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But what, you may well ask, do these three have in common?
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One of my current favorite authors, Michael Pollan, has some intriguing thoughts on their relationship which he shares in the chapter on marijuana in The Botany of Desire*. In this snippet he's talking about Paracelsus, a sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician. (Among his many accomplishments was the invention of laudanum, the tincture of opium that was perhaps the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia until the twentieth century.) In the decades following Pope Innocent's fiat against witchcraft, Paracelsus set to work transforming cannabis, opium, belladonna and other "pagan potions" into healing tinctures, bottling the magic plants and calling them medicines. Michael writes:
"Paracelsus's grand project, which arguably is still going on today, represents one of the many ways the Judeo-Christian tradition has deployed its genius to absorb, or co-opt, the power of the pagan faith it set out to uproot. In much the same way that the new monotheism folded into its rituals the people's traditional pagan holidays and spectacles, it desperately needed to do something about their ancient devotion to magic plants. Indeed, the story of the forbidden fruit in Genesis suggests that nothing was more important.
"The challenge these plants posed to monotheism was profound, for they threatened to divert people's gaze from the sky, where the new God resided, down to the natural world all around them. The magic plants were, and remain, a gravitational force pulling us back to Earth, to matter, away from the there and then of Christian salvation and back to the here and now. Indeed, what these plants do to time is perhaps the most dangerous thing about them - dangerous, that is, from the perspective of a civilization organized on the lines of Christianity and, more recently, capitalism.
"Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come - whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending. More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-circuits the metaphysics of desire on which Christianity and capitalism (and so much else in our civilization) depend.
"What, then, was the knowledge that God wanted to keep from Adam and Eve in the Garden? Theologians will debate this question without end, but it seems to me the most important answer is hidden in plain sight. The content of the knowledge Adam and Eve could gain by tasting of the fruit does not matter nearly as much as its form - that is, the very fact that there was spiritual knowledge of any kind to be had from a tree: from nature. The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn't very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn't exist, not when generations of plant worshiping pagans knew better. So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo. Yes, there is spiritual knowledge in nature, the new God is acknowledging, and its temptations are fierce, but I am fiercer still. Yield to it, and you will be punished.
"So unfolds the drug war's first battle."
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*Take a peek at the book HERE or view a full-length PBS video HERE
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The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
- Carl Sagan
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Saturday, April 14, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
Forget This Post
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Michael Pollan speaking (in The Botany of Desire) about one particular effect of cannabis use:
"The scientists I spoke to were unanimous in citing short-term memory loss as one of the key neurological effects of the cannabinoids. In their own
way, so were the "poets" who tried to describe the experience of cannabis intoxication. All talk about the difficulty of reconstructing what happened mere seconds ago and what a Herculean challenge it becomes to follow the thread of a conversation (or a passage of prose) when one's short-term memory isn't functioning normally.
"Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sensory impression from the kernels of perception we need to remember if we're to get through the day and get done what needs to be done. Much depends on forgetting.
"The THC in marijuana and the brain's endogenous cannabinoids work in much the same way, but THC is stronger and more persistent than anandamide, which, like most neurotransmitters, is designed to break down soon after its release. What this suggests is that smoking marijuana may overstimulate the brain's built-in forgetting faculty, exaggerating its normal operation.
"This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. It helps account for the sharpening of sense perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness, whether by means of drugs or any other technique.
"Boethius, the sixth-century Neoplatonist, said the goal of our spiritual striving was "to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come." Likewise in the Eastern tradition: "Awakening to the present instant", a Zen master has written, "we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant."
Yet we can't get there from here without first forgetting.
~~~~
Cheerfulness, the good conscience, the joyful deed, confidence in the future - all of them depend... on one's being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
~~~~
Michael Pollan speaking (in The Botany of Desire) about one particular effect of cannabis use:
"The scientists I spoke to were unanimous in citing short-term memory loss as one of the key neurological effects of the cannabinoids. In their own
way, so were the "poets" who tried to describe the experience of cannabis intoxication. All talk about the difficulty of reconstructing what happened mere seconds ago and what a Herculean challenge it becomes to follow the thread of a conversation (or a passage of prose) when one's short-term memory isn't functioning normally."Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sensory impression from the kernels of perception we need to remember if we're to get through the day and get done what needs to be done. Much depends on forgetting.
"The THC in marijuana and the brain's endogenous cannabinoids work in much the same way, but THC is stronger and more persistent than anandamide, which, like most neurotransmitters, is designed to break down soon after its release. What this suggests is that smoking marijuana may overstimulate the brain's built-in forgetting faculty, exaggerating its normal operation.
"This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. It helps account for the sharpening of sense perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness, whether by means of drugs or any other technique.
"Boethius, the sixth-century Neoplatonist, said the goal of our spiritual striving was "to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come." Likewise in the Eastern tradition: "Awakening to the present instant", a Zen master has written, "we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant."
Yet we can't get there from here without first forgetting.
~~~~
Cheerfulness, the good conscience, the joyful deed, confidence in the future - all of them depend... on one's being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
~~~~
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