Call to My Brother

 Today, I decided to call my brother again. I think the purpose of my call can be called highly selfish because we haven’t talked for years, and when I decided to talk to him, it wasn’t out of brotherly love or anything like that. I think I’m just looking for people who have similar thoughts, views, and roughly the same depth of these thoughts. I love my brothers—recalling myself as a child, I think they were the most important example for me; I didn’t see freedom in anyone else as much as in them. They came to visit only a few times a year—maybe they didn’t think it was rare, since perception of different things is very individual, but I really wanted to see them more often, probably because I saw in them the very example I truly wanted to follow. I remember when they came, I always tagged along with them like a shadow, and when they talked, I usually stayed silent because I tried to soak up all the thoughts coming from them like a sponge. Even with their rare and short appearances, they certainly greatly influenced my life and did it in the best way—I read all the books they recommended, and oddly enough, I really liked those books; I remembered some of their words and sayings for life; I always tried to follow their advice, even if I didn’t always succeed. Yes, I love my brothers, even if we don’t talk for years. And the fact that we don’t have real (truly interesting, not just polite) topics for conversation doesn’t mean we’ve grown apart because we never had them; I never talked to them as equals—maybe this is my attempt to do so. Bogdan, wherever he is now, is doing what he thinks is right, so despite all the danger of his path, I worry little about him, but I understand that what he’s doing requires utmost concentration, so I don’t want to interfere by adding my presence and thoughts to his head; his mind should be as clear as possible. As far as I know, Zhenya might have a bit more free time, so maybe I can talk to him more. But I’m not writing about that.

When talking to Zhenya, I, as always, tried to be myself and be as honest as possible, so after some of my thoughts out loud and honest answers to his questions, he asked me what I smoke. I said I don’t smoke because I don’t like the smell and how strongly it clings, but I consume it in another form—in chocolates. It was very unexpected for me because I hadn’t thought before that people who use weed can be identified by their thinking. From this, I had an alarming question: “How much are my thoughts mine?” How much am I myself, how much does weed affect my consciousness, how much can weed change me, and how much of me will remain after that? I think this is important, so I want to reflect on it. Weed has undoubtedly greatly influenced me; it helped me understand many things, and now I’m starting to doubt whether I understood them or if these thoughts were imposed on me.

I think I need to start from the beginning. And my changes didn’t start with weed—I think that’s one of the key points in my favor. It all started with Lisa. At that time, I was drinking almost every day, cursing myself and life; even in complete despair, sometimes after another drinking session, in proud solitude, I’d walk through the most dangerous places of the most dangerous city in Canada, hoping someone would stab me—in general, I saw no meaning in my life at all. But at the same time, I was communicating with Lisa, who seemed a bit strange to me but interesting. She was interesting precisely because she wasn’t afraid to show her quirks, although there was nothing strange about it; it was more strange to see a person who isn’t afraid to say and do what they want without worrying about others’ opinions. She said she was religious and believed in God, but she was different from the believers I knew; she swore freely when she wanted to, and it wasn’t forced or ugly—it fit perfectly into the conversation, and there was never a feeling that she said something extra or out of place. Also, she didn’t care about holidays and what believers aren’t supposed to do on those days; she called most believers idiots and didn’t seem afraid of going to hell after all that. At first, I just accepted her as she was—not because I was wise enough for that, but because at that time, I didn’t care. But time passed, I lived as if on autopilot; I seemed to have everything I needed: a job, housing, friends with whom we met from time to time at someone’s house or went for barbecues, but for some reason, peace didn’t come. And there was Lisa, who initially tried to fit into our group, then gave up on the company, saying she saw where it was all heading and it wasn’t interesting to her. But even though she distanced herself from the company, she didn’t distance herself from me, although she had several attempts to do so. I don’t know what exactly gave me the strength or wisdom to consider her my friend despite everything—maybe the fact that despite all the quirks, I saw a good person in her—but I’m grateful to myself for that, and after each of her attempts to push me away, I didn’t push back. I didn’t impose myself, but I never refused her communication. We could go more than a month without talking or even seeing each other, despite living in the same house. Over time, she just called me for various trivial reasons, and I suggested going for a walk or having tea; usually, she agreed, and we talked for hours on end. I felt I could tell her a lot, and I did. She almost never pitied me; instead, she gave me advice and a list of literature to read so that I could change something in my life. Probably, that was the key moment for my changes. I was already drowning in a sea of self-pity, and the fact that with her cold yet kind attitude toward me, she seemed to gently but confidently pull me out of my ocean of despair. That’s the kind of friendship we had. Sometimes during our conversations, I was interested in her faith, and she told me various things not only from Christianity; some things she took from Buddhism, and some even from shamanism, but she said Christianity was closest to her. She recommended various books to me, including Castaneda, whose work later greatly influenced me.

Over time, it became easier and easier for me to live; I began to develop an interest in life and different things. It was as if I was learning to live anew. After what I went through, many problems that previously seemed global began to seem like trivial nonsense. After it didn’t matter to me whether I lived or died, something remained in me from that state—probably the realization that death can come at any second, so it’s foolish to waste energy trying to hide or run from it; it’s better to spend my energy living while I have the chance. And it’s even more foolish to waste my life on grudges or other bad emotions that lead to despondency. But I can only explain this now; at that time, I was just starting to feel it but didn’t understand these feelings. At some point then, I decided to try cannabis because its sale is fully legalized here, and there were more stores with different strains and types of cannabis than grocery stores. Since I didn’t want my clothes to smell of it, and smoking in the apartment wasn’t an option, and I didn’t want to do it outside, I found something closest to me—chocolates. I’ve always loved sweets, and this was definitely one of those things I couldn’t imagine my life without. So, I found a chocolate that was recommended for beginners in the comments and bought three of them. They were very small, and if you put three pieces together, it wouldn’t even be half of a regular 100-gram chocolate bar.
I came home and ate the first one. Now, I just had to wait for the effect. After half an hour, I still felt nothing. Fueled by the thought that people said the first time doesn’t hit—even though it wasn’t my first time; the first time was a few years ago—and I thought that my body had completely cleared it, and now it’s like the first time again; another thought was that these were weak chocolates for beginners, so one might not be enough; and the last thought that pushed me to eat another chocolate was that when I take a headache pill, it starts working in 15-20 minutes, but now half an hour had passed, and I felt absolutely no effect. So, armed with all these thoughts, I ate the second chocolate, and after another half hour, the third one. That was my mistake because I didn’t think to read about dosage and consequences. In fact, it was only half a chocolate more than my maximum dose, but I didn’t know that then. About an hour and a half after the first chocolate, it started to take effect. The sensations were too unusual, so they began to confuse me a bit, and over time, the effect grew stronger, and the fear grew proportionally. Since I knew nothing about dosages and what could happen with an overdose, I gradually fell into panic. First, I tried to Google the norms for cannabis intake, but in my state, it was hard to make sense of anything, and the point of doing it after consumption rather than before was lost with each second. Then I panicked; it seemed my heart was beating too fast and irregularly; I was thrown from hot to cold. The first thing that came to mind was to call for help. I wanted to call an ambulance but thought I couldn’t explain everything properly, especially in English; then I wanted to ask for help from friends who lived in the same house, but thought I couldn’t look them in the eye after asking for help for such a trivial reason. I started feeling nauseous; I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, which intensified the nausea, and I barely made it to the toilet to throw up. The world was spinning; everything was blurry; it felt like my blood pressure had reached its maximum, and every capillary in my body, especially my head, was swollen. When I finished vomiting, I had very little strength left, and I no longer wanted to call anyone for help. The fear didn’t go away, but I began to accept it, and the more I accepted my fear, the less important it became. I lay down in bed again; the dizziness and nausea didn’t go away, but at least I could lie down. A thought flashed through my mind: “If I don’t wake up tomorrow, then I won’t wake up.” I caught this thought and held onto it for a bit; I thought it was a shame to die so foolishly; many people wouldn’t understand it; many would judge; it’s a pity for those close to me for whom it would be a heavy blow. But if I think about it differently, after death, I won’t have to experience regret for what I’ve done or the heavy burden of responsibility for the pain I might cause my loved ones with my immensely foolish act. If I wake up tomorrow, everything will remain as it was, and if not, it won’t matter to me anymore. In such a scenario, it seemed ridiculously foolish to feel fear, nervousness, worry, or any other unpleasant emotions. Why experience unpleasant emotions if I can just not do it, since they don’t affect anything anyway? After such reflection, all I wanted was to fall asleep easily and sweetly and maybe see a pleasant dream. I fell asleep.

When I woke up the next day, I was glad. This joy wasn’t wild or inspiring; it didn’t excite me; I was calm and simply glad. At that time, I didn’t yet understand the depth of my joy; I just felt it. Recalling this, I think our feelings are very important and always very deep because we can feel what’s right for us and what’s not, even if we can’t explain it with our minds. Decisions made by the heart cannot be wrong, even if not only the whole world but also your own mind tries to convince you otherwise. I think this event also gave a certain push to the development of my thinking, and although cannabis figures prominently in this story, it wasn’t it but the event itself that prompted these thoughts.
After some time, I bought chocolates again because, unlike fear, my interest didn’t disappear. This time, I prepared. I learned about dosages and what can happen in the worst case; I found out that you can’t die from cannabis—the worst that can happen is poisoning, which is what I had. At first, I ate one chocolate at a time, but when I got used to the new sensations, I gradually tried one and a half, two, and stopped at two and a half because I felt that was my limit.
Over time, I developed my system for taking marijuana. When I want to buy chocolates, first of all, I need to understand why; I need to know the reason firmly—otherwise, I don’t buy. Sometimes, I feel like I’m about to understand something, but it keeps slipping away; in such cases, I bought chocolates and tried to understand it. Sometimes, I wanted to watch something deep, and weed seemed to help me see the full depth of the picture, and sometimes, I just wanted to relax and watch something funny, although even in that case, I saw something completely different from what I expected. Like, for example, the movie Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. I’d watched this comedy before and decided to rewatch it because sometimes I want to see some simple, “dumb” humor, but what I saw amazed me. It was no longer a dumb and strange comedy; it was a drama full of the loneliness of a person who couldn’t find the right example and, trying to remain a good person, got deeply into trouble because, due to other people’s stereotypical thinking, he tried to be someone he wasn’t. Would I have seen this without marijuana? Yes, undoubtedly, I would have. Would I have felt all this without it? No, I don’t think so. The effect of cannabis is very interesting; I’m still trying to understand it. I’d say that this state allows me to concentrate better on one thing without getting distracted by others. What’s interesting is that in this moment of extreme concentration, time tends to slow down—no, it’s more accurate to say that the perception of time changes. I noticed that I can manage my concentrated attention much better in this state and direct it to various things. Perception starts working on a subtler level, on the level of feelings, which is exactly what I lack. Lisa said that according to some science—whether psychosonics or socionics, I don’t remember exactly—I have will in the first place, logic in the second, physics in the third, and emotions last. This means it’s hard for me to feel emotions, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have them; I’d even say I’m a very emotional person, but it’s easier for me to understand emotions than to feel them. It wasn’t surprising to hear this because I’ve been told more than once that I’m one of the calmest people in the world, although inside, I’ve always had a hurricane. So, in a way, with weed, I can better learn to feel feelings. I remember that at first, it was hard for me to keep anything in memory in that state because the effect was focused on “here and now,” so everything else quickly evaporated, and I could start thinking about something and forget what I was thinking about and how it all started within a few seconds. But over time, I learned to be in the moment without losing myself, and now I can monologue for minutes without forgetting where I started and even digress a little without losing the thread of the narrative. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that the more I know myself, the more the line between the state with the effect of cannabis and the sober state blurs. So, again, I have the question: “How much am I myself?” If I abstract from thinking about this and try to feel it, I have no doubt that I am myself. Maybe that’s where I should stop, but I want to write a bit more about my thoughts related to cannabis.

I want to clarify my attitude toward it and describe one more case that greatly influenced me. I don’t know why, but I know for sure that over time, I will stop taking cannabis; I just feel that after some time, the need for it will simply disappear. I don’t know where this knowledge comes from, but I feel that after some time, I will be able to enter this state calmly without outside help. A helper—that’s what I can call cannabis. A helper who can become my friend or my enemy; it depends only on me. Weed itself doesn’t carry anything bad or good; it’s just a force that I can use; it can’t help me or ruin me; I decide how much it will affect me; I can use it, but it would be foolish to think that I can tame or conquer it because, in fact, it’s not necessary. As I wrote earlier, I have a rule: “Before using, I must know exactly why I’m doing it.” If I don’t know or think I just want to, it’s a trap, and I don’t intend to fall into it.

I want to describe one more case when the effect of weed helped me see something. I decided to try meditation for the first time then. I thought that meditation under cannabis would be more effective. That evening, I ate two chocolates and, waiting for the right effect, moved my chair to the window, sat in it as comfortably as possible, facing the window, which showed me several high-rises and a dark, cloudy sky. I closed my eyes and, not really knowing how to do it, just started waiting. I don’t remember what exactly, but I began to think about different things—not because I wanted to think about them, but because they seemed to crawl into my head by themselves. At some point, my leg started itching, but I didn’t scratch it; I decided to follow the advice of some guy from the internet and just observe this sensation. When I focused enough on that spot, it stopped itching; I felt pleasant tingling, as if I felt every nerve there. I got interested and tried to move my attention to other parts of my body. I seemed to feel every nerve on my skin, and when I started to rise higher, I seemed to begin feeling my organs; I felt them with every pulse of blood that my heart desperately made. The higher I went, the more intensely and strongly I felt the heartbeat in my organs; when I reached my face, it felt like millions of tiny needles piercing my skin and hitting my skull, but at the same time, it wasn’t painful at all—it felt more like pleasant tingling, just hundreds of times more detailed. When I reached my brain, it wasn’t as pleasant anymore; now it felt like millions of tiny hammers trying to make a steak out of my brain folds, but at the same time, with each beat, I felt the connection of all these little hammers—it wasn’t an attack on my brain; it was more like the concentration of a huge number of connections, and the more I found them, the more my head exploded with each heartbeat. So, I stopped trying to concentrate even harder and relaxed my grip a bit. Thoughts began to come back to my mind. I don’t remember why, but I started thinking about the moment. What is a moment? Is it a second? No, it’s definitely shorter than a second. How long then? Does it matter? Is it important how long a moment lasts or what it is? And what is it? It stands in the middle between the past and the future. Does it intersect them? No, it just is. But if it is, then it is constantly; we are neither in the past nor in the future—we are only here and now. Does the past and future exist in that case? No, they don’t exist; it’s an illusion. But we can’t ignore them. And we don’t need to; they don’t exist now, in the present—the past remains in the past, and the future in the future. They are as real as the present moment, but they cannot exist in it. The past and the future are things that cannot exist without each other; without the past, there is no future; without the future, there can be no past, and the present moment is a small balancing edge between them. And then I saw lines. On a dark background, bright lines of the past and future intersected by the present, through which they constantly pass. It’s very hard for me to describe it better, so I won’t try; I can only say that I’ve heard somewhere about some loom of fate—I don’t know if that’s what I saw, as I know nothing about the philosophy of this loom, but it sounds very similar to what I saw.

I got up from the chair and started pacing the apartment excitedly; I was joyfully thinking about everything I’d seen. After that, I made a mistake. I liked realizing things so much that I couldn’t stop—it was such a wonderful feeling when you understand something yourself, pulling it not from some book or other resource where other people describe their experience, but pulling it from yourself. And there’s no doubt that it’s correct knowledge because it came to you on its own and doesn’t contradict anything you know. Euphoria engulfed me, and I wanted more. My mistake was greed. I don’t even remember how, but I remember that I put a lot of effort into getting more knowledge. And I began to see loops and paradoxes; I saw them in everything. The loop of the infinity sign haunted me… We are born to die, we die to be born, where the future ends, the past begins, where the past ends, the future begins, everything starts from zero and strives for infinity, just as infinity strives for zero… Paradoxes pursued me… The meaning of life is in death, the meaning of death is in life, the meaning of the past is in the future, the meaning of the future is in the past, the meaning of degradation is in evolution, the meaning of evolution is in degradation… I felt I was plunging too deeply into myself; it was sucking me in; it seemed like time had stopped, but not in the whole world, only for me; I tried to get out of this moment, but when I started resisting, it seemed to suck me in even more; I got scared; I was afraid I was going crazy; I knew for sure that this fear was more than justified because with each second, it was becoming more real. After several attempts, I knew for sure that I couldn’t fight it, and I tried to switch to something else. I started thinking about ordinary things and remembering what I liked to do; after some time, I began to get out of there—it was still pulling me with great force, but the realization that I had a chance to get out was pulling me back. When I came to my senses a bit, I threw up—not from intoxication or anything like that; I threw up from fear, which I still felt with my whole body; for the first time in my life, I threw up from fear. It felt like this fear was coming not so much from my consciousness as from my body, which had tensed every fiber and was still in a state of shock.

Castaneda wrote that knowledge should come easily or with little effort. That evening, I learned that lesson very well.