Nanodosing Into the Sacred with Lady Ganja
In my last report from a 46 year apprenticeship with Lady Ganja, I promised some tips on nanodosing and microdosing, with a tip of the hat and many gasshos to Magick Man Aleister Crowley. And m0b1us, whatever else he might do, doth keep his promises, so here’s a promise that we will indeed all nanodose into the sacred nowhere else but now here. Microdosing is often usefully paired in sentences with those prankish mushroom teachers and other psychedelics, but today I want you to please lend an ear to the nano dose of Lady Ganja and the scale of the sacred found in silence and the microdose void. Remember: Have some respect!
Have you noticed that the puns and the snickers bubble up through nearly every Cannabis story in the popular media? They just can’t shut up about it, like somebody’s who’s just had their first beer.
The fact that the journalists, bloggers and social media tongue waggers can’t stop their giggles when they start talking about “weed” should tip us all off to the fact that Lady Ganja has a powerful taboo field all around her. Maybe they should quiet themselves and see what She has to teach them. It’s been amusing to watch as the Just The Facts crew titter and squirm at any mention of her Ladyship. “Hee hee! Hoo hoo! It’s time for the good old drug war to go go go!” Of course, these are the stories the scribe’s Global Oligarch paymasters yearn to circulate: There’s too much green to be gathered from the Green Lady, now that the carceral complex is in retreat and racial justice has caught some noospheric wind. Just as the churches all figured out how to position their toll booths on the Stairway to Heaven, Big Cannabis laps up the moolah by posting up between the Green Lady and her erstwhile devotees. Universities and Big Pharma make a grab for the psilocybin we can all grow in our own closets, and shamans go to jail while researchers-come-lately carpet baggers file their patents.
Soon, here in the US, HR will be requiring us all to gather out back of the donut delivery shop where we work and toke together and joke 2getha. I guess there are worse zones of the Multiverse! In short, the Reality Studio already made its money by suppressing Her, so it’s time to celebrate Her and treat Her as a panacea, even while She is carefully stripped of any of her shamanic or sacred qualities. We know the routine. It’s the Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Psychedelic Capitalism, y’all. “Botch your own capacities for ecstasy! Pay us for your cosmic birthright! Sign on eagerly for the bondage, and keep your eyes offa Zion! Call by Midnight Tonight, before interest rates skyrocket!”
But given all that serious moolah, why can’t these spokespeeps for consensus reality keep a straight face around the Green Lady, it seems fair to ask? It may well be a clear cut case of metonymy - contagion by association. For the unprepared, an encounter with a well rolled spliff can yield quite a case of the giggles, so natch when we start talking about Her, the giggles come roaring back. Now m0b1us loves a good belly laugh. Just ask Reader’s Digest: It’s often the best medicine. So even talking about her Ladyship can induce a nice little contact high, and the scribes for the Reality Studio, they just can’t help themselves. They elbow each other in the ribs: “Dood, Dood, Dood: Weed so funny!”
Yet as that coca abuser and mycophobe Sigmund Freud noticed, there’s often depth to be found in the giggle or the slip of the well paid tongue. It’s parataxis, for those keeping score. The uncontainable giggles induced by even the mention of Lady Ganja might remind us that consensus reality is awfully funny and nary the tip tip tip of the iceberg of Truth upon which we now globally go crunch like a planetary scaled Thomas’s English muffin. Our pretense and carefully tended claim that Appearance is Reality slips on a banana peel with some well timed and well intended tokes and jokes. Even the pandemic on the natch can remind us how funny the official story is: Ha ha! We’re all gonna die! Life: Nobody Can Survive It! Why so serious?!
We can and ought to have a good laugh: At ourselves.
In other words, Lady Ganja opens our aperture to Truth. What we take to be real - the mad scramble for stuff and power, the attachment to a stable identity, the loading up of treasure for the long haul while we cling to our suburban tombs and our SUVS, the attempted viral cultural cloning of ourselves into our unique and beautiful friends, kin and lovers, all the immortality cons - just ain’t. All of this shiite is temporary, transient, about to go up in smoke, to add in a grateful reference to those jokester drug war heroes, Cheech and Chong. And at the right time and place, a little bit of the Green Lady opens our eyes to this vanity of vanities until we get back in the SUV, supersize some fries, and get on with our attachments. “Dood, I was so high.” We visit Truth, but return to the I - the very root of, and first letter in, all of the Immortality cons.
Hence, too, the sudden panicked journey into the darkness She can unfold for us without warning. If we have pinned our hopes on the Dominant Narrative That Keeps Shifting, The Ego that Will Figure it All Out and Live Forever, I I I I, we can find ourselves spinning and spiraling into and beyond the depths of suffering and despair. Just say Yes to the Noooooooosphere. Even the greatest and most seasoned of psychonauts, the Shulgins, found themselves whirling into the abyss with Lady Ganja. You know what I am talking about. If you don’t, you will. So have some respect!
Having respect for Lady Ganja begins with leaving her alone for a while until you are Ready. Have you meditated, noted your inputs and outputs, let go of your harbored hopes and grudges and precious attachments? Have you worked your physical fitness to a new threshold, so that you periodically feel and inhabit embodiment as a laugh-out-loud glorious blessing rather than a curse? M0b1us didn’t think so. So take a little break from the Lady if you want to learn from her and intensify the learning and the healing. Even a two day hiatus can focus our attention and our intention. Crowley, in his luminous Ganja dharma teaching, reveals that he acted with remarkable restraint in his apprenticeship with hashish:
First, the use of the minutest care in estimating doses.
Secondly, the rule never to repeat my experiment before the lapse of at least a month.
That’s the nano dose. But we aren’t all Crowley. Some of us need the medicine for our pain, our anxiety, our thriving. You can start, though, with the microdose: Be Still and Know that Lady Ganja is your teacher, so give her a few days of silence and respect when you can. Out of the silence, follow the advice every traveler should take: pack less than half of what you think you need, then half it again. Now half it again like you are re-enacting a version of Zeno’s Paradox. Give praise to Shiva, Tara, Mother Theresa, Captain Crunch, and blaze your glorious herb with just a little more respect out of a teeny one hitter rather than that fat bowled pipe. Or roll that joint of perfection and share it with nine friends. It sometimes takes a village to microdose properly.
That’s a leetle bit of the sacred for ya. When we cultivate respect, we leave the mundane and profane world where Appearance is Reality, and we open to sacred Truth. Just get together with some friends, nanosize that spliff, and find out. Say it ain’t so, and try to keep a straight face while you are at it.
About the Author
Richard Doyle, Ph.D., aka m0bius, is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State University, where he has taught since 1994. He has authored numerous books and open source texts about the wonders of plant medicines and consciousness, including the 2011 release Darwin’s Pharmacy. m0bius has a special fondness and expertise for Ayahuasca, Cannabis, + Mushrooms, and he is especially gifted at assisting those passionate about understanding our dual nature, and our non-dual destinies. m0bius has also been the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the National Science Foundation and the Penn State Alumni Association.
