Marihuana Reconsidered

[David Morris]

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/07/carl-sagan-spaced-ou.html

>From Boing Boing:

A friend once told me that famed astronomer and noted head Carl Sagan
wrote notes from his high self to his sober self to trust in his
stoned revelations. I haven't confirmed that, but Sagan was definitely
into the wacky tobaccy. In 1969, Sagan contributed a piece about his
marijuana use for the book "Marihuana Reconsidered." Sagan wrote under
the pseudonym of Mr. X, but he was later confirmed as the author.

>From Marihuana Reconsidered:

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but
there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity
in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings,
both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception
of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the
hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other
times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and
whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be
communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been
in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an
awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and
forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really
like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what
it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid
thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union
political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same
kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you
hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on
cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we
call mad.

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood
memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and
tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences
in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all
my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me
which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on
the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays
on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great
insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am
convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights
achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting
these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that
we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've
ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing.
The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to
be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why
someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble
to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic.
But since I live almost all my life down I've made the effort -
successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good
insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has
been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or
tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the
following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an
effort to remember, I never do.