This meme is already dated. Gummies, not joints. However, that would kill the joke. So . . .
As a lifelong “stoner” myself, I was unpleasantly surprised when my intuitive healer at the time (the very intuitive Dorothy Englehart, who died a few months ago) all of a sudden said to me, “you need to get off marijuana.”
WHAT? That remark, just as she was checking my pulses, hurled from her quiet mouth out of the blue.
“YOU . . . are my ENEMY!!!!” I hurled back.
Then, shocked at my audacity, and even more shocked at the sudden flood of instinctive rage, which showed me, first hand, once again, what addiction looks like, I suddenly sobered down. And though I didn’t tell her then that I would let it go, I did. Right away. That was in late 2021. Thank you, dear Dorothy.
I let go of marijuana, after over half a century. In the last decade or so, I’d only allowed myself one or two tiny tokes every day around 4 p.m., needed to relax after a focused, stressful day. Or so I thought.
I was truly surprised by how easy it was to let go. And to not begin again. My original impetus to “smoke dope,” back when I was 26, was to help open my mind. I had been brought up a saintly Catholic girl, sporting a deeply indoctrinated theoretical framework, dictating (delimiting) possibilities for both perceptions and behavior. This framework was cemented like a helmet onto my (left) brain. And, at some inchoate level, I knew it.
In graduate school, I hungered to answer one primary epistemological/psychological/spiritual question: HOW CAN I LEARN? HOW CAN I REALLY LEARN? By which I meant: how can I allow for novelty?
During that same late ’60s decade, I happened to run cross a pioneering article in Scientific American re: right and left brains . . . WOW! That’s it! I’ve been taught to limit myself to left brain language and logic. How do I access the right brain?
How do I access my right brain? That was what the “dope” was for. I intended whatever energy was trapped in left brain categories to loose itself, flow over the corpus callosum bridge, and flood the right brain, the intuitive brain, which, I discovered, to my vast surprise, is open to the heart, through which the universe pours endless love/light.
Yes, I wanted, I longed, with every fiber of my being, to remove the role-playing persona, and learn to move from the inside out, to open open open.
In my late 30s (1978), I started a community magazine called “OpenSpace” in my hometown, and ran it for two years, bringing together whoever wanted to fully express themselves onto the printed page.
IF, when I die, I have a tombstone, I’d like it to read, “She lived to open space.”
At this point, there’s no point in “smoking dope.” My two brains work together — left brain, where language frames up contents of consciousness, taking its instructions from right brain, open to the infinite mystery of the universe. The result, unusual (especially for my age) mental flexibility, with each possible theoretical “framework” that I (my left brain, my ego) cannot help but construct (as a decided “conspiracy theorist,” i.e., pattern seeker) continuously evaporating into a diaphanous membrane, through which I see, for a while, until even it dissolves, thanks to an even larger, more spacious theoretical, i.e., dot-connecting “framework” beyond that.
It turns out that, for me, “smoking dope” was an outmoded habit, extremely useful as a teaching device for half a century, but in no way needed now.