Cannabis was one of the few things I couldn’t quite let go of throughout my insight process. I was attached to the idea that it helps with processing emotions, because that’s what life had taught me. I decided to try a psychoactive dose of the legal THC-derivative distillate and what can I say? I no longer like or need cannabis.
All it did was introduce craving into a system which no longer craves. It ruined my focus, got my mind thinking in words again, reactivated old self-referential loops, and had me craving food and games where previously I was happy with books and meditation.
Down the drain it went, and without a shred of remorse.
This experiment showed me that there are at least two core systems at play with this liberation thing.
There is your biochemical substrate, which I simplify to dopamine.
There is your electrical mind and consciousness.
Your mind is pulled by the gravity of dopamine and uses dopamine in turn to lay neural pathways of learning and conditioning.
No matter how liberated your mind may be, it needs to operate on the wetware of your brain, which weights preferences based on dopaminergic activation.
Cannabis gives your brain-body system a big bump of phasic dopamine which results in it settling into old ways and seeking old pleasures.
But at the same time there seems to be a ‘root-code’ of consciousness which is not dragged into these grooves. Even when behaviour is altered by the cravings of phasic dopamine, this unit can remain aloof and observe as you stuff your face full of chocolate.
This is the root-code system and the controller of your environment, with the caveat that this controlling unit rests atop your dopaminergic substrate so is not 100% independent of it.
I think this is why we can only reprogram ourselves in incremental steps and why a large-scale reprogramming requires a temporary decoupling from reality.
So… the dopaminergic side is like a river of marbles. You have your grooves carved by life and some stimulus triggers the marble run. These marbles will keep running down the grooves until they hit their target and cause an action, if they reach an activation mass. Thoughts are the easiest illustrator of this.
This is why thoughts seem to be constant and consistent. They get triggered by an impetus at t=0 and then they continue down their marble run of habitual mental formations until t=[x] at which point the chain of thought completes and either releases or loops.
Your mind’s root-code does not operate like this. This root-code seems to be on a constant refresh and always to be starting from zero.
So the root-code is like a flickering display of consciousness. You can sometimes see it in your vision as black-frame or white-frame insertions. If you focus on sensations in your fingers you can feel them flickering in and out on the millisecond scale and if you watch closely you can see that they are all actually synced. Your awareness is constantly flickering on and off.
This doesn’t mean that you’re ‘aware’ of a flickering; more that awareness itself is flickering. Every moment is completely new.
But at the same time your marble runs are going t=0, t=1, t=2, etc. Taking the example of thought, these combine to present the illusion of a complete and continuous stream of feelings and words. But if you sit and really observe, you can see that your consciousness is only interacting with the marble run in an (impossibly fast) intermittent manner; like a cartoon that seems to move but is actually a combination of still images.
I believe that this is what they talk about when they say that things are ‘luminous’ in buddhism, and this is what I will use as my meditation object for a while. I think this is the ‘citta’ of mind-moments.
As an aside, meditation feels like ‘just sitting’ now. I can do it in a room full of noisy children just as easily as in a quiet and darkened bedroom, and when I open my eyes at the end I feel little different to when I sat down at the start.
Anyway.
I think that these thoughts and their marble-run nature can be observed through this flickering consciousness and you can start to approach further liberation from the ‘formations’ of your mind by doing so. It is incredibly easy to just detach from a thought if you see it for what it is: a conditioned chemical reaction, no different to a leaf falling from a tree and catching eddies in the wind.
So on one side, taking cannabis made my mental substrate noisy again.
On the other side, it showed me that this consciousness ‘lens’ through which we view the world is a flickering thing.
And on the mechanistic side it confirmed that there are at least three components at play here:
dopaminergic signalling
D1 phasic reward-learning vs D2 tonic baseline stability
neural pathways
engrams of repeated D1 signalling with consciousness binding stimulus to feeling
conscious awareness
the impossibly fast sequencing of still-images of the mind-body system
Neural pathways are the product of a lifetime and will fall away as they are observed though the new consciousness lens.
The dopaminergic signalling, however, is something that can still be cultivated.
Cannabis showed me how much a big phasic spike in dopamine brings discomfort and has gotten me wondering how much these smaller spikes from food and games are impacting the system.
So over the next couple of months I will probably go back to the roots and work on the dopaminergic system. This will include being more intentional with my diet (lower sugar, plenty of omega-3s) and exercise (5-6x per week 45 min Z2 cycling), and continuing my 90 min of sitting meditation each day.
I might also start writing a bit more again, but likely keep it private. I found this was an incredibly effective way to consolidate thoughts on a physical level within the brain, and though the mind is liberated there are still neural pathways lying there dormant which can be manually singled out for pruning.
Away falls another piece of conditioning.
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