Musings on Pot

I used to smoke a lot of pot. Maybe not as much as some people, but quite a bit. I've not smoked any in over four years, nor do I want to, but it's a curious substance. I'm still a bit puzzled as to what it actually does to one's brain, one's mind, one's perception, one's thinking, and one's health. I do know that I experienced its effects in mostly a positive way. I found myself to be more open-minded, more in tune with aspects of the world around me, less biased by previous experience. I found a lot of energy to pursue things; research, poetry, visual art, and though some of the results are obviously the results of a drug-affected mind, some are not. Some aspects of pot's effect on me are similar to meditational experience, especially resting in the present moment and experiencing the world anew in each moment. However, there are aspects which are significantly different. Pot induced a craving for more of the same experience. (Meditation can do this too, actually.) The craving was so strong that my self-centeredness was exacerbated. I wanted to get stoned and enjoy myself and my interest in the happiness and welfare of others was diminished. Pot also scrambled my thinking and destroyed much of my common sense. However, I really can't deny that some of the most amazing and sublime experiences I've ever had were in the middle of nature, hiking in the mountains, stoned on pot. I've also had some less positive experiences where anxiety was a dominant component. I sense that these experiences were bound to decrease over time, and that many of the negative effects were bound to increase. For example, sometimes smoking pot would send me into a stupor, not the fresh constantly renewed mind state I described earlier. I would also get headaches from smoking it. On my path to recovery, I initially wanted to deny that pot had any positive aspects, since I was so close to it back then, I didn't want to allow any possibility that I would revert. However, now that I have some distance from it, I see that it can be profitable to be honest as well. I also see that the meditational path looks a lot sounder, thank goodness. After all, if one's happiness and spiritual progress is predicated on a drug, what happens when the drug runs out? What happens when the drugs effects on you change, as almost all addictive drugs do? This is just more of samsara, or worldy existence. Chasing after sense pleasures which are incapable of providing permanent happiness. Also, if you believe in reincarnation, what happens in the next life when your contact with the drug is broken? Meditational realization, the small amount of it that I have, is more stable than drug-induced changes of mind-state. Its effects could lead to the sort of craving and selfish behavior I described above, but not if it is combined with a spiritual program such as the Buddhist path, where the welfare of others is constantly reinforced. Indeed, Buddhists believe that it is with the blessing of enlightened beings that we make progress, so simple meditation is not enough, and could easily lead one astray in the manner of a drug or in some other manner. I was reminded the other day that in meditation, when something arises, you shouldn't block it, and when I meditated later that day I caught myself trying to block many things, thoughts I perceived to be negative. But actually by blocking them, I was giving them more energy so that they actually persisted, whereas when I stared at the thoughts they unraveled themselves. For example, I began to criticize someone internally, my mental censor deemed the though unworthy, and so I was about to turn away from the thought, but when I looked straight at the thought a wealth of positive aspects of the person spontaneously came to mind. This is very different from my pot-induced experiences. It was very easy for me to block things from coming to strongly to my conscious attention that I didn't want to examine.