Tender Thoughts

I can feel so broken on the inside when I smoke weed.

And why do I smoke weed?

Answer: identifications.

Before I was old enough or wise enough to understand, I didn't know what I was doing. Smoking weed meant high school, grade 9. My brain 'contains' that imprint in its depths. So when I see my younger brother smoking weed at 14 years old, and I, at 20, at first criticize it, but then come to see it as desirable.

We never pay attention to those moments when peer pressure forms our perspective. The mere fact of good emotions if I do this, tends to make us enact it.

But for me, the moment was stronger because of the explicit association of weed and the culture it represents. Being stoned, itself, was also an association.

Now I do it partly out of addiction, the addiction to the feeling, of being "zoned out" and unable to feel bad. I think, although cannabis tends to suppress neurochemicals, it might promote a 'dopamine' rush. I say this because I feel a sort of 'rush' in my chest and my forehead.

But it is an induction from without. It is not natural to assume the presence of exogenous agent such as cannabis smoke wont effect either your lungs or your thinking. I am committed, at a psychological, or "ontological" level, to detest the notion that weed smoking - or any other substance abuse - is "ok".

There is and there isn't. My mind both says "yes" and rides the waves of fanatical exaggeration, or it dulls itself to wish-washy notions that speaks of the perfection of cannabis; that is, the ridiculous mythos carried by users who extol the physical and spiritual benefits of marijuana.

I'm against it; but I only want to speak of my experience. Of my addiction. Of my struggles in integrating my mind from the shards it was broken into. Weed - my past - the culture it represents and my hidden attachment to it. It can so hard to disidentify when It's midday and I'm tired from all my reading. The thought pops in 'oh, Jordan....we can smoke weed!!!". And my chest and my arms pump up with adrenaline, and I feel it within me, that childish, ADHD energy, the hyperness which consumes my attention.

I wonder what the relationship is between my weed smoking and my eagerness to respond. To identify. Early on, my mind-brain was dysregulated by mothers anxieties. She put into me, and shaped me, to feel emotionally 'needy'. This is the type "C" attachment category.

Borderline people do a great job of making needy people. It's just it. As If I were the "bing" to her "pong". Every generation represents the logical "fit" of the last generation. Each generation of people, giving a particular shape to the next. No one is at fault. Were all responsible to know that. So we can change it.

I can feel myself so desperately different sometimes. I can feel detestable, broken, unconnected with myself and with others. A bore to be with. Annoying, Irritating.

For those who deny object relations, is it merely a coincidence that an enormously irritable woman, prone to bouts of depression, and aggression against those who relate with her, would produce a child who felt defective, annoying, and unlikeable? Or this just the logical consequence of interpersonal relating.

Now imagine mindfulness. A mindful mind knows what it feels and is aware of its multiplicity. When it changes state, it knows it, "catches it", and disidentifies with it. It loosens the hold, allows space for clearer, calmer thinking.

The cycle isn't inevitable. There is no gene that makes people doomed to enact their frustrations. The brain is built to sport mindful self-awareness. Only a society aware in this way can teach it within it's education systems.

Every person you meet is the logical consequence of his genetic-epigenetic proclivities and the experiences, one by one, that he lives through those epigenetic-genetic proclivities.

I found the perfect metaphor for what being high is like. "High", of course, refers to the feeling of being 'raised up' - somehow floating is a popular way of putting it. But it's most like the relationship between the egg/white and the little tiny spot of space at the tip of the egg. This is what being high is like. The totality of the egg is your body, and in being high, you feel as if your consciousness has been removed from 'egg white/yoke' portion and into the little space above.

When your feeling good and your self is feeling fine. Being high is very enjoyable. But if you feel a chip in your armor, and find yourself struggling against negative thoughts...being high can feel like a burden. A bad situation made worse by being "stuck" in this tiny little space in the egg. I feel compressed. Riding, from up above, highly conscious of the fears 'below', in the experientially distant, yet felt body.

Its as if the room has filled up with water and I'm being pushed towards the ceiling, grasping for air. Finding a little space or a bubble to catch my breath, find a soothing thought, or feeling the quietness and peace in my body. But then i think, and I think from here - from this horrible referent - this sense of internal brokenness, of not having a strong enough self; pathetic; weak; easily hurt; prone to despair.

I have truly never healed from the 6 months of trauma. And when I smoke weed, there's always this risk that the spinning wheel will fall on "broken". Experiences, feelings, thoughts and the fear/anxiety cycle they kick off. It is hard to keep clear, stay present; not push away; not let myself lose coherence. To track whats happening and staying with; then letting go; letting go into the ether. You can sleep, you can sleep. Do not be afraid of sleep. Let your body relax, relax into it, into unconsciousness, into the hands of whatever good you hold dear.

I truly feel one grasps a deeper sense of life when one has suffered deeply. The more psychological the suffering; the more it relates to your self, the more you know about the extremities about human experience.

When you've grown into an abused self and have become accustomed to negative, obsessive and anxious thinking, life forces into you a question: the adrenaline and cortisol have super-charged your forebrain, giving you a profound feeling of disembodiment. From here, from the depths of the suffering that psychological fear can create, impels the searching mind to find the "other". The other, I claim, is anything outside of us; any object, held on to. A thought, an orienting devide: the blessed thought we turn to moor us to a good feeling.

How amazing, how amazing that people overlook the relational nature of good feelings. Good feeling is what animals experience together. Bad feelings are what we know, alone.
Although bad feelings can be made all the worse when people, feeling bad, project their bad upon you.

It's as if the bad shows us the reality of the other; while the good, reveals the mystery of unity - of an integrated, coordinated and harmonious flowing.

Who can say if God exists? What I can say is, when I suffer this way, I find myself looking for a thought, some "pointer", oh, "breathe" - but why should "breathe" comfort me? What is ignored is the missing other, speaking, through the suggestibility of communication.

Even the Buddha was a baby. And whatever gains he had, no doubt, were made possible by the internalized other - his mother - who built in him a high capacity for self-exploration.

Self-other, Body-World. The Other, my mommy, my daddy. I see loving hands pouring down upon me, coming to cradle me into it's arms. I feel rocking, a loving, smiling face. Kind eyes. Loving, Happy, blissful.

I never, never, can forget the lesson of these horrible experiences in my life, and what they have shown me about the ontology of the world. Suffering: enter ontology. Happy and Content: Exit Ontology. The human mind cares when it needs to and ignores when it doesn't.

The mind which explores philosophically is shaped by its emotional states. And sometimes, the emotional states are chaotic enough to provide a 'perspective' necessitated by the intensity of he experience. An 'other' is enacted. Thinking, our own thought, our own reflection upon ourselves. Seeing a body, a world, "out there", yet feeling an intense fear and loss of "self". This "self", real or not, represents an orienting awareness. You want the coherency of a memory, and a sense that I "know where I am".

Where am I? A body, a world. A mind, reflecting and knowing. The biggest puzzle - as in the suffering I currently experience - is relational, interpersonal; its about ourselves with one another.

I am in a world with other people, and perhaps knowing the sacred unity of our relations, that is, positing a something that is sacred which needs to be cared for. Call it God, Allah, the Universe. You are positing and assuming an ontological relationship with it.

Without it There is chaos. With it, there is order, life and mind.