On the other hand, I very often have magnificent creative
insights when very stoned, and leap up to capture them on a note card, which I save for future use. A strong consciousness and will, a highly developed critical sense, and carefully nurtured self-editorial ability are necessary to separate the banal and trivial from the golden glimpse, the kernel of insight that often exists in my stoned jottings. Carpe diem is the key—seize the moment when the insight occurs, write it down quickly and hot, and edit and criticize it later. It's a two-edged sword; often my stoned writing is too rambling or parenthetical, but just as often being a bit stoned really helps the flow of writing and thought. So there are times when smoking marijuana is very suitable, and times when it's not suitable at all. Part of the value of long-term marijuana use is knowing which is which from experience.Marijuana, like all hallucinogens, is a wonderful teacher. Although its most famous value in creativity is as a source of inspiration and suggester of things, it is also perhaps the world's best herb for creative appreciation Whether listening to music, watching TV or a movie, reading poetry, mulling over one's thoughts in a pensive mood, or sensuously touching the skin of a loved one, marijuana sharpens the senses. That is its great virtue and reward. Baudelaire had a sense of this in his magnificent phrase about hashish, "the mirror that magnifies." Allen Ginsberg wrote the definitive statement about marijuana's effect on consciousness in general: "The paradoxical key to this bizarre impasse of awareness is precisely that the marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention from habitual shallow, purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand ideological interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena."
In a world glutted with information, desensitized by television and telephone and endless tabloid journalism, this directness and intensity of perception is marijuana's major gift to humanity. From the historical perspective it seems to me that marijuana is the perfect drug for the mid-twentieth century, and its massive increase in use throughout the world in the 1960s is extremely appropriate for this time and place. Of course, LSD and the major hallucinogens are greater, if more demanding, teachers: but they are ideal for advanced students7 while marijuana is generally suited for everyone.
Insights while stoned. I've had so many valuable insights while stoned that to describe them all would comprise a decade's autobiography. But I would like to mention one that has repeatedly proven invaluable over the years. I believe that marijuana's oft-mentioned ability to interfere with immediate memory ("short-term memory loss" ) has another facet, which I call "long-term memory gain." I believe marijuana is helpful in delving swiftly and directly into many levels of consciousness, including those the psychologists call "subconsciousness." A great part of the untapped potential of the human mind lies in the reservoir of archetypal memory, not only tucking into the memory bank everything that happens in this life7 but also many things that have happened in previous lives. Often this involves the most profound of human senses, deja vu.
I pride myself on not often being guilty of fuzzy or "magical" thinking, but I profoundly believe in many levels of consciousness, in reincarnation, and in marijuana's ability to open up the creaking doors of awareness of multiple realities coexisting simultaneously in my life. T he first time I had an insight into this occurred when I was a graduate student. A friend of mine had some relatives visiting him, including a little girl cousin about five or six years old, and my girlfriend and I went over to his house to smoke some fine Afghani hash that had just arrived in town. After the kids were put to bed we settled down for some serious exploration of this fine, crumbly herb. We'd all gotten pretty stoned and were sitting out on an enclosed porch watching the heavens roll by, a very clear chilly midnight with the stars and moon ever-so-bright, listening to records and chatting. The little girl wasn't able to sleep and came out to the porch rubbing her fists in her eyes. "What are you doing, Daddy?" she mumbled to her father, who was just reloading the hash pipe.
Quietly, without any put-ons or razzle-dazzle, he told her that we were smoking hashish and showed her how to burn it a little and crumble it and put it in the pipe, light it, and toke on it slowly and carefully. I was very stoned and dreamy, enjoying the crisp air and wonderful stars and this little tableau happening; and suddenly I was overwhelmed with a sense that this had all happened before, had all happened to me before. The scene was stunningly familiar: the little girl learning how to smoke dope from her kindly father, an intimate family scene going back to prehistory, an overwhelming sense that we were in a smoky cave in Afghanistan in maybe 1500 B.C. and the old man was carefully, sensitively, teaching the child a tradition already ancient. An illusion, a "memory hallucination," perhaps. Perhaps?
But I felt that I had suddenly tapped into a great cosmic flow of reality, a sensation that truly I had witnessed such a scene before and it was in a Himalayan cave long ago. I have had a conviction of having lived in ancient Afghanistan (where I've never lived in this life, though I spent a year in India) in a past life ever since and have had this conviction confirmed by other experiences many times over the years. But that is not the insight. The insight is that the use of mind drugs can make a person aware of other levels of reality and experience that might never otherwise be awakened. And by "experience" here I mean personal experience, an unshakable recollection of things that have happened to me in circumstances that are not familiar from this life's thirty-six years on the planet. And that are made available, often through deja vu sensations, by the judicious use of cannabis.