Pot Stories for the Soul, page 15
Pam and I left with plans to meet up with Darby and Lee at a restaurant after getting a motel room for the night. About a block from the boys’ house, Pam made me stop by a small stand of trees. She ran into the woods to relieve herself. That supper was the last time I saw Darby.
I ran into Lee a year or so later in a commune. It was called Rainbow’s End, named for a Doors’ song, and run by deflated former radicals. When I asked after Lem, Lee told me that Lem had been mauled to death by a stray cat that had gotten into the house the summer after Pam’s and my visit. Darby had then gotten another gerbil he named Rommel, the Desert Rat. Lee assured me that Darby had reformed in regard to his treatment of rodents and that, as far as Lee knew, Darby had kept Rommel straight.
Unfolding the Quantum Butterfly
RAY TESLA
So my brain unfolded in April of 2001 and I went into a higher dimension. Mystic experiences are often discussed as if they’re the soul province of mountain-sitting Tibetan monks and the delusional, but the world’s not so exclusive sometimes. The agony and the ecstasy can hit you anywhere, anytime, and leave you just as fast.
I thought I was locked out of the club myself until a gigantic quantum butterfly opened its wings in my parietal lobe and, for a few hours, I lived in a limitless reality where there was no such thing as time. That tends to change how you look at daily existence. It remains one of the happiest experiences of my life.
Just like everyone thinks before this kind of thing happens to them, I didn’t believe in visions.
I was in the dorms in college; I’d been having one of the best weeks ever, studying journalism and Tae Kwon Do and lying in the sun with my friends and just dopily grinning all day long. It seemed to be leading up to something.
I’d smoked with some of my friends early in the day; it’s been my experience that pot tends to both sensitize the self and to exaggerate the emotions, for better or worse, but marijuana does not spontaneously create sensations like the following one. This was not a drug experience. This was something else.
I was alone in my room, typing at the computer, and something hit me. I was suddenly overflowing with ecstasy and euphoria. I could barely contain all of it; I was sitting in my chair and I could suddenly see the sense of linear time in my brain as a physical thing.
It was like I could see the clusters of neurons where I stored my associations with the idea of “time.” It was an aggregate of associations and beliefs, all of the images I associated with linear time—ventilation shafts, rivers, roads, metal corridors—and they all added up to an image that appeared in the shape of a snake or a worm. I also perceived that either it wasn’t meant to be there, almost as if it was a parasite—put there by somebody or something—or that it was something that I had outgrown.
I decided to approach it shamanically, to work with it, to see what it wanted. Could it be a caterpillar, I wondered, just waiting to become something higher, more evolved? With a bit of coaxing, will, and imagination, this proved true.
I hatched it in my imagination and suddenly I could see it like a huge, shimmering cross between a butterfly and a quantum cloud. It fluttered slowly, and I was suddenly struck by the depth, the texture of the world: the infinite possibilities of interaction between myself and everything around me.
Imagine being a character in a two-dimensional TV show that suddenly remembers that he’s an actor in the three-dimensional world. I remembered, I think, a higher dimension. I was suddenly able to see the moment, the infinite possibilities around me, that I really could do anything once I had sloughed off the chains of narrative and linear time.
I saw my friends in the hall, and when I embraced and talked to them, it was like light dancing into itself—infinite love with no suspicion or hesitance. I was operating as a full human being, not imposing limits. It was love light, love light.
I went out into the sun. It’s a blur from there. Love light.
After a day or so, it faded, slowly at first, and then altogether, as I slipped back into the old patterns, still radically altered but without that catastrophic bliss overload, leaving me trying to piece together what had happened so that I could get back to that state.
The psychic trigger was the growing realization, extrapolated from my martial arts work, that both the past, and even more so the future, are fictions that we use to limit ourselves. The problem isn’t how we interpret the past, it’s that we think we can see the future and predict future events, which amounts to locking ourselves in chains. We labor in our minds over what we can and can’t do, which is laziness. It’s not up to us to determine the results of our actions; it’s up to the world. Otherwise, we’re fastening our ankles to stones and not living human lives. I wanted to eradicate the idea of the future in my mind. Then the situation would really become clear and action that much freer and truer.
I remain altered. It was this experience that really awakened the feeling that I had an energy field, for lack of a better term. I also began to walk around with a constant, low-grade feeling of physical euphoria, which, although nowhere near as overwhelming as the original experience, remains present. It also awakened basic psychic abilities; that is, I soon realized that in conversation with other people, the most important thing wasn’t what was being said, but the intent in each person’s mind, that what each person was thinking was just as important to good communication as what was being said—if not more important. Several other revelations followed; it was one of several experiences I had that year in which I could step back and say, “I’ve grown up.”
Also, it suddenly dawned on me why so many postadolescent girls get butterfly tattoos.
Months later, I startlingly found references to the experience I’d had in literature. In the 1910 story “The Surgeon” by the Hungarian writer, doctor, and opiate addict Géza Csáth, translated into English in 1980, a neurosurgeon talks to an acquaintance in an absinthe café:I have found time in the brain. It doesn’t differ externally from an ordinary brain cell. Yet it’s the nucleus of misery, sickness, the senseless sorrow of passing on. It can be quantitatively greater in one man than another. It elaborates its appendages, it branches and forks like a polyp into the fresh and healthy brain—hence into every aspect of our thoughts.
Of course, this is a great task for the surgeon, but it’s absolutely simple. All we have to know is what to cut. I know it. And I’ll offer my discovery to the man who wishes above all to be rid of time, who is borne down by the idea of passing on . . . I just spoon out this evil hornet’s nest of human grief. In a few minutes the whole thing’s finished. I hand the time cells round in a dish . . .
I waken the fellow . . . This is the man of the future, the really new man who’s able to solve today’s secrets and tomorrow’s truth with his fresh clean brain. He has total recall because facts don’t pass away for him—they line themselves up as equal powers in his consciousness . . . Time has exhausted itself! All of the psychic energy stolen from us by the silent madness of mortality is left over for us in the form of tremendous life-energy.
Csáth also suggests this would lead to immortality! But my view was that time wasn’t so hardwired, more of a new arrival on the scene, a fictional concept created by society and only enforced on Western perceptions shortly before the Industrial Revolution. As the anarchist writer John Zerzan has said, “Cause-and-effect exists, time doesn’t.”
Then, from the notorious and brilliant Aleister Crowley, in Liber LXV (Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente):I am the Heart; and the Snake is entwined
About the invisible core of the mind.
Rise, O my snake! It is now the hour
Of the hooded and holy ineffable flower.
Rise, O my snake, into brilliance of bloom . . .
Much of Crowley’s writings, like a lot of more recent psychology, philosophy, and social movements, spoke to the idea that man is an unrealized being and that there are concrete techniques to evolve to a higher level. Liber LXV is a poetic account of that process of evolution, and what is described above—the opening of the snake into the flower—is the very first passage.
Robert Anton Wilson, the novelist and consciousness theorist, had this to say about one of Crowley’s drawings from The Book of Thoth: “The serpent is the rising of the Kundalini serpent, a Hindu metaphor for imprinting this Circuit V neurosomatic bliss-control . . . Temporary neurosomatic consciousness can be acquired by (a) the yoga practice of pranayama breathing and (b) for those who can handle it, by ingestion of cannabis drugs, such as hashish and marijuana, which trigger neurotransmitters that activate this circuit.”
I didn’t find these texts until several months after my experience. It was a stunning early introduction to the strange world of inner space. And it certainly encouraged me to continue to peel the lid off that inner space and keep looking, for years to come.
Political Protest
Blessing in Disguise
JACK HERER
I was thirty years old when I first started smoking pot. That was the summer of 1969, and my life would never be the same. Everything was immeasurably enhanced—eating food, making love, listening to music—so it was completely understandable that I started dealing pot in the spring of 1970. Four years later, “Captain” Ed Adair, my ally in the marketing of counterculture posters, tie-dyed clothes, and general head gear, insisted that we take a joint oath: “We swear by our life and our love for it that we will work every day of our lives, all day, all night, to legalize pot—until we’re dead, or it’s legal, or we can quit when we’ve turned eighty-four.”
The more I learned about marijuana and the suppressed history of hemp, the angrier I became that I had never heard any of it during my entire formal and informal education. In May 1980, I began a series of protests on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Federal Building in Westwood that would last for as many as one hundred days at a time. The demonstrators fed, clothed, and provided portable bathrooms for petitioners who were attempting to get legalization initiatives on the local and state ballots.
On the flagpole, we hung a huge marijuana-leaf flag underneath the American flag. The local and federal police were friendly and trusting. Often, instead of busting drunks, they would drop them off to sober up with the pot protesters.
One morning in January 1981, President-Elect Ronald Reagan came to Westwood. It was five days before his inauguration, and he needed a haircut from his favorite barber. With his entourage of Secret Service agents, Reagan visited the Federal Building.
“You’re doing a fine job,” he told the manager, “and I want you to know that you can bring any of your problems to us. Incidentally, why are those Canadians down on the lawn?”
Reagan had mistaken the five-pointed hemp leaf for the maple leaf that is featured on the Canadian flag.
“They’re not Canadians,” said the building manager. “Those are the marijuana protesters, and they live down there twenty-four hours a day.”
“Well,” said Reagan, “I’ll be on the job in a few days, and I’ll see what I can do for you.”
That dialogue was reported by one of the secretaries in the manager’s office who happened to support the initiative. In the evenings after work, she got high with the demonstrators and let them take showers at her home.
A week later, after only two days in office, amid celebrating the return of the State Department hostages from Iran, Reagan reissued a World War II anti-sabotage act that had originally been passed in 1943 as a wartime measure to prohibit anyone, such as saboteurs, from being on federal property after regular business hours. So six of us were arrested for registering voters on federal property after dark.
Arrested, that is, for patriotism above and beyond the call of duty.
Unlike the five others, I refused to accept a year of unsupervised probation and pay the maximum fine of $5. (That was the original amount specified; the law was reenacted so hastily that federal authorities had neglected to adjust the fine for inflation.)
In court, Federal Judge Malcolm Lucas—a Richard Nixon appointee, later named chief justice of the California Supreme Court by his former law partner, then-Governor George Deukmejian—asked the supervising officer, “Now, what were these people doing there all night long?”
“Registering voters and listening to music.”
“Oh? What kind of music?”
“Things like the Grateful Dead.”
Whereupon the judge suddenly stood up and roared, “I threw my own son out of the house in 1975 for listening to them. As far as I’m concerned, the Grateful Dead would be better off appreciably deceased!”
He then sentenced me to fourteen days in jail.
In my defense, I told Judge Lucas, “I can’t think of a higher honor that I could ever have in my life than going to jail for registering voters after dark on federal property at the busiest intersection in the country. If I’m not willing to do that, how can I call myself an American?”
I appealed my conviction all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but they wouldn’t hear the case. In July 1983, I did my time in Terminal Island Federal Prison. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I had never been given the opportunity to write so clearly and without interruption.
In that dreary cell, I composed an outline for a comprehensive book about hemp, which I called The Emperor Wears No Clothes after the Hans Christian Anderson fable in which the emperor gives his gold to swindling tailors to be made into fabric for his imperial robes, but it is stolen. I saw a metaphor there for the U.S. government. It struck me as the perfect analogy for creating laws against hemp/marijuana. The most useful plant would become the most criminal.
And, to extend the metaphor, “only those with pure eyes could see that the clothes were not made of gold.”
I scribbled notes in my jail cell based on treatises I had written and published about hemp entitled Everything You Should’ve Learned About Marijuana, But Weren’t Taught in School. That outline turned into the first edition of Emperor, which I published in 1985.
Without major distributors, wholesalers, advertising, or reviews, the book became an underground best seller: four hundrde thousand copies were promptly sold in the United States, mostly on college campuses during my hemp tours in the late ’80s and early ’90s; two hundred fifty thousand copies of translated editions were sold in Germany (one hundred fifty thousand), France, England, Italy, Japan, and Australia, with more translations scheduled for Spain, Poland, and Greece.
My partner in hemp, Captain Ed Adair, died in 1991.
Three years later, when I was presented with an award for activism at the annual conference of the Drug Policy Foundation—a respectable drug-reform organization based in Washington, D.C., which had previously given awards to former presidential candidate George McGovern and economist Milton Friedman—I delivered my acceptance speech in a green 100 percent hemp suit, a hemp shirt and tie, hemp hat and sneakers, and underneath was the same hemp T-shirt that I wear every day (one of an identical dozen), proclaiming, HEMP: HELP ELIMINATE MARIJUANA PROHIBITION and on the flip side, HEMP FOR THE OVERALL MAJORITY FOR EARTH’S PAPER, FIBER, FUEL.
I said that I was accepting my award for Captain Ed, too. However, I neglected to thank Ronald Reagan.
Postscript: At the annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, a new strain of marijuana, four years in development, was christened “Jack Herer.” He mused, “Long after I’ve died, people will be smoking Jack Herer.” He died in April 2010 at age seventy. On the first anniversary of his death, High Times asked its readers: “Should 4/20 be renamed Jack Herer Day?”
For and Against
RUTH STRASSBERG
My memory’s a little (a lot) fuzzy on the details, but I know it happened in the early ’70s (possibly late ’60s) since it was a combination smoke-in and Vietnam protest in New York City. Who knows, you may have been there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other people send you this story.
I can’t remember if it started from Washington Square or Central Park, up Fifth Avenue, smoking pot, to protest in front of Attorney General John Mitchell’s apartment on Fifth Avenue and a street in the eighties. I believe it was probably from Washington Square because I remember a very long walk and all of us being very stoned.
I believe Abbie Hoffman was our leader, but even that detail has faded with the years and billows of pot smoke. We were so stoned, in fact, that we went several blocks too far and had to backtrack to the Mitchell’s apartment. And, no, John Mitchell didn’t make an appearance, but Martha stuck her head out the window.
Students for a Democratic Society
JOHN JOHNSON
Great, now I have to relive those times. In 1966 or so, we had an SDS office on Hyperion in Silver Lake. I was rooming with Mike Klonsky a couple of blocks away. People would come in from around the country and crash there. Other locals would hang out a lot.
One guy decided to store four kilos of grass under the house. Mike found out about it (the house was in his name) and told the guy he was an idiot and to get the dope out of there. I did not know about this.
That night Mike and I are at home, and a bottle full of liquid crashes through our window (we were on the second floor of a house). We had been getting right-wing threats and a lot of police and FBI harassment at the time. So I thought we were under attack.
Mike and I stayed up the rest of the night with a shotgun. Around 5:00 AM, I hear a car slowly coming up our hill. Couldn’t see it. As it gets to our house, I ready the shotgun. Something comes flying out of the car. It was the Los Angeles Times being delivered. Obviously, the guy Mike told off was the person who threw the Coke bottle through our window. He heard about this shotgun incident and fled the city.
