Marijuana and False Enlightenment

I smoked pot for many years. I liked pot because it helped me forget what a mess my life was, but I also liked it because of the effect it had on me. Whereas most people would zone out, drift away into la la-land and/or forgetfulness when they smoked pot, people would say things to me like "you are the only person I know who gets sharper when you get high". My mind became acutely aware.

Pot gave me the effect of enlightenment and realization. My thoughts would become crystal clear, extremely vivid and would reveal to me profoundly "spiritual" things. I could see into people with profound clarity and could psycho-analyze them with great precision. People found it mind boggling. A few liked it, but many found it cut to close to reality and stopped being with me when I was high.

The high for me mimicked realization and insight so closely that it had me unable to see the dark spirit behind the high for a very long time.The spirit behind this drug knew that I was born with a proclivity toward truth, had strong perception and it played up on this by revealing to me profound things, showing me true things, keeping me coming back for more. But what it never revealed to me was that all of this "insight" was taking place from within my thought world, from within my ego universe called mind, where I saw myself as enlightened and certain that what I was seeing was true, because, for all intents and purposes it was. It would be, however, many years before I realized that the critical component called love that makes true insight timely and appropriate had been missing.

But can you see how unbelievably subtle this spirit was? How terribly confusing this can be? How can right be wrong? But then again, that is the difference between intellect, where knowledge of good (and bad) is learned and memorized and genuine insight, where truth is realized in the ah-ha moments. Knowledge can be very addictive, even more so when it is highly enhanced by a drug like marijuana that gives exordinary clarity to thought. It is not called a mind expanding drug for naught.

I imagine the spirit behind marijuana is the same spirit that "talked" Eve into eating from the tree of knowledge. "Did God say you would die if you ate of this tree? No, you won't, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil"...but what the spirit did not say was that "knowing good and evil, a prerogative of a God, will be at the cost of your innocence".

It would be some time before I realized that the "weed" supported and kept me bonded to a false "good" in my mind that wasn't good at all...but was only an illusion, a phantom appearing as good. It took some time and a real blessing for me to finally realize that all real good comes from outside the mind, not from within it. Thank goodness for the pain in other aspects of my life that drove me to meditate, for in meditating I was finally able to see the great lie behind the powerful but false "voice of good" within my mind, and find freedom from this terribly addictive bondage.