45:53 ►
That’s just one of many, many, many examples.
00:45:57 ►
It’s true.
00:45:59 ►
And we just want to ignore that all of these thought leaders like Plato,
00:46:03 ►
it was understood you went and had one good trip at least in your life.
00:46:06 ►
Yeah.
00:46:08 ►
Yes, exactly.
00:46:10 ►
Yeah.
00:46:10 ►
And we’ll never know exactly what they were drinking there,
00:46:13 ►
just like Soma.
00:46:15 ►
It’s impossible to truly know.
00:46:17 ►
But one of the big guesses that seems to make sense
00:46:19 ►
is that it was some version of the ergot fungus that we got LSD from
00:46:24 ►
and that was also the source of St. Vidius’s dancing, I think was the term,
00:46:29 ►
when entire French towns would go nuts for a couple days throughout the Middle Ages.
00:46:32 ►
It’s because they were eating this fungus that actually had some version of LSD in it,
00:46:37 ►
but they were getting the bad version.
00:46:39 ►
And somehow the Greeks figured out a way to keep a brew going of some kind
00:46:43 ►
that would allow them to talk to the gods
00:46:46 ►
uh-huh indeed yeah no i think i think here’s here’s what i think you know of all this discussion
00:46:53 ►
we’re having right about this uh right now about this is the most important thing to sort of put
00:46:58 ►
it in a nutshell um humanity communities all over the planet for as long as they’ve been such,
00:47:09 ►
have found plants in their neighborhood that could take us out of the quotidian,
00:47:16 ►
out of the status quo conventional state of mind, and open us up to our connection with the spirit.
00:47:22 ►
There’s no doubt about that in my mind.
00:47:22 ►
and open us up to our connection with the spirit.
00:47:24 ►
There’s no doubt about that in my mind.
00:47:30 ►
And so cannabis, you know, since this is what we’re ostensibly talking about today,
00:47:35 ►
cannabis has a role to play in this for the time to come. And that’s what the book’s for, is to help, you know, provide some, you know,
00:47:41 ►
offer some suggestions, again, open source, flexible, you know, kind of
00:47:46 ►
idea that as long as you take an attitude of respect and you, you know, understand what we’re
00:47:53 ►
capable of and work toward it sincerely without taking advantage of people, you know, etc.,
00:48:01 ►
hopefully without overly commoditizing this and declaring yourself some great guru and charging a fortune to come to your ceremonies.
00:48:08 ►
It’s the people’s plant.
00:48:10 ►
I’d like to see it be more in an indigenous way of the sharing economy
00:48:14 ►
than some sort of capitalist model of how we proceed with this.
00:48:18 ►
But it has immense potential.
00:48:20 ►
And also, cannabis, although, again, it’s potentially a lot milder than some of the other entheogens, when you really know how to work with it and you’re really prepared to go deep with it, it can be pretty much as powerful as some of these other substances.
00:48:43 ►
as powerful as some of these other substances.
00:48:47 ►
There’s a book called Orgies of the Hemp Eaters,
00:48:48 ►
which is a wonderful book, by the way,
00:48:53 ►
by Zog and Bey, Hakeem Bey,
00:48:56 ►
Abel Zog and Hakeem Bey.
00:48:57 ►
They did loads of great stories.
00:49:00 ►
But there’s a chapter in there by Michael Aldrich about the Maha Nirvana Tantra practice
00:49:03 ►
of, I think, 1100s or 11th century, maybe, India.
00:49:09 ►
And to me, this is an example of the kind of aspiration we could have for cannabis spiritual use.
00:49:18 ►
They took it really seriously in a way that people in our culture are generally not prepared to do.
00:49:23 ►
But I would love to see us move more toward this kind of attitude.
00:49:29 ►
They would take a yogi and a yogini, male and a female,
00:49:33 ►
presumably experienced with meditation and, you know,
00:49:38 ►
knowing how to work with their minds so they’re able to open.
00:49:42 ►
They’re not going to get freaked out or, you know,
00:49:43 ►
as their egos are threatened or whatever and then they would put them through a preparatory period perhaps i don’t
00:49:51 ►
remember all the details so you know go read the article if you want to be exact about this but
00:49:56 ►
vaguely what i remember is you know maybe a couple of weeks or even longer where they’re
00:50:01 ►
fasting meditating more than they would normally
00:50:05 ►
so that their body systems and mind systems are prepared for this particular encounter,
00:50:10 ►
which takes place in the temple.
00:50:13 ►
And the monks are all around supporting this and everything.
00:50:17 ►
And then the couple, the yogi and the yogini, are brought together physically.
00:50:22 ►
And, you know, they unite physically you know like penis and
00:50:27 ►
vagina kind of unite but it’s not for the purposes of you know having a great role in the hay
00:50:33 ►
it’s to for a direct experience of divine of the divine and then they drink something so again
00:50:41 ►
that you know oral ingested cannabis can be a lot more powerful. So their
00:50:46 ►
system, their whole system mentally, physically is extremely well prepared for this. They’ve got
00:50:51 ►
support and guidance around them. They come together and they surrender. They dissolve into
00:50:58 ►
the godhood, as it were. That’s an actual practice, right? And there’s no reason why we can’t be doing those kind of things now.
00:51:06 ►
Oh, heavens.
00:51:07 ►
Wouldn’t that be great?
00:51:09 ►
Yeah.
00:51:11 ►
And it also – I like how you often compare this to the act of sex as well.
00:51:17 ►
And it reminds me of something Terrence said about in much of Tantra, it was just like you said.
00:51:23 ►
It’s not about even knowing the person that
00:51:26 ►
you’re doing this with. It’s not about that. It’s about working with that person to achieve
00:51:32 ►
a spiritual godhood type state. Absolutely, yeah. It’s something easy to forget. Oh, of course, yeah.
00:51:39 ►
Wow. Yeah, to see those rituals spread in this Western world would be incredible. I’m glad to see you’re out there trying to plant the seeds.
00:51:48 ►
Yeah, thank you.
00:51:50 ►
And the last thing I wanted to ask you about, one of your last essays, was about the use of cannabis and creativity, which is a great one.
00:51:59 ►
You have so many great quotes in there by different creative people as well.
00:52:02 ►
in there by different creative people as well.
00:52:08 ►
But speaking that modern idea that art can be somebody’s spiritual experience and their church as well.
00:52:10 ►
And to remember to use cannabis like this.
00:52:12 ►
You said something, the Beatles said something like, create with it, don’t play with it.
00:52:16 ►
Well, that was a direct quote from Ringo Starr.
00:52:18 ►
He said that if we, I think he wasn’t just talking about cannabis, I don’t think, but
00:52:22 ►
I think he was including cannabis in it. He says, yeah, we found out really early on that if we tried to perform, you know, derelict was his word in any way, it was shitty music.
00:52:34 ►
So we would have the experiences and bring that understanding into the music and the creation and performance of the music later.
00:52:41 ►
Which isn’t to say that you can’t perform music on cannabis or any or any
00:52:47 ►
other art form it just it’s hard to say really you know I I quoted a few
00:52:56 ►
guidelines by a fellow who was going by the handle herb garden in there about he
00:53:02 ►
says he’s a composer of classical music that’s been performed
00:53:07 ►
by major orchestras in the United States and he said things that work and don’t
00:53:11 ►
work with with cannabis and he listed off a few things I can’t remember them
00:53:16 ►
all but he said you know some of the more technical things no leave it alone
00:53:19 ►
sight reading doesn’t work too well usually improvisations of less than two minutes do
00:53:25 ►
and of course the idea stage so that’s really an interesting one actually saw I don’t know if you
00:53:33 ►
heard of this guy I just saw him on Twitter the other day and watched his video his name’s Matthew
00:53:37 ►
Santoro he’s one of these guys that does little YouTube videos And it was like the 10 myths about cannabis.
00:53:47 ►
And most of them were right on the mark.
00:53:50 ►
But one of them, what he said was a myth, was that cannabis is a creative aid.
00:53:57 ►
And he quoted some study that showed that it didn’t help or whatever, you know.
00:54:02 ►
And then, in fact, it could be the opposite.
00:54:04 ►
that it didn’t help or whatever, you know, and then in fact could be the opposite.
00:54:09 ►
And I actually wrote him about that because I took complete issue with that point.
00:54:18 ►
It’s a skill we’re talking about, and there can be some, you know, missteps and wrong directions.
00:54:27 ►
But again, I like to think of it in terms of this amplification function that uh you know basically uh i’m sort of a kind of like what would it call i’m kind of like an amateur artist i suppose you
00:54:33 ►
know i compose music and i’m really into photography um so i have some understanding of the of the
00:54:39 ►
space that you get into when you’re creating something. And essentially, the way I understand it anyway,
00:54:47 ►
I’m sure there are a lot of, you know,
00:54:48 ►
powerful artists out there that might have a better way of explaining it than
00:54:52 ►
this.
00:54:52 ►
But my way of talking about it is that you enter into the,
00:54:58 ►
you create something in your mind in a sense, and you enter into it.
00:55:02 ►
Like writers, novel writers often do this.
00:55:07 ►
They maybe start with a character and then they enter into that character and then the
00:55:11 ►
character they say this i’ve listened to a lot of interviews with writers and they often say this
00:55:15 ►
the character starts to take on a life of its own so you actually are you’ve actually created this
00:55:21 ►
kind of reality a virtual reality or inner reality somehow
00:55:25 ►
and then you step into it and that can apply to a variety of art forms and so
00:55:35 ►
what cannabis does is is is it energizes and it amplifies and this comes back
00:55:42 ►
again to where you channel it and your intention and how you’re using
00:55:45 ►
it so that you’re the one making skillful use of it rather than it becoming a dependent thing or
00:55:51 ►
whatever like we were talking about earlier and so you enter into this space and it can open up
00:55:58 ►
the space more sharply more deeply for people and so i think where this fellow Matthew Santoro was talking about the illusion
00:56:08 ►
is that I think what he really meant was that people think they’ve come upon the greatest idea
00:56:14 ►
that ever existed. And then when they check it the next day in the cold light of day, it seems flat and empty or nonsensical or silly or superficial or whatever right but my my view
00:56:30 ►
of that is this partly an issue of experience and it’s a partly an issue of not getting
00:56:35 ►
overexcited about every single idea that comes up and in fact examining them later but my
00:56:42 ►
experience is that i get loads of ideas that i find later on in the light of day to be valuable.
00:56:48 ►
Not all of them, and sometimes I do get overexcited about them in the moment,
00:56:53 ►
or at least I think they’re more important than they are in that moment.
00:56:56 ►
But it all comes out in the wash later.
00:56:59 ►
It opens things up.
00:57:00 ►
I know one excellent award-winning journalist and writer of
00:57:05 ►
two very successful books from major publishers who writes high all the time
00:57:11 ►
and I asked why I asked him how does that work for you and he says well it’s
00:57:15 ►
a basso dilator and my brain just fires better but you know this is we’re
00:57:20 ►
talking about a person we’re not talking about a person who’s getting blasted
00:57:22 ►
here we’re talking about a person who’s you not talking about a person who’s getting blasted here. We’re talking about a person who’s, you know, using it, you know, when he’s probably, when he’s writing,
00:57:28 ►
he’s writing every day, so he’s using it every day. So the effects are going to be
00:57:32 ►
somewhat muted anyway, and he’s used to it. So it’s a familiar space. And so it’s a lighter
00:57:38 ►
dosage as well. I quoted Neil Young in the book, who wrote many, perhaps most of his fantastic songs under the influence of cannabis.
00:57:50 ►
And in his own autobiography, he was talking about this one particularly strong strain he was using at one time.
00:57:59 ►
And he said, if you smoked a little, you wrote song if you smoked too much you were just toast
00:58:05 ►
so dosage yeah is important there but given that i think because of its amplification
00:58:12 ►
capability with some skills some experience some you know discipline cannabis can be extremely
00:58:21 ►
valuable for creating lateral thinking opening up new channels of ideas that you hadn’t considered before, etc., etc.
00:58:29 ►
I think that’s the – you were referring to some quotes at the beginning of my little chapter on cannabis and creativity.
00:58:34 ►
And one of them was by Terence McKenna who said something like, what I value about cannabis is the way that it brings up unexpected ideas.
00:58:45 ►
Yeah, and it actually reminds me, his talk on creativity,
00:58:49 ►
he said it was a very challenging thing about art
00:58:52 ►
and how you should approach it with dread,
00:58:54 ►
and your job is to go out there and get the biggest fish you can pull up from the ocean,
00:59:00 ►
not a worthless little guppy and not a giant whale that’s going to eat you up,
00:59:03 ►
but the biggest one you can handle.
00:59:05 ►
Yeah.
00:59:05 ►
And to use these kind of tools to help with that.
00:59:09 ►
Yeah.
00:59:09 ►
I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to tell us about the spiritual and creative possibilities here
00:59:16 ►
and to get us thinking in new directions with this stuff.
00:59:18 ►
It’s really, it’s wonderful work.
00:59:21 ►
And it’s a great collection of essays in all these different directions, including history
00:59:25 ►
and best practices, cannabis and spirituality, and explorer’s guide to an ancient plant spirit
00:59:30 ►
ally. Stephen Gray, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Well, thank you for your
00:59:35 ►
interest in this. I really enjoyed talking with you and I love talking about this. I think it’s
00:59:39 ►
great stuff. Awesome. Thanks so much. If you enjoyed this podcast,
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To say thanks, we have perks like blotter art,
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Thanks to Matt Payne, who engineered the sound, to Joey Whipp in California Smile,
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