Whether smoking leads to negative or to positive realizations,
for most users there comes a point where these glimpses of self become too intense. Not everybody finds it comfortable or even acceptable to be so close to emotional truths, and even those who smoke for the purpose of stimulating personal growth and awareness often find themselves hastily seeking a compromise, searching for an acceptable level of comfort from which to perceive the various insights that may be bombarding them.For example, the social worker from San Francisco is aware that some of the most important understandings she gets from being high are almost immediately forgotten; it is these things, as much as the various insights she retains, that she wishes to preserve. Her solution is to accept the inevitability of this process, which she calls "the censor," and to preserve this elusive material until she can confront it at leisure. She explains:
You're
barreling along on some long thought that's getting to its logical conclusion
and suddenly... what was it? What was I thinking about? What was that problem I
was understanding?
Whenever this occurs, I pay special attention. I ask: why is that
so threatening to me? I had better pay special attention to it. And I will
write myself a note: "think about X when you're not stoned, and see how
far you can get with it."
Another way of seeking an appropriate level of comfort is to
enter new areas of understanding slowly and cautiously. Judy, who has seen her
husband undergo significant realizations about himself while stoned, describes
her impression of this process:
After smoking, I might encourage Murray to take a chance and go to places he is normally not comfortable going. He might take a small, tentative step into a new area, and realize that it isn't so threatening, that he can stand to be there. And even if he does have to retreat, he has at least been introduced to a good place. Next time, he may return there not as a tourist, but as a visitor. And eventually, it may become familiar territory.
A Detroit clergyman uses a different image to make the
same point:
There are always new areas that you have to understand about yourself. With marijuana, you can sometimes put your foot in the door, and pry it open a little wider. We all have blind spots about ourselves, and each of these blind spots has a radiation going out from it to other blind spots, to other things in ourselves that we don't want to look at. These blind spots are somehow in cahoots with each other. But if you chase one of them down, the others all give up a little.