“Have Some Respect!" Learning to Learn from Cannabis

By m0bius

2002. It was the very first time the Universe did grace me with Ayahuasca, and “I” was in the vortex. For what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a massively interconnected galactically scaled plant intelligence, nowhere else but now here!

Mama was manifesting, as many readers might well relate, as Something Else Entirely, and I was at a complete loss of how to respond. What was happening was impossible. For just as the anthropologists had reported directly but often incredulously from their shamanic informants, this plant was a doctore, a healer. A teacher! The unmistakable impression that I was being instructed directly was unshakeable, definitive - impossible to ignore or fathom. “The teacher plants are real!” I somehow reflected to myself within the maelstrom. “And cannabis has been my teacher?!”

“AND HAVE SOME RESPECT!” 

This was way weirder than machine elves, Terence McKenna’s quirky and enchanted denizens of the ‘tween.  This was one plant teaching me how to interact with another, with whom I was already well acquainted, nowhere else but nowhere.

Mamahuasca can be, as Kat Courtney points out in her remarkable book, a “chatty Cathy”, and here she was, straight and to the point, instructing me directly in and via my own noggin. For thirty years or so, off and on, I thought I was smoking cannabis, when it just so happens that the girl was smoking me. And a few months later Lady Ganja -  she can also be a real chatty Cathy, if we have ears to hear her - whispered it again directly into my inward ear: You’ve only begun to learn how to smoke! 

The very concept of “drug” presented one major obstacle in my all too lengthy pilgrimage to this plant teacher: I thought I was inhaling a “substance” when I was involved in a relationship. True, growing the plant itself can teach us this essential intimacy of cannabis. But it can be easy to forget this co-evolutionary dance within the language of chemistry, where we pretend that the compounds are somehow separate from our own interaction with them.  While it may seem overly credulous to take our subjective encounters with plant agency seriously, it certainly requires no more credulity than the interaction of isolated bits of matter miraculously cohering into consciousness - the very premise of that reductionism.

Even our paradigm of “medicine” can distort this desire Ganja has for intimacy and instruction. When each week we learn of novel new cannabinoid compounds isolated in university and industry labs, we can and should marvel that cannabis science is back in a big way, but we also risk unknowingly ingesting a reductionist paradigm that reduces a complex and deeply intelligent plant to its molecules. We risk treating a palpably sentient being in symbiosis with humans as a mere container for compounds. Within this paradigm, when we smoke, eat or vape cannabis, we literally don’t know what we are doing, and we forget our relationship to the plant. But with a little bit of experiment and practice, and a lot more respect: symbiogenesis is. You really can learn directly from a plant!

Are We At War with Plants?

The current context is truly a wonder to those of us who grew up in the War Against Plants. With medical and recreational legalization, cannabis is now widely available as a medicine without the massive fear and incarceration endemic to  the 1930s onward. But are we maximizing the healing and spiritual potential of this plant?  Are we treating her with the respect she has every right to expect? When we offer her that respect, that love, she mirrors it back to us, and then some.

For Lady Ganja can be an exquisite shamanic teacher hidden in plain sight. I know she gets a good laugh - it’s a bit of a cackle - when she reflects on all of these humans who think they are  “using” her medically or recreationally. Oh, she’ll play along for the slow jam and the long game. She’s a seductive trickster healer power plant alright. Coupled with a meditative practice, she has been a powerful spiritual ally. She’s mighty sensitive to “set” and “setting”, so deep awareness of expectations and intent are fundamental to any healing cannabis practice. Along with reflective knowledge of dosage, strain, cannabinoids, and terpenes, a personalized cannabis spiritual dieta can help you reset your attention and intention to learn everything there is to learn from this remarkable teacher. She’ll teach you how to heal even as she guides you to the galactic scaled plant intelligence, the divine, and beyond.

Become a plant symbiont already, and enroll in evolution school with Lady Ganja. She’ll tell you what’s what!

Next month: Nano and micro dosing with Lady Ganja and Special Guest Star Aleister Crowley.