Tag: Buddhism

Old Tricks, Repackaged for a New Generation

“Yvette!  WE’RE GOING TO THE POT STORE,” my dad shouts from the driveway up to my bedroom window over the garage as if the message was in the all-caps print he favors.

“Great Dad. Now I and the rest of our neighbors know where you’ll be for the next hour or so.” Looking down, I can see my mom climbing into the passenger seat of Dad’s jumbo-jet sized, luxury SUV.

“And no one says pot anymore, by the way.  Say weed.  Or better yet, just dispensary.’”

I sound so like the snarky teen I once was that I have to do a mental check.  My dad’s awareness of marijuana had its foggy beginnings during my middle school years, when he shifted from beat cop to narcotics, grew his hair long, donned a uniform of loose peasant shirts, suede boots, and bell-bottom Levis, and played The Guess Who in our tangerine-colored family van.  He might have adopted the trappings, but he was miles from cool.  Shouting out his destination in our smartly landscaped, ethnically diverse, Tesla-littered cul-de-sac reminded me of his past indiscretions.

I surmise that properly identifying cannabis and recognizing its psychoactive effects might have posed a bit of a challenge for a small suburban police force back then, mostly because my oldest brother had the actual plants growing in our backyard that my dad routinely watered every weekend when he did yard work.  Dad could never tell when we were high, which was more often than not during those years.  I do remember him spouting the inflammatory prophecy of it being an evil “gateway drug” which would inexorably deliver its users into full blown heroin, cocaine, LSD, and/or psilocybin addiction.  (Though my siblings and I dabbled in those substances, most of us ended up in thrall to sporadic quantities of crystal meth – oh, the all-nighters studying, cleaning, organizing, writing!)

Now my parents are rabid, copious consumers of all things THC- and CBD-infused – cookies, gummy drops, oils, lotions, and patches.  Their dispensary expenditures routinely exceed $300-400 per month.  Nothing I would’ve ever predicted in 1975, but probably the most mind-altering consequence of living in a state where recreational marijuana use is legal.  (And heavily taxed, I might add.  HEAVILY.  Another example of liberals putting their money where their mouths are, I’m just saying.)

I reflect on this reality whenever I open my desk drawer and see my vape pens rolling around with the Pilot G-2s and Sharpies.  Getting high is such a mundane aspect of life these days, for many reasons preferable to imbibing alcohol, which used to be my go-to relaxant until I suffered a (very) scary bout of elevated liver enzymes a year ago.  Mostly I employ it as a soporific, taking a hit or two prior to shutting off the lights for bed.  Zonk – menopausal insomnia cured!   Occasionally, I’ll take it along for a coastline jog; nothing corrals the chattering distractions of the running brain like the hypnotic, looping effects of a little THC. But mostly I don’t think about it.  Unlike high school, I don’t have to deal with shady strangers on corners or someone’s lascivious cousin with his own apartment in Downey or the manager at the local pizzeria who charged a 200% markup over street prices but gave you a free pie as a cover.  I just drive the 2.6 miles to the local dispensary, park under the watchful gaze of the armed security guard, wait in line behind five other convivial senior citizens to present my ID to the woman at the front desk, and am buzzed through to an emporium of products presented in myriad flavors, sizes, strengths, and delivery mediums.  Capitalism has transformed the War on Drugs into a surprisingly pleasant shopping errand.

Subsequently, I don’t know if the high itself has changed or its integration into the routine of life has tamed its tantalizing qualities, but it certainly doesn’t hold, at least for me, the cachet that it once did.   When I was fourteen, my relationship with psychoactive substances sprang from the nascent desire to fathom the teleological difference, if there was any, between mind and brain. Suffused as I was with Buddhism, Beatnik writers, Schrödinger’s cat, Platonic ideals and rudimentary Catholic theology, one can imagine how effectively a marijuana high could contribute to my efforts.  Now, I just want to go to sleep.  Same feeling, different outcome.

I imagine that by fifty-seven I have followed all the less strenuous, non-academic, quasi-spiritual paths towards figuring out life’s meaning; the mental vistas currently afforded me by THC have become a bit mundane and claustrophobic. Is it maturity?  Monotony?  Resignation?  Smoking weed no longer promises the (wink-wink) mystical elevator into the absolute it once did.  By virtue of their legality, THC and CBD products are heavily regulated to be content verifiable and consistent.  Does this affect the nature of the high itself?  Certainly, smoking dope of this type is not the roulette’s wheel of my youth, when the whispered gems “Mexican Sinsemilla” or “Humboldt Indica” conveyed deluxe, transcendent properties sure to send the mental explorer catapulting into deep space but more reliably, come to think of it, fizzled out into blank stares and ill-advised snacking.  And there were a few, definitely uncomfortable occasions early on, after legalization but before I got the dosage right, when my thoughts caromed off into cramped and circular orbits that recalled the “bad trips” of my youth, anxiety-fraught treks through ricochet-laden mental environs that are even less enticing after so long abiding in the world of forethought and consequences.

Perhaps what I am really yearning for is that breath-stealing, soul-melting experience of magic mushrooms or E(cstasy) kicking in, when the boundary between mind and brain dissolves, liquefying into a non-question, any answer irrelevant to the numinous revelations pouring from within and without. But, of course, when one is fifty-seven there is a larger context underpinning the choice of what to ingest into one’s corpus: will this kill me? Weaken me? Make me healthier? Live longer, stronger, wiser?  Increasingly, the risk associated with most drugs outweighs their various temptations. I see now that death will always have the upper hand, catch me soon enough and provide all the outstanding answers to life’s Big Questions, anyway.

It does amuse me that, after all these years, I am coaching Dad on the socially appropriate way to reference his ‘gateway’ drug in the driveway of the same house where squad cars would periodically deposit my two truant younger brothers after they were caught smoking ‘pot’ in the flood control channel behind their high school.  How times have changed.  What was once the stuff of dire parental warnings and government propaganda has transformed into an AARP-touted pain-reliever and  a sleep-inducer for the Boomer generation.

Perhaps that’s what makes the high substantively different, in the end: anything your parents condone can’t be that much fun, right?

Imagine

A young child asks his mother to imagine that she is completely surrounded by tigers , with no weapon available, and nowhere to hide. What would she do?  The mother hesitates, ponders the question, and replies that she has no idea what she would do. The mother then asks the child what he would do, and he replies, “I would stop imagining.”

Tiger roar

I came across this enigmatic little tale in a book I am reading: “Stepping Out of Self- Deception: the Buddha’s Liberating Teaching of No-self” by Rodney Smith.  My mind keeps returning to its deceptive simplicity  –  how much of our fears, anxieties, worries, and dreads are born of our own imagination?   And what  is the imagination, when you get down to it?  Neurobiology creating worlds out of electrical impulses…including the very real impression that there is a ‘self’ capable of inputting,  managing, and analyzing the data.

I am also reading Diane Keaton’s memoir Then Again in which she traces the deterioration of both her parent’s mental capacities and abilities to maintain a ‘self’ – her father’s as a result of a brain tumor and her mother’s due to Alzheimer’s.  (When books I am reading cross-pollinate it always causes me to pay special attention.)  In both cases, their respective imaginations began to rule their experience and caused them (and all their loved ones) undue anguish.  Their “selves” were no longer at the wheel.  But then where does that self go? Who is driving?  What is experiencing the anguish? I tend to think of a mental illness as some sort of discreet demon – an evil imposter that wrenches control away from the proper owner of the brain/body.  As if the sane person was locked up in a cage in a corner of the mind, rattling the bars, screaming to get loose.  But that could really only be the case if we want to put our faith in some sort of entity akin to a soul.  Because increasingly, neuroscientists are affirming many of the basic tenets of Buddhism: the “self” we wear so deeply, clutch so strongly – that, in fact, is the essential definition of who/what “we’ are in this world –  is impossible to parse out from the machinations of the brain.

Meditators with years and years of experience tell us that they experience a consciousness unrelated to a sense of self; a deep, impersonal awareness that absorbs and dissipates the ego.  Does this awareness remain present, I wonder, lurking above it all when a person’s imagination runs haywire? Or take the comatose person lying in a bed for decades with no apparent signs of brain activity other than those maintaining the body – is this pure awareness present without the mitigating factor of imagination or self?

What happens when there is no “i” to stop imagining or to imagine at all?  I can’t imagine it….can you?