Cannabis and its cocoon of self-deception — a serious warning

Cannabis and self-actualization / self-realization are incompatible

Cannabis is one of the relatively unsung blights upon Western civilization — and I say this as one who in the early 1970s smoked cannabis myself several times and appeared at the time actually to gain significantly from it. It's my task here to clarify the situation so that — I hope — many people will wake up to the seriousness of the situation with regard to the long-term effects of this pernicious mind-affecting substance ('drug' in popular parlance).

What can be positive about smoking cannabis?

Yes, we all know that most people feel sort-of comfortable and 'nice' when they've smoked a bit of marijuana, 'the weed', dope, 'grass', hashish, hash, 'shit', 'skunk', or however one chooses to name it. But feeling nice or indeed having fascinating visual effects isn't in itself necessarily a positive effect — i.e., in the sense of it being genuinely beneficial. Let's remember that wants and likes, on the one hand, and what's for one's deepest and ultimate good on the other hand, can be very, very different.

What we ALL need to be aiming for is not (directly) feeling better, 'good', or 'great' (for that leads one into no end of harmful blind alleys), but functioning better. At least in the long term, functioning better gives rise to the only healthy and genuinely better feelings from our life experience.

We didn't incarnate to become comfortable or feel nice, but to experience life as enlightened and self-actualized / self-realized beings — which implies that at least one of our fundamental life tasks is pursuing a comprehensive genuine self-actualization process. And that implies working on ourselves to clear old emotional issues, stresses and traumas — indeed all karmas — and all garbage connections and influences* so that our mental functioning progressively improves and we become more rational, constructive and vibrant in our behaviours and life experience.

The question is, then, can the use of cannabis actually take us forward in our life purpose of self-actualization, and any other life purpose of ours with regard to improving the lot of all people (as part of improving our own living environment)?

Superficially, at the time it appeared to me that for a very small proportion of people it could have a truly positive effect — if smoked only a small number of times in order to get some one-off experiences, and then not returned to ever again.

However, if I'd known at that time in the 1970s what I know now about long-term effects of cannabis, and what it really achieves within the 'mind', and the tremendous troubles that I was due to get from the garbage in 2003–2008 and again on a few occasions since, I'd very likely have foregone any use of that substance at all.

The particular supposed benefit was little to do with feeling 'nice' but was to do with having mental doorways temporarily opened so that one discovered all manner of new ways of experiencing things, and visionary ways of perceiving things.

In other words, in the right circumstances it could enable particular (rare) people to see through particular mental blocks of theirs to a certain extent, to get a glimpse (albeit quite distorted) of certain ways they could be functioning better in everyday life. However, one respect in which it was NOT materially revealing or pointing one towards better functioning was that of rationality and genuine clear-mindedness.

This would have been of use at all only for people with very active and creative minds (primarily people who were direct incarnations of fundamental consciousness, who I call no-soul people, which isn't at all a pejorative description), who could make some sort of subsequent use of what they've seen and experienced, and who don't become attached to the experiences and seek to keep returning to them. I was one such person.

When I had cannabis experiences (probably up to about 15 of them, from 1971 to1973), they opened a powerful window on my hidden creativity and ability to live in the present and enjoy to the full each experience as it arose. I 'knew intuitively' that these experiences were showing me capabilities and potentialities in my mind, and my task was to leave cannabis behind and work through various means to open up those potentialities so that my mind was every bit as expansive and creative as in the cannabis experiences — indeed much more so — and fully under my own control, without need for any further drugs or 'props'.

Even at that time I had some recognition of the reality that the benefits that I gained were nothing more than the benefits of insight that a really mentally aware and sharp person would gain from ANY adverse experience.

In other words, although my mental acuity was enabling me to benefit from that sequence of adverse and fundamentally harmful experiences I'd fallen into, I'd have done MUCH better to have had other, benign or indeed beneficial, means instead to point me to what I needed to know in order to further my own self-actualization.

But actually, beyond the superficial appearance, in retrospect I can see that the supposedly 'important' insights that I gained then were all distorted in some way or other, which would lead almost anyone into harmful directions and dead-ends. It took me many, many years to progressively un-distort those early 'insights' that I gained by such an unwholesome means.

Similarly, I benefited hugely through going through all my horrendous garbage shenanigans of 2003–2007, but the genuinely important insights that I gained from that monstrous catalogue of 'horrors' were simply what those situations forced me to build up from my own awareness and clear thinking for the sake of my own survival.

For my own survival I had to work things out and get them right, instead of following-up the twisted 'insights' that the garbage was loading onto me many thousands-a-penny! Does all that mean that I recommend getting embroiled with the garbage? — Not bloody likely, any more than eating your own turds or harming yourself with cannabis!

The problems cannabis brings…

One thing I noticed at the time, when I was occasionally smoking cannabis and 'enjoying' its various effects, was that its 'visionary' effects were ones of self-deception. Well, except that in my case it wasn't very much self-deception because I saw through the façade, but other people around me who were smoking the stuff did appear to be deceived, and thought they were experiencing something important and in some respect fundamental, profound or highly 'spiritual' in a really positive sense.

I recognised clearly at the time that the cannabis experiences had a sort of two-dimensional, 'cardboard-cut-out' quality about them, figuratively speaking, which made it obvious to me that, although those experiences did give me some extremely useful pointers to some aspects of improved mental and emotional functioning that I needed to uncover, those experiences themselves were NOT of any genuine improved functioning at all, but were actually at best crude and superficial imitations of it.

Indeed, after a quite small number of cannabis sessions I found the experiences and 'fascinating' visuals actually boring, and I was getting impatient for the 'high' to go, because I was clear that those experiences were really not taking me anywhere useful, and I wanted to be in full command of my faculties again.

On one of those cannabis sessions, soon after I started writing poetry in 1973, when I smoked a little bit of the 'weed' up on Pewley Down above Guildford I took with me a portable cassette tape recorder, because I'd noticed that when I was 'high' I had all sorts of seemingly awesomely meaningful surrealistic phrases and expressions coming into my mind. I thought that I'd thus be able to build up a whole inventory of wonderful striking ideas to use in my poetry.

In the event, once I'd got out of my 'high' I was disgusted, though not at all surprised, to find that all I'd recorded was banal and almost completely meaningless drivel. I did write some 'poems' trying to make use of bits of that stuff, but they were useful only as experiments.

In my writing I was able to be genuinely and profoundly visionary and, one could say, 'hallucinatory', but only without drugs or any other interference with my mental functioning. Indeed, one limitation on quite a bit of my poetry of those times was that I was often still seeking to portray a sort of cannabis effect rather than trust myself completely for my own 'inspiration'.

I did succeed in capturing something of that cheap, ersatz, cardboard cut-out pretence of a visionary experience during a cannabis 'high' in my early poem Smoking Grass on Pewley Down. I wrote that actually NOT while I was 'high', and before I came to be seeking to use the (actually) drivel that came to me when I was 'high', so that my creativity wasn't being stunted or distorted too much by the 'dope' smoking.

What I also noticed was that most people didn't move forward in the way that I'd done in terms of genuine life improvement and self-healing. They got attached to the pleasant feelings and (in many cases) visual effects of a cannabis 'high' and kept returning to them.

Some of these people eventually got bored with that and more or less finished with cannabis, while others continued it as a regular or even daily habit because it took their attention away from uncomfortable personal issues.

However, I saw no sign that any of these people had benefited significantly in the sense of having received some nudge for positive life change and actually clearing their particular personal issues. Some of them seemed to think they'd achieved positive life change by continuing to smoke cannabis, because they were apparently more relaxed than they used to be, less anxious, and more comfortable in their current situation.

Indeed, some actually claimed that through doing so they'd found enlightenment — something that they most certainly had not, and indeed by making such a claim they'd demonstrated that they were in a state of considerable self-deception.

Many people continued using cannabis because they tended to have depressive feelings, and cannabis comforted them so they felt such feelings less. The drug was being used as a 'natural' (i.e., biologically sourced) antidepressant.

It's a considerable personal sadness for me that one particular friend of mine went that way. He had considerable potentiality to be a great friend of mine (including our having an exceptionally strong mutual 'energy' compatibility), but the effects of cannabis, and particularly his cannabis-induced addiction always to withdrawing into his 'comfort zone' and feeling threatened by my increasing clarity and focus for genuine self-actualization, produced an ever-growing rift between him and me, so that he and I were then only distant friends, with rare contact.

— And on those rare occasions when we did speak together, he tired and frustrated me by rambling on about how he'd found a sort of comfort and peace and 'enlightenment' by just keeping within his decidedly limited comfort zone and not taking on any significant challenges that would take him beyond that…

The particular sad irony in that case was that it was I myself who introduced him to cannabis, by sending him my remaining very small stock of it when I gave it up myself, back in about 1974. I did that in response to his going through quite severe depression at that time, and, naively, I strongly cautioned that he use it only in the creative way that I'd done and not to follow it up by getting more and keeping on smoking the stuff.

…But unfortunately the latter is just what he did — no doubt very much reinforced in that by his infatuation with the Beatles and their music and the happy-go-lucky brain-damaged dope-smoking youth cult they were cultivating. He soon developed a daily routine of smoking tobacco as well as smoking 'the weed', and drinking some alcohol. He also compounded his problems by doing daily meditation. So he was doing a great job of progressively damaging his brain, and generally was a ticking time-bomb for serious mental and physical health issues.

He died fairly prematurely in 2022, in his seventies, after some years of quite severe pains (apparently put down to osteoporosis) and increasing dementia. I was surprised he lasted as long as he did — though in a sense the whole later part of his life was an agonizingly slow death process.

That's the horrible and unnecessary sort of death that people creating their comforting cocoon of self-deception are particularly liable to end up with.

It seems sort-of attractive, doesn't it, that, while people taking alcohol regularly are liable to have all sorts of overt problems arising from it, and it can precipitate all manner of irresponsible and violent behaviour, cannabis tends to be gentle in its effects and make a person gentle and accepting, and more happy with their lot.

But the underlying purpose of our lives isn't about withdrawing into our 'comfort zone' and finding quick and easy contentment. It's about experiencing variety and contrast in abundance (i.e., to a sensible degree), about moving forward, opening up new horizons and taking on new challenges, and about bringing about positive change in the world where that's needed.

There's an inner peacefulness and what you could call contentment (actually more like a sense of fulfilment) that's eventually opened up through proper self-actualization methods — the true self-healing — but that peacefulness is something very different from what's achieved by drugs, and even it itself becomes an obstacle when people make it an actual goal, as they usually do.

A true positive way forward necessarily involves sometimes facing discomfort and pressing through inner resistance in order to break old behaviour patterns that were based on old emotional stresses or traumas, and to respond to situations in new, better ways. You can't do this if you have no motivation to move out of your comfort zone.

My current understanding is that regular, and especially daily, cannabis smoking, over a period of weeks, causes changes in brain chemistry in such a way as to keep the person unmotivated for positive change, and thus so reluctant to go beyond their comfort zone that they're in most cases unmotivated to quit cannabis or indeed any other addictions or significant patterns.

It's the norm for such people to live in denial of there being anything wrong for them. Those who are more deeply self aware are inclined to kid themselves and others that through having found a certain level of comfort and peacefulness, that they've found 'enlightenment' or at least something very close to it.

In fact they haven't only not found enlightenment at all that way, but they've greatly reduced the essential motivation that could get them there, and they would find it almost impossible to progress much further in terms of self-actualization, even if they gave up cannabis now and never smoked any more. They've also created for themselves insidious and extremely harmful illusory realities.

Thus, these people — and there are a LOT of them — can be seen as effectively brain damaged. Yes, that sounds harsh of me to say it directly, but that stunting of their motivation for positive change is associated with changes in the brain, and it's this brain damage that makes them seem commonly so placid and easy-going. They tend to withdraw from those of us who, like me, have an active self-actualization process and sense of our life purpose, for they find this too threatening to their comfort zone, preferring to resonate with others who have similar self-anaesthetization tendencies.

Some of them have considerable self awareness to a certain level, yet seem to wrap it up in cotton wool so that becoming more peaceful and contented with their lot in life is equated with enlightenment. That's actually a very harmful illusory reality. Enlightenment is never found through getting more comfortable through going into denial of one's issues. A considerable amount of active clearance (which can be very uncomfortable at times, though can be both painless and actually joyful if appropriate methods are used) is a prerequisite before enlightenment can occur.

I know some people who smoked a lot of cannabis a few decades ago and, as far as I know, don't normally do so now, and I find something of a 'drifter', laissez-faire sort of outlook in them, which again prevents them from really moving forward on any active self-healing or process of self-actualization, even though they mostly think of themselves as being very 'open' and aware. They, like so many others, completely mistake a state of chronic ungroundedness for being self-actualized (which latter is our real need — not so-called spirituality).

The only situation in which the brain damage may be reversed is if an appropriate powerful healing method is applied. However, there's a catch — indeed a Catch 22 situation. Because of their non-motivation, such people mostly can't be bothered, or even actively don't want, to change, and so they won't apply the healing to themselves, and few indeed would look to anyone else to assist them either. Indeed, they're mostly unmotivated to let go of their addictions (any of them), and thus retain their obstacles to true healing.

True healing possibilities for cannabis harmful effects

For the benefit of the rare case of the person who's smoked cannabis significantly and is still sufficiently motivated to do something effective about it, there are very powerful methods by which you can address this.

Because they operate in rather different ways and address different aspects of the issue, all the methods would generally be needed for the fullest possible healing, even though there's a large overlap between their healing effects and any one of them on its own would still be very beneficial (but why settle for anything short of the whole job when you could so easily complete it and have massive additional improvements to your life?).

I can't guarantee full healing of all the cannabis-related damage for every affected person — that would be an unrealistic claim to make for healing of any type of issue. However, it appears that any affected person who uses these particular methods would benefit greatly, and at least theoretically a good proportion would recover fully*.

• Go to Letting go of addictions and compulsive behaviours for some pointers as to how to get clear of your cannabis habit.

• Do regular Self-Power Walking.

• Have a regular session (daily if possible) of what I've labelled 'Regular Core Practices'. This replaces my previous recommendation here to use the now-legacy Clarity-Sphere and associated practices.

Cannabis and 'mental illness'

I've learnt that people who've had any tendency to experience hells (including night terrors) or 'hearing voices' (and a very significant proportion of people have, or have had, such a tendency), in some cases can have the use of cannabis trigger the process of various types of hell experience or/and a recurrence or aggravation of any intrusion of 'voices' and related phenomena.

The hell visuals would often be a hellish maelstrom of frightening and often dark and 'demonic' / Satanistic-type images. These visuals would typically be accompanied by exaggerated arisings of fear and related emotions (anxiety, apprehension, panic and full-blown terror). This isn't just a one-time triggering, but rather, a long-term disruption of the brain chemistry so that the disturbing visuals and fear/anxiety/panic attacks keep recurring.

Contrary to what most of the medical and psychiatric services believe, the changes in brain chemistry don't directly cause or produce the disturbances, but rather, they reflect particular weakenings of the person's non-physical aspects (associated with the person having become more poorly grounded), which allow greater access from the garbage, which then itself produces all the disturbing manifestations, as I describe in Night terrors and hell experiences — Understanding and clearing them.

My understanding now is that interferences and attacks from the garbage are the basis of at least the vast majority of cases of alleged cannabis-caused 'psychosis'.

Affected people would do well to read the above-linked page so that they can start working out a true healing strategy, because currently the mental health services have no clue about this and would just try to suppress symptoms with drugs and maybe ECT, which simply adds to any extant brain damage to the point even of wrecking.

As explained in that page, my own observations strongly point to the garbage being the prime cause or aggravator of virtually ALL so-called 'mental illness', and on this basis I can fairly say that any attempt to address cannabis-associated mental health issues without recognising and addressing the involvement of the garbage is like going out to a slap-up meal at your favourite restaurant supposedly in order to put out the fire that's burning your house down!

The smoking of cannabis (also tobacco) also ungrounds the person and thus makes them more open and susceptible to the garbage. Such people also are inclined to get soul fragments attached to them, also draining their energy, degrading their life experience and causing steadily increasing health problems.

Quitting cannabis

"I stopped smoking cannabis and I started hearing voices, getting illusions and all the other withdrawal symptoms. Doctors got involved and they gave me tablets. I want to leave the medicine. How long will it take me to recover and what would happen if I leave the medicine?"

That was actually a search engine query that led somebody to this page, and it's a nice illustration of the sorts of pickle that cannabis users tend to get into. I salute the particular individual in his having the strength to cut out cannabis.

However, he's unfortunately identified his adverse manifestations as merely 'withdrawal symptoms' — which assumption of course would follow the standard medical 'Party Line', and so the guy is given medication to try to hide the problem. Unfortunately he's now feeling stuck on that medication, and, although he wants to come off it, he's liable to find that if/when he does, the adverse manifestations are still there, for what he's been experiencing would most likely NOT be withdrawal symptoms in any meaningful sense but the result of the damage that he's been doing to himself by smoking the cannabis in the first place.

His need therefore isn't the antipsychotics or whatever other type of drug that he's been given, but safe and completely non-medical methods to strengthen his non-physical aspects and heal the damage caused to him by his use of the cannabis — see Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way. That particularly includes a consistent strategy of cultivating stronger grounding of his awareness.

"But shamans use drugs as part of their path…"

Yes, and that's one good reason why they're so attached to their 'paths' and don't go beyond such 'paths' and so don't become genuinely enlightened and self-actualized. No-one is intrinsically a shaman. Being a shaman means that one is attached to a certain self-image — a false ID — that enables them to have some sort of (spuriously based) social status.

Actually the whole notion of a spiritual 'path' is highly problematical, because of the way people become attached to the supposed 'path' and don't get on with a real self-actualization process. Also, I think you'd have some difficulty, to put it mildly, in finding a shaman who is (a) in really good health, long-term, and (b) who is really old.

Undoubtedly many look old, but (a) that would be part of their projecting a false image of themselves as 'old and wise', and (b) it would at least in part be because of premature 'ageing' effects of their drug use and other harmful practices, many of which latter are extremely unhealthy, and generally show a considerable disregard for their well-being just for the sake of getting their 'buzz of the minute'.

In addition, ALL religious / mystical / spiritual / healing traditions contain elements that maintain or increase your connections with the garbage, and shamanism is no exception there (indeed, it's one of the more brazen examples). So conventional notions of a spiritual path ALL need to be let go of if you're serious about enlightenment and genuine self-actualization — or, put more simply, genuinely better human functioning, because that's what it's all really about.

I point to a true self-healing / self-actualization methodology, free from problematical connections and influences, in Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way and Letting go of addictions and compulsive behaviours.

Should cannabis be illegal then?

It's not for me to go telling people what they should or should not do. It's my task simply to point out the cause and effect relationships in this issue, as far as I can ascertain them. The human race generally has an extremely confused and contradictory attitude to mind-affecting substances, and our supposedly so rational Western civilizations are highly irrational in their attitudes to them.

Why, for example, is cannabis illegal while alcohol and tobacco products — so tremendously harmful — are freely available (albeit with actually very minor restrictions)?

Certainly not because of the problem that I've outlined above with regard to motivation for positive change, because that isn't widely recognised — or rather, at least in our Western materialistic culture, the consequences of the personality change brought about by cannabis aren't recognised as anything serious because self-actualization and self-healing aren't seen as a vital part of the life purpose of each of us — and many of the apparently brain-damaged people actually seem rather nice and endearing in their easy-going ways.

Those who want to use cannabis for treating medical conditions don't understand the great price they'd be paying for their physical comfort or reduction of unwanted physical symptoms. I'm not saying that they should not use cannabis, but they do need to be made fully aware that once they've been regularly medicating themselves with cannabis or just THC for a while, they may well have lost much or all of their (potential) motivation for self-actualization or actively taking charge of their lives in positive ways.

Once they know the full costs as well as benefits, then it's really their choice and not for me or some holier-than-thou doctor to try and make such a decision for them.

Basically, what would-be medicinal cannabis users (and indeed any other cannabis users) really need instead of that cannabis is to embark on proper holistic self-healing programmes or strategies. On this site I point to the sort of way to go in order to really heal yourself and dispose of any perceived need for such medication (at least for the vast majority of cases). Please see Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way.

As to the legal status of cannabis possession and use, I express no view, except for pointing to the inconsistency of treatment of this drug and alcohol and tobacco. Whatever happens about cannabis, I'm all in favour of much stronger measures against alcohol and tobacco, which are 'drugs' just as much or little as cannabis, and cause tremendous misery, illness and mortality worldwide. But ultimately it's not for me to try and decide on such issues.

If decision-makers insist on playing the silly fool and allowing hospitals to be filled with, and countries' health budgets be strained by, victims of use of these drugs, then that's part of their own learning process — the hard way.

What is necessary with cannabis is that people be widely and fully informed of its brain-damaging effect and the fact that it effectively puts a brake or even total stop upon a person's opening up to their true life purpose.

Liberty-cap or other hallucinogenic fungi the real answer?

Pull the other one, Cedric! — The real answer to what? Where's your rationally based working model of what a fully functioning human is like?

People forever find ways to convince themselves that they've found one or more ways to achieve some sort of improved or 'ideal' state of functioning (actually with no understanding of what genuinely improved human functioning would be like!), while meticulously avoiding the rationally-based methods that would genuinely do the job. So they go for some sort of altered state that gives them the illusion and indeed delusion that they've 'found it' and therefore don't need to do their pressingly necessary homework after all. — Their whole approach, then, like that of the hugely vast majority of other people too, is devoid of the aforementioned crucial rationally based working model of a fully functioning human: a sure recipe for being right off the rails and barking up wrong trees every time!

From my rare encounters with people who admit to using hallucinogenic fungi (and indeed other hallucinogens), whether they be Psilocybe semilanceata, Amanita muscaria, or any other psychoactive fungus, plant or substance, and my seeing a lot of social media posts from people who are into those, it appears that there's a widespread misapprehension that these items are 'liberating' agents not only for individuals but for Humanity at large.

All that those people have been 'liberated' from is their groundedness, good sense and connection with down-to-earth reality — indeed, a major aspect of their basic human functioning. While cannabis users tend to become peaceful and unmotivated for anything proactively positive in their lives and relationship with their surroundings, the hallucinogen-heads are typically more vibrant, but with an irresponsible and often evangelistic tendency about their supposed 'liberation' agent. They are typically obsessed with their sense of personal freedom, but without due regard for their responsibilities towards others — and also in denial of the serious 'mental health' issues — typically some form of 'schizophrenia' — that such hallucinogens often cause (I mean, in addition to, and aggravated by, the regular brain damage that all users progressively accrue).

Let's be clear, that if you want genuinely better human functioning, then your starting point has to be that aforementioned rationally based working model of what a fully functioning human is like (nag, nag!), which is the basis of this site's whole mindset and methodology. There's no way round that. And you need undistorted, unattenuated brain function for that — which rules out ALL psychoactive substances — synthetic or natural — from your life if you're to be pointed in that direction. Even socially accepted stimulants / sedatives are all OUT (tea, coffee, cocoa and related products, and indeed ALL high-sugar foods and confections (even as the odd rare 'treat') apart from a modest amount of fresh fruit per day.

One needs a commitment to all one's future choices being not just 'awarely', but rationally based (i.e., properly thought-out with regard to what would be the most beneficial or least harmful of available options) as a key partner to that proscription. Thus in overall terms it isn't a restricting mindset, but a liberating one that discards the actually restrictive ball-and-chain effects of reactive living (chasing after and being attached to one's 'likes'), replacing those effects with the ever incrementing life enhancements coming from basing one's life on thought-out living with positive intent.