Purges said:
Its interesting that you distinguish between weed and psychedelics. Weed can be a very psychedelic tool at the right levels - when you are really high, but not too high to be monged out and not give a crap about anything. It takes practise to get to / maintain that level but can be very rewarding.
This last week I made the decision to have a break from it, and to be honest I feel crap lol. I haven't had much sleep, so the first half of each day I feel horribly tired, by evening time I am no longer tired, and often can't get to sleep until 3-4 am. Now you may say that is because I rely on weed to get to sleep, which is true, but even before I was a regular smoker I had difficulty maintaining sleep for extended periods of time. At the moment, I am less productive than when I smoked.
What I am trying to say is that it just suits some people better than others. I am going to maintain my abstinence from weed during the week, and keep it as a treat on week ends and see how that suits me as I am trying to make positive changes in lifestyle and diet which weed makes it hard to do.
Weed is a tool, as are other psychedelics. DMT has helped me gain a fresh perspective, and get to the point of quitting weed, weed also, after a DMT trip, lets me access the information gained from a different angle, and helps maintain the meditative mind state that Spice provides.
Weed can be very psychedelic depending on how it is ingested.
Being a health conscious non-tobacco smoker all my life, I would never smoke weed in a joint. Instead, I used to have a 'bottle', namely a 2 litre coke bottle filled up with hash smoke (and no doubt gaseous plastics, aluminium etc.). These things would knock you for six, and I got in the habit of smoking ten of these per day. At first it was only ever great intense fun, but after a couple of years of doing this constantly, some very negative consequences came into being and it was when things started to turn bad, that the experiences became most psychedelic. I had many of the types of experiences that people report on DMT from being in hashish induced trances, but only with none of the openess and feeling none of the joy of the universe. At the very lowest point, I felt as though I had left my body, and viewed myself as being nothing more than a pile of meat and bones with blood squirting through it.
Someone in this thread mentioned that cannabis left them feeling 'stuck in thier mind'. I often struggle to find a way of defining the effects of cannabis but 'stuck in mind' would be a pretty good broad description. To me cannabis is a drug which acentuates all physiological faculties of indulgence, be it appreciation of music, food, sex, social company, and so on. Thus, smoking cannabis can give very good insights into the inner workings of all of these 'faculties of indulgence' and can provide the user with an understanding of the roots of specific expressions of 'mind' that would otherwise remain hidden from him. For example, it was through smoking weed that I figured out that my strong preference for a specific female name took its roots in my psychology as a result of the girl who 'I fancied/fancied me' when I was just six years old, which lead to a very early expression of my understanding and attraction to the opposite sex being sown in my mind, psychologically tied to this specific name. I never get this exact type of psychological insight from say LSD or mushrooms, where my 'insights' tend to be much more in connection with the
life that is around me and also the life that is within me.
Needless to say, I also cannot really handle hash these days and even with a small amount, it doesn't take long before I feeling all kinds of negative consequences. I think for many people, being plunged into 'mind' is quite ok as it was for me in the past also. However, being plunged into 'mind' comes at the expense of being less receptive to 'lifeforce' and for some people, due to various reasons, this is a untenable situation for thier own psyches. Therefore it is quite a common thing that many people report not being able to handle cannabis at all, yet being perfectly ok with much stronger (and therefore supposedly much more potnetially dangerous) hallucinogenics such as Pscilocybin, LSD, and even DMT.