The soft rush of energy behind the eyes. The light pull at the back of the head. It sometimes feels like a rubber-band that gently snaps – opening the flood gates that turn your fun cannabis high into a fountain of eurekas in your mind.
Insights overflow. Ideas flourish. Powerful concepts arrive. Imagination on fire with a sudden appreciation of fine detail that morphs into an inspiring sense of nostalgia for the right here, right now.
This is the stuff cannabis legend is made of and the reason it is one of the most useful tools for the thinking/creating/connecting brain.
If imagination is the sandbox – cannabis is the rake.
When you think of a young Steve Jobs using cannabis, you don’t see him on the couch with a party-size bag of Doritos and cans of Mountain Dew spread about. You imagine him working out the early designs for the first Apple computer.
When you think of Willie Nelson puffing on a joint while composing a new song you don’t see him giggling incessantly while starring off into space. You imagine him writing a lyrical story, searching for the right melody, slowly layering it all together.
When you imagine the rumors of a young Bill Gates using cannabis while writing code you don’t see him with anything less than focus/intelligence/curiosity and passion.
That’s because cannabis, when used correctly, is the greatest mind-hack of all time. It is the universal door-opener to a wider array of perceptions and heightened senses that no other substance can match.
Of all the high-profile people who have been able to make this all-natural tool work for them to great effect, nobody was better at it than Carl Sagan.
His original book and TV series Cosmos was a thought-provoking look at life in the universe from the perspective of a man who had experienced wonder every day.
Sagan was so masterful in knowing how to use cannabis to unlock his best ideas, choose one to harvest, and then put it into action the next day.
In his now-famous essay about cannabis (Mr. X by Carl Sagan), he summed up perfectly how cannabis connects us all on a mysterious perception level:
“Cannabis enables non-musicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and non-artists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work?” -Carl Sagan
I can answer his question because cannabis has certainly allowed this non-scientist to grasp what it is like to ponder the big questions from a place of free-form curiosity.
As a writer of fantasy and science-fiction, I have studied physics while under the relaxed and imaginative spell of cannabis and felt that I was not just reading but actually absorbing the ideas that I encountered.
The unrelenting gravitational pull of a black hole many light-years away could be felt and understood on a subconscious level that is both abstract and concrete at the same time.
Practiced cannabis use induces reason by calming the emotional pathways and even-ing out perceptions so that the observer is always in a state of neutrality when exploring with the mind’s eye.
A heightened and stimulated ability to reason is the key to using cannabis as a creative tool.
Knowing when the inspiration will be coming downstream, being ready to catch it and document it – then scrutinizing and even acting on it the very next day – is the recipe all of the great cannabis intellectuals used and so can you.
Each bit of inspiring thought is a mysterious gift. So many thoughts pop into our heads daily and the ones we choose to keep working on are the ones that become reality – no matter how far fetched.
