Lord Shiva and Cannabis: Destroyer and Creator

I first frequented India just about 50 years in the past and returned with a statue of Shiva as my prized memento. This image of frequent transform as the world transforms through cycles of destruction and development sat in my business office in the course of my dependancy psychiatry occupation. With hearth in just one hand, the drum of creation in yet another, Shiva gestures for us to stay relaxed although his dancing crushes mortals’ illusions of permanence. All is in flux.

All through a return to India final thirty day period, I uncovered Shiva is intimately involved with cannabis. Soon after ingesting a poison that threatened the planet, Shiva’s wife gave him cannabis as medication to counteract the poison. It grew to become his constant companion equally as drugs and to aid him relax and meditate. Sacred Hindu texts from 1000 BC history the use of a hashish preparing identified as bhang by Shiva’s devotees in religious rituals. Currently, shops even now market varieties of intoxicating bhang and spice-infused beverages, the oldest identified cannabis edible.

My early attraction to Shiva and eventual fascination with the science and meanings of hashish are a best example of synchronicity (i.e., emotionally billed coincidences) popularized by Carl Jung. The connections concerning Shiva, cannabis, and my skilled curiosity in cannabis’s results on the brain and expertise are just far too uncanny to be disregarded, or effortlessly explained. Delving into why hashish arrived to be linked to Shiva’s function as destroyer, creator, and dispeller of illusion throws some light-weight on all this.

Hashish has an effect on our mind, and hence our intellect, by firming down our purely natural endocannabinoid method (see How Marijuana Functions). Endocannabinoids regulate the action of all other brain neurotransmitter systems. The THC in cannabis resembles normal endocannabinoids, but its exercise is extra potent and for a longer period lasting. As a outcome, THC adjustments the normal harmony amid the brain’s diverse neurotransmitters. This alters our conscious practical experience. Because endocannabinoid receptors are concentrated in precise mind areas, THC in particular alters our knowledge of memory, appetites, time, emotions, and incredibly importantly our perception of novelty and awe. Sights, seems, and strategies are perceived with an extra sense of newness, as nevertheless in no way viewed just before (jamais vu). Regimen stimuli are perceived differently, like how a black mild illuminates a poster in a different way. A rose is just another rose until finally its exceptional fragrance and beautiful shade are attended to and absorbed. Synesthesia, the flowing of perceptions from one particular sensory process into many others, spreads visual and auditory stimuli through the body as thrilling kinesthetic vitality. For case in point, sudden digital notes in Pink Floyd’s new music can resonate outside of mere audio into bodily sensations.

Habituated perceptions of a rose normally categorize it as a commodity to be picked, photographed, acquired, or bought. Beneath the affect of THC, a rose is linked to otherwise. It might be seen as just one member of the plant planet, whose photosynthetic power is necessary to feed all animal lifetime on earth. Devoid of flora, there would be no foods for fauna. The that means of a rose is expanded beyond getting a commodity or a stunning image in a photograph. The typical superficial notion of a rose is now comprehended to be a slim illusion. Hashish can give us a range of strategies to relate to the rose, deepening its which means. This entertaining knowledge can also be liberating. Once the cannabis knowledge wears off, folks may keep a residue of the realization that the entire world can be connected to in additional techniques than earlier identified. Cannabis destroys slavish superficiality as the default way to relate to the earth. This knowledge can be also disturbing to some, skipped by others, and profound for a lot of. Hashish challenges our recurring modes of perception and marriage.

A several cautions right away arrive to intellect. Jack London believed his liquor dependancy helped him pierce through the surface of truth. Sad to say, the realities he saw beneath the floor were being profoundly darkish and depressing. Most likely that is in the mother nature of alcohol’s impression on the brain and the brain. In other words, the “realities” unveiled by a drug could not convey to us the fact about what lies beneath the surface area.

Next, several folks mesmerized by the effects of cannabis turn it into a little something approaching a religion. Alan Watts’ caution about faith is relevant listed here. Watts wrote that faith is a finger pointing in a religious way, but way too several people stop up sucking on the finger as an alternative of traveling in the way it details. In other terms, whichever wisdom may be acquired by way of expertise with cannabis requires to be brought into the sober globe and made use of to information every day lifetime, not simply just continuously revisited when stoned.

Ultimately, there are several means other than cannabis to study how to deepen perceptions of the environment, and not all people is able to combine the sudden problem provided by cannabis. These with psychological sickness may be negatively destabilized. The incredibly younger may not have a sturdy more than enough psychological foundation to take up the impression of cannabis’s problem to typically perceived truth. The consequence may well be a weakening of elementary cognitive processes to the detriment of additional maturation. You have to know the guidelines before being able to crack them creatively.

I have an understanding of now what attracted me to both Shiva and learning hashish. We would be nicely suggested not to panic complicated our recurring perceptions and views. The world, which include ourselves, is in regular flux, regular re-formation by way of destruction and re-generation. All learning is a method of unlearning and relearning, forgetting and accumulating new working experience. Shiva symbolizes this frequent flux, but Hindu tales are myths and need to be counterbalanced by motive. Like Shiva, hashish can supply an working experience that issues our recurring romantic relationship to the environment. In the close, nevertheless, too much use and dependancy are in no way great for the brain, the head, or associations (see How Marijuana Will work).