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Dear Ned,
Please note that this article in no way encourages illegal activity of any kind; it's purely a philosophical discussion.
The spiritual effects of marijuana use depend entirely on who you are, where you are in your journey, and your intention in using it. Drugs aside, people should be psychologically stable and healthy before exploring altered states of consciousness.
Most of our beliefs about illicit drugs stem from social conditioning and our observations of people who abuse them in order to avoid reality. When people who aren't stable and competent in everyday life take recreational drugs, it's like watching someone who just learned to drive climb into the cockpit of an airplane. By contrast, people who are ready for it and have a clear sense of where they want to go can fly to new dimensions of spiritual experience by employing various sacred tools and practices.
Many sincere seekers who embrace marijuana as a sacrament find it spiritually beneficial. Further, many times when people use marijuana for the first time, it opens them up to a whole new realm of possibilities because getting high focuses their attention inward, toward the realm of spirit. Pot alters our state of consciousness and increases alpha brain waves much like meditation and other trance work. In terms of its effects on the aura, it can create a lovely green color and open the heart chakra. So you're right in saying that it loosens your awareness of the physical world, but isn't that one aim of spiritual practice?
Perhaps the most dramatic spiritual effect of marijuana use can be seen in people who are strongly rooted in physical, rational, left-brain thinking. From birth we are programmed with what and how to think, which can become a mental straight jacket that prevents us from moving beyond ordinary levels of wisdom, consciousness and spiritual experience.
Through altered states of consciousness, we can escape from that mental conditioning and expand the scope of our inner horizons. When we get high, we often experience higher levels of love, peace and awareness. Before we experience something, we don't even know that it's possible, but after we've done it at least once, it's easier to find our way back to it without aid of outside influences.
So just trying marijuana can awaken people who are uptight with social conditioning to new spiritual possibilities. Further, when their existing beliefs are shattered, they hopefully learn to question everything else they've assumed to be true, possible, right, good, etc. This blesses them with an open mind, which fosters further personal and spiritual growth.
Marijuana can also turn on parts of the brain that have remained dormant and free our consciousness to wander into new psychic territory. According to at least one very involved study, using marijuana can profoundly increase a person's chances of having an out of body experience. Marijuana users are also far more likely to report experiences of ESP, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance and other psychic phenomena. In lab experiments, regular marijuana users have also scored significantly higher on psychic tests than non-users.
Similar studies have found a negative correlation between ESP scoring and alcohol use, and scientists have noted that marijuana affects the brain differently from drugs like alcohol, nicotine and cocaine. For example, marijuana seems to generate the growth of new brain cells and stimulate brain cells in ways that combat depression and other mood disorders, where the other drugs have an opposite effect.
Marijuana users also frequently report spiritual experiences, such as feeling connected to All That Is; contact with Divine beings like spirits, angels and guides; a deep sense of peace and contentment; a shift in their values away from materialism toward more spiritual interests and concerns, etc. Just meeting spiritual beings or having an out of body experience can spiritually transform people by opening them up to all sorts of new possibilities, allowing them to shed limiting fears, and launching them on a quest for new wisdom and experience.
Further, the term to get high accurately reflects marijuana's spiritual effects. When most people smoke marijuana, they get fully present in the moment, drop all emotional resistance and sink into a wonderful state of appreciation. As a result, their vibration skyrockets. When our vibration is soaring, we're more open to life and other people, which facilitates greater psychic and spiritual awareness. (Those who feel paranoid on marijuana should definitely avoid it, and might view this as a sign that they have a lot of repressed fears to be healed and released.)
Since marijuana doesn't lower our vibration and it isn't addictive, we don't have to worry about lower astral entities as we do with other substances like alcohol. In fact, smudging with marijuana can dispel dark energies and cleanse the psychic atmosphere like sage does, for its energetic tone resonates with purification, liberation, peace and love.
All of this aside, please understand that I am just explaining why marijuana may have spiritually beneficial effects on some people. I am not in any way trying to convince you to change your mind about what is best for you personally, nor am I advocating the use of mind altering drugs for spiritual growth. Scientists have learned that the body produces its own psychedelic chemicals, so when we ingest a mind altering drug, we're not introducing anything truly foreign into our bodies. This means we don't NEED things like marijuana in order to attain the states of consciousness they induce.
I also believe that there is a point early on in every conscious spiritual journey when the use of mind altering substances becomes more limiting than beneficial. We might equate this with becoming an astronaut: when you can soar into the cosmos in a rocket, climbing into the cockpit of that airplane I mentioned earlier will prevent you from going as far and as high as you could without it.
Marijuana has been used as a spiritual tool for ages, and like any other tool, it can be used for destructive or constructive purposes. If spiritual seekers take a wise, mature approach, using marijuana may expand their consciousness and help them tap new psychic ability. --Julia
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