I hear they’re calling it “Jazz Cabbage”

If and only if you share my neural architecture, I highly recommend taking a couple of doses of a nice THC edible just about an hour before any dentist appointment involving lots of pain (i.e. any dentist appointment). You may need to hang around in town for a little extra time after, to make sure you’re safe to drive home, but it’s well worth it (even if you accidentally have to eat two extra scoops of ice cream, but that’s another thing).

In my extensive experience (today), I find that it (the THC) has two complementary effects (man, either of those words could be spelt wrong):

Firstly, it drastically shortens the memory of pain. Or at least this was one of the deep insights that I had before the cannabinoids (oh, c’mon WordPress, that’s not mispelt!) started to wear off (and I had the thought “how sad, that these deep insights may be lost when normality returns!”): that most of the suffering from physical pain comes from the memory of the pain, not from the pain itself (there may have been other insights, that I’ve forgotten).

So when the hygienist jabs the spinning drill-head into one’s gums and presses it in (“Hm, you’ve got some bleeding on probes here”), one is like “heh, some pain!” like you just saw a (brief bright) shooting star, but a moment later it’s gone, and not a big deal, and pretty much forgotten (more than a real shooting star would be).

Secondly, it distances one from whatever it might be that is experiencing whatever pain is left. When there are big flares of pain, one experiences it as a sort of label (like one might see a large area of purple), but with the emotional content more like “Whoa, looked like that hurt a lot, poor body!”. Even when there was enough pain that the body winced or twitched or whatever, one was just observing it objectively, thinking, “looks like that hurt really a lot, tsk”, rather than getting upset about it.

I think my body’s reactions to the pain were perhaps, guessing, about half what they usually are. So there was still the initial motion / wince, but that slipped quickly out of memory (maybe the body, per se, doesn’t have much in the way of memory? that could be an insight) and so the physiological effects died down again quickly, not being enforced by consciousness-driving emotional effects (see how deep?).

Thinking about it, one major physiological effect that I associate with the dentist is a significant tightness across my chest and very tight breathing, and I have to consciously let go of those a few (several, many) times per session. I did notice that effect once this time, but similarly it wasn’t bothering me, I just casually noticed it, and consciously relaxed it away for the body’s comfort’s sake.

And that was all really nice. Another effect, or maybe a side-effect of the second effect, is that (as I think I’ve mentioned before) my attention gets considerably narrower (and possibly slightly deeper, but not as much deeper as narrower) than usual, and also it was sliding around all here and there, exploring other more or less nearby realities and planes of existence, and just checking in with this reality and the body now and then, not spending much time there.

So looking back it seemed like the torment part of the appointment was very brief (since, I guess, my consciousness and memory were mostly in other realities), but also occupied a pretty long and active time (all that exploring of alternate realities). Not alternate realities like hallucinatory hallucinogen things, but more attention or thought-region or abstract-concept things. Mostly pretty bliss-filled (because I live right?).

Normally I don’t notice one or two little squares of my Bedrock Bar (“Elevate your life”, about 5mg TAC per square), when all I’m doing is the usual stuff around the house. I took four once, I think, and I did notice that, but as I was just doing normal home things that day, the only effect is that I was aware of my consciousness bugging out to other realms and checking back in to see if I’d finished my sentence or whatever.

But apparently after a couple of hours, two squares (10mg TAC) is enough to make a dental appointment much more bearable than usual. Today. For me.

YMMV.

And all! :)

Interlude with Devil’s Lettuce

I haven’t gotten to the point of posting any more in my translation of that tiny piece of Bodhidharma that we’ve been working on, because I’ve been like working and playing Satisfactory and posting too much to r/zen and stuff. (Rumors at work suggest that we might be able to start going into Manhattan for work at least a few days a week starting as early as the second week of September, woot!).

But this other thing that occurred is kind of interesting, so I thought I’d write it down interlude-fashion here meanwhile. Before I like forget.

Marijuana (pot, weed, grass, THC, the Devil’s Lettuce, reefer, Mary Jane) is now legal, in some senses, in the State of New York, and a certain young relative and I went off into the local little park and up into the old quarry, and relaxing on a big rock overlooking the now-treelined main basin, we indulged.

Here is a photograph of my very nice vape “pen”, which is really mostly a battery. The pen was acquired probably without breaking many laws, by someone who travelled to nearby Massachusetts where it is legal to sell such things (it may be technically legal to sell such things in New York as well, but only under like a dispensary license that it not currently obtainable). The cartridge could potentially have been acquired that way as well.

This particular cartridge contains Sativa Blue, or perhaps Blue Sativa, but not I suspect Sativa Blue Dream. Or if I’ve gotten the pair of containers mixed up, it might contain Indica Blue, or perhaps Blue Indica, but given that I didn’t fall asleep when using it, I suspect that this didn’t happen. (Wouldn’t want to put the strain name on the actually cartridge or anything!!)

Today was the first day I’ve indulged out in nature since college, and the most highest I’ve gotten since then also.

It was extremely interesting!

My main memory from college is that, sort of oppositely from alcohol, marijuana made me feel like everything was light and hollow, insubstantial, like you could bat it up into the sky or burst it with a pin.

More recently, I’ve thought of it as focusing my mental attention down into like a small spotlight, so my mind isn’t always jumping around between things, and also can’t keep track of multiple things at once even if one might want it to, but focuses in singly on that single (potentially random) thing.

Today, as I was lying there talking about things with the relative, I was amused to find that I would be in the middle of a relatively long and complicated sentence, with no memory of how the sentence had started or how it was intended to end. But, I found, if I didn’t let that bother me, I could just be still and watch, and my voice would continue on with the sentence just fine, and I would find out what it was about.

That was interesting! And I had some thoughts about it that I want to write down here.

Brief lemma: (A) I used to think that either our inner experience and decisions cause our (our bodies’) actions, or (B) they don’t. (A) has against it that how would that work anyway? and that there are some interesting experiments that show the body starting to do a thing before (in time) the experiencing part of the brain has decided to do the thing. (B) has against it that what our bodies do has a strong correlation with what we experience and report; if our experience is just passive fizz on reality, how could reality come to contain things (like philosophical essays) that talk about experience?

I read somewhere, and I wish I could remember where, a beautiful and obvious-in-retrospect hypothesis that solves most of this: our inner experience and decisions don’t cause our bodies’ actions, nor do the actions cause the experiences, but they are still correlated because they both have a common cause. That is, some currently-mysterious process happens, and that process causes both the body motion, and the subjective experience. The process also (and the remaining mystery is here, around “how does it do that?”) gets feedback from both the bodily and conscious processes, so a later bodily action can for instance consist of the body writing down a rough description of the recent subjective experience.

This struck me as lovely. And now as I lie there and my body is fluently saying a long complex sentence that I personally have completely lost track of, I can see an approach to explaining this: the Devil’s Lettuce is interfering with the connection between the mysterious process and the subjective experience, but not interfering as much with the connection between the MP and the body doing things. So the body goes along doing things relatively well, and the subjective awareness is like “whoa, I’m lost.”

Similarly when I stood up, my subjective mind was like “yow I’m dizzy,” but my body was not unsteady on its (my) feet particularly at all. So again more interference with the subjective branch of the causal chain than the physical one. I’ve felt something similar when I forget to take my Effexor; not that it feels at all like being high, but that I feel like I’m dizzy, except without the dizziness. Which makes no sense at first, but might it we recast it as “my subjective I feels dizzy, but no message to that effect got to/from my body”.

That’s probably all for now. :) How long does one continue feeling effects after partaking in The Reefer? It was like five or six hours ago, and although most of the effects are gone, I still feel a bit more separate than usual from my body. Or something. It could be I’m just sleepy. :) And invigorated from the extremely hilly and rather rocky quarry park!

It was a good day. :)