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.

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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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