How does pot affect your mind exactly?

Matthew Woodson via CGUnit

Jamie Nadalin, a reader of the Blog of Innocence, recently posted this comment:

"During the day, I'm ceaselessly striving. I'm striving for a picture in my mind. Every morning I wake up and try to attain this ideal.

You can imagine I'm regularly disappointed. But I brush off the disappointment--I've learned to."

Your blog is a pleasure to visit, I'm very glad to have stumbled upon it. I identify with the above quote very strongly. Not only am I regularly disappointed but also disheartened by not achieving that mysterious goal. Most often I do brush it off, but sometimes I can't help but feel like I've failed. What's worse is the goal or picture in mind is so vague, I can't rightly decide how it is I should improve myself or my approach.

I also want to ask you why you stopped smoking pot? You say your mind is important to you, how does pot affect your mind exactly? you see, I smoke on a regular basis, mostly because I think it's the only way to feel any real motivation, there are other reasons of course but that's the main one. Sometimes I want to quit though, I'm afraid it will turn me into some kind of a blob, a slug. Is that what you felt as well?

My response:

So you too have had this experience . . .

From time to time, I feel as though I've failed in achieving my mysterious goal. Especially when I consider my accomplishments from the point of view of my father; in other words, how he sees me.

My whole life I've been striving for my father's validation. On the one hand, I've done what I've wanted to do in life. I followed my dreams, my desires, my instincts. But on the other, I look back over my shoulder, always thinking of him, and anticipating his reaction.

I never feel recognized in my achievements by my father. Perhaps if I was leading a more conventional life, with a high-paying career, a family and such, he would recognize my success. As of now, I have done little to impress him. The last time I impressed my father was when I graduated from college.

It's a petty thing to need my father's approval, but this sort of thing dominates many people's lives. For some it's the mother's approval. For me, it's my father. I'm living the life my mother would have wanted for me. I run an arts and culture publication. I'm creative; a writer. My life is in accord with her dreams as an artist.

So, when you say "failure", I think of myself through my father's eyes. Of course, he would not say that I am a failure. Perhaps it's the reassurance that I'm not a failure which I need from him. I know I'm not. But certain things that are important to him--my ability to support myself, financial independence, etc.--demonstrate that I have fallen short in his eyes.

Sure, he's pleased with my literary and creative accomplishments, but they mean very little to him without a paycheck.

I love what you say here:

What's worse is the goal or picture in mind is so vague, I can't rightly decide how it is I should improve myself or my approach.

The mysterious goal we set for ourselves is meant to be vague. This is so that we can never actually attain it! So that we must continue striving, and achieving all sorts of things, but never anything that truly satisfies us.

The logic goes that if we were satisfied, then we would stop living. There would be no reason to continue doing anything in life.

We make the goal of our lives, our "destiny" per say--elusive. It must remain elusive for us, or we won't have a desire to keep going.

If your goal is to retire and move to Puerto Rico, like one of my uncles, then you attain it eventually and you move to Puerto Rico. This is not a mysterious goal. This is a concrete goal. And when you are there, you may do like my uncle did. He bought a house that overlooks the ocean and he sits on his roof and admires the view, or he drinks whiskey and watches the stock market ticker.

He has no elusive goal before him. He is done with life. Ask him, and he'll say there is nothing more.

You say, "I can't rightly decide how it is I should improve myself or my approach."

If you have a desire to live, you will improve yourself. We live in a culture of self-improvement and half the time this seems like the disease and not the cure. You are always improving your approach toward achieving your mysterious goal in that you are re-defining your goal and goals constantly.

As long as you are actively re-imagining your goals in life, you are coming closer to what you really want to do.

You ask me why I stopped smoking pot. This is a big question. First of all, I'm a recovering drug addict and I shouldn't have been smoking pot in the first place. I had what you call a relapse.

So when I was smoking pot recently, I was not leisurely smoking it. I was compulsively smoking it. I went out and bought a $150 glass bong. I took bong hits nightly.

And I didn't really enjoy the experience. You can read my essay "How many of us are self-medicating" to get an idea of the situation.

Yes, the mind is important to me. What I mean by this is I depend on my mind. I depend on my mind as a creative person, as a writer and intellectual.

I've done the experiment. Meaning, I've tested it out whether I'm more or less creative, more or less effective, while stoned.

Usually, while high, I have lots of interesting thoughts in my head. And I tend to end up on Twitter. Smitten by my own thoughts, I want to share them. I'll tweet something profound and wait for people to respond.

When I write high, however, only 1 in every 10 times does something articulate and meaningful get manifested. A lot of time it is just manic thought patterns and I don't have the wherewithal to compose a single coherent article, essay, or poem.

But I'm not going to lie, sometimes I tap into a profound stream of thoughts and I'm able to get them down on paper. For example, the Preface to the Blog of Innocence was written while I was stoned.

Every individual is different. You say you're more motivated while high. For me, I'm not more motivated, I'm more manic. And just because I'm manic, having racing thoughts, doesn't necessarily translate into motivation to produce a solid result.

I didn't worry that smoking would turn me into a lazy, unmotivated slob. My personality is Type A, so there's little fear of that. I do too much in life, which is why I gravitate toward drugs. I seem to need them to help me relax, to unwind, and to stop working.

So when I was smoking pot on a regular basis I would get all of my work done first. Pot was my reward at the end of the day.

But this didn't work out for me because I would stay up all night when I smoked. Smoking interfered with my cycle. I wouldn't wake up until the afternoon. And during the day, I noticed a bit of cloudiness.

I wasn't lazy. I didn't stop working. I just began to feel as though my brain wasn't at its peak performance. That's all.

And my brain is important to me. In fact, my life depends on the performance of my brain. I'm a writer, a thinker and an intellectual. I want my mind in the best possible condition for writing these essays, and running my website and business Escape into Life.

The Imaginary Audience

Let me describe what I see in front of me:

the Sunday edition of the NYTimes, Tricycle (a Buddhist magazine), a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson, The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, The Energy of Delusion by Viktor Shklovsky;

and underneath the coffee table, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.

I am reading all of these books at the same (or sections of them)--in addition to the newspaper and magazine.

Lin Yutang talks about the "histrionic instinct". I have quoted extensively from his book in the previous post. He talks about our human drive to perform for others. He talks about how we are hardwired for the approval of an audience. Let me quote him once again:

"Consciously or unconsciously, we are all actors in this life playing to the audience in a part and style approved by them."

Right now I am blogging. There has been a recent explosion in blogging. The Internet is a suspended audience. You know people are watching; you just don't know how many or who these people are. The audience becomes more elusive. But it is only the promise of someone watching that we need. A virtual audience will do just fine.

In Las Vegas, eight years ago, I had an experience.

I became an actor in my own life. Was I imagining things? I deeply believed that my actions were central to the world. I adopted a persona based on these beliefs.

In adolescent psychology, this is called "imaginary audience." Another characteristic of adolescent egocentricism is the "personal fable". Professor Boughner of Rodgers State University writes: "adolescents imagine their own lives as mythical or heroic" and "they see themselves destined for fame or fortune".

These ideas seem closely related to what Lin Yutang calls the "histrionic instinct".

Eight years after my experience in Las Vegas, I set out to write my history. You can call this history my "personal fable".

The novel is called Lethe Bashar's Novel of Life.

Lethe Bashar is me eight years before, in Las Vegas. What defines Lethe's character is the "histrionic instinct".

My adolescence was a dream. I was under the spell of my own play-acting. I created a persona to feel important, to feel unique. (Could I be doing the same thing now? Writing the novel?)

I am writing the novel to understand the character and the dream. And to know the spell has truly ended.

Can the actor awaken from her performance at the end of the day?

The theater lights have turned off, the audience has gone home. The actor is still up on stage.

At a certain point, the role the actor plays can become self-destructive. The imagination fuels her sense of power as well as her sense of defeat. According to adolescent psychology, the actor thinks that she is invincible. Imagination becomes dangerous, a weapon. There are consequences for incessant dreaming. Sometimes this is called "idealism".

I compare my alter ego, Lethe Bashar, to Don Quixote. Lethe Bashar takes drugs and acts out an imaginary role as poet/writer. Don Quixote reads too many books and acts out an imaginary role as knight errant. Both go on journeys. They leave their homes.

The novel by Cervantes is a violent novel. It is funny, but it is also violent. Nabokov writes, "Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty. From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its cruelty is artistic."

What I have described to you is adolescent psychology. But couldn't we say this is adult psychology as well?

Lin Yutang writes, "The only objection is that the actor may replace the man and take entire possession of him."

The actor degenerates into a fool, a nutcase, like Don Quixote. We have seen many of these characters on reality television, on American Idol.

The audience laughs instead of cries. And yet somewhere inside we can relate to this foolishness. We empathize with Don Quixote.

There are many books at my house. Gazing at my library solidifies my sense of self. I surround myself with books, extensions of myself.

If I am an actor, books are my props. At the beginning of this essay I described to you "the set".

You are my audience right now. Your applause strengthens my purpose.

I cannot see the writer or the artist. I can only ruthlessly act out his needs and desires. The role is my destiny and my pre-destiny.

Destiny gets created somewhere.

Lin Yutang says that beyond the fear of God and the fear of death is the fear of one's neighbors.

In other words, society.

The audience is society. A child's first society is her mother and father.

I first started reading classical literature to my father when I was in middle school.

I hated it.

But he would make me go downstairs and sit with him on the couch. We would read for one hour. He had a collection of leather bound books that arrived in the mail each month.

The books literally cracked open they were so new. Each new edition had a frontispiece portrait of the author. The manila pages had illustrations. Under a block of letters that read, "PUBLISHED EXPRESSLY FOR THE PERSONAL LIBRARY OF," my father signed his name.

I couldn't understand what I was reading and that's why I despised reading with my father. It felt like a cruel joke.

For five years I read with my father almost every night.

Lin Yutang says the actor is seeking approval of the audience. The audience is society.

I really believe in my role as a writer. I don't know who I would "act out" instead. It's not easy to pick up another role.

We become who we are through sedimentation. Years of repetition. We work with the old drafts constantly, rewriting the ego. The future seems to hang on the success or failure of a single part.

I omitted the first line of this essay. I was making revisions. I will include that line here:

"I'm making discoveries about myself that are unsettling."

The unsettling part of a dream is not the dream itself, but discovering the dream is unreal.

Can I escape my role as a writer? Do I even want to?


CRA 5-28-08