SEVEN
Coming Fully to Your Senses
Each of us is an opening for God’s creation to flow into us through our senses.
It’s said that we are the eyes and ears of God as we use all our various senses to absorb as much beauty as we possibly can!
In the world of shadow and light we may often encounter the unknown as we discover through our senses that we and nature are one whole – and by sharing our sensory delights with the universe, we can feel fully at home in this universe.
We often think of getting high as a mostly passive physical experience, where you just stop moving and trip off in an interior flow of experience. Maybe you and your partner get caught up in an initial buzz of chatting, eagerly recalling something that happened earlier that day, sharing flashes of insight, reliving upsurging memories. But at some point, one or both of you might get tired of the head-tripping and remember that you’re free to silence the mental chatter whenever you want to.
You can then spontaneously shift into focusing your attention on the pure pleasure of present-moment perceptions – the overt sensory realm of consciousness.
Marijuana is prized for its ability to shift your mind’s focus into sensory appreciation mode.1 Suddenly it can seem that the world around you has come alive and you’re seeing with fresh eyes – everything becomes more colorful, more beautiful, artistically touched. Words fall away, the mind becomes silent, and you become pleasurably engulfed in whatever natural or man-made beauty surrounds you on all sides.
What’s going on here? Scientifically, as a report from the National Institutes of Health states, “THC stimulates neurons in the reward system of the brain to release the signaling chemical dopamine at levels higher than typically observed in response to natural stimuli. This flood of dopamine contributes to the pleasurable ‘high’ that those who use recreational marijuana seek.”
In other words, when arriving in the brain, cannabis carries the biochemical power to amplify the pleasure of pure perception. You experience the world around you with fresh, innocent eyes – and are often stunned by the beauty surrounding you.
You might, for instance, realize that you’ve been chattering nonstop for ten minutes . . . so you consciously pause and quiet the mental buzz, and then you shift your focus outward and tune in to an enchanting perceptual experience. In a couple getting high together, this shift may happen to one person first, and then quite often the partner, having noticed the other person’s sudden shift into quiet perception mode, will do the same. Suddenly both of you are tuned in to the “gazing” function of the brain, seeing and hearing and breathing and smelling, happily absorbing the shared sensory universe that surrounds you both.
This nonverbal act of sharing the abundance of beauty all around you is a primary bonding process in and of itself. And it often expands into more fully taking in the other person’s physical presence through mutual eye-gazing and heart-connecting. Or perhaps the two of you might get up and stroll around together, enjoying flashes of aesthetic beauty.
This shift into movement can lead to more intimate movements as well, goofing and touching and hugging and kissing and so forth. As the Rolling Stones pointed out in their famous cover of a traditional gospel song, “You gotta move!” As long as you stay immobile or caught up in verbal exchanges, your relating experience will remain mostly mental, not physical – you’re stuck in your head. But as soon as the chatting stops and you allow your attention to shift into perception mode, opportunity emerges in a variety of whole-body sensate realms.
Marijuana delivers a number of “inner pops” as your focal attention shifts. This transition from a mental focus to the magic of whole-body sensory awareness can feel gigantic – suddenly there’s space, volume, touch, sight, sound, and physical pleasure!
As thoughts drop away, as past and future temporarily disappear and the present moment becomes everything, you are set free to discover your expanding capacity to be fully here, mindfully present, and even spiritually attuned . . . perceptually merged with all of Creation. It’s one thing to engage socially and intellectually with your partner, exploring new philosophies and realizations, imaginations and memories. It’s quite a noticeable pop when this cognitive fixation drops away and you both become alert and aware as organic bodies embedded in a host of sensory delights all around you.
For a few moments after reading this paragraph, see what happens when you look up from the page, tune in to your breaths coming and going, and then, even without a cannabis high, simply let your eyes feast on whatever you see around you that’s beautiful . . . and notice that you can be aware of both inner and outer experiences (breathing and seeing, for instance) at the same time. . . .
TASTE
It’s well known that cannabis increases appetite; when we are high, we do tend to get the munchies. Why is this so? The body naturally produces ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates appetite, in the stomach, pancreas, and brain.2 THC also stimulates the production of ghrelin, which makes you feel hungry. Ghrelin also boosts the pleasure we experience from food, heightening our enjoyment of cooking and eating even a simple repast. Before getting high, you might want to set out something to cook, so that if the hunger reflex should suddenly come over you, you can move into the kitchen and delight in cooking and eating.
TOUCH
The sense of touch is the first sense to develop in the womb and plays a primary role in helping an infant bond with its mother.3 To “feel good inside your own skin” is considered the height of well-being. Right now, as you read this paragraph, if you expand your awareness to include your whole body, what you’re doing is shifting your awareness to the sense of touch at the skin level and also deeper into your sense of position and volume in space.
The whole notion of “be here now” involves being tuned in to your sense of touch – your remarkable inside-out experience of being present in your own skin.
As we’ve discussed, when you get high, you can focus in myriad directions – and your choice of a focal point determines your experience. If you shift into sensory mode, you tune in to a vast realm of direct interaction with the outside world. Each finger pad, for instance, is loaded with remarkably sensitive nerve endings. And much of your body is covered with tiny hairs that transmit touch sensations to the brain to process as experience.
Touch is associated with a vast storehouse of personal memory – memories of being touched before – and there are loads of emotions linked to every type of touch. Cannabis helps you tune in to this level of experience. It also increases your sensitivity and pleasure related to touch, and this can be a major element in your cannabis experience, both when you are alone and, of course, when you are touching your partner.
Touching is vital to intimacy, so taking the time while you are high to tune in to your skin – your largest organ – can be highly rewarding, to say the least.
Cannabis is often praised for its ability to relieve numerous kinds of pain. THC has the ability to muffle the neurotransmitters responsible for causing pain. It also alters the transfer of anandamide, an endogenous compound that contributes to the body’s regulation of pain, as well as hunger, mood, and memory.4 CBD can be helpful for pain relief because it reduces inflammation. Through these and other mechanisms, and primarily by influencing how the brain responds to pain stimuli, cannabis dampens our experience of pain.
Many people who suffer from chronic pain find that when they are high, they feel less pain, regardless of why. In addition to the proven effects of THC and CBD on your biochemistry, perhaps it has something to do with cannabis’s ability to boost your mood and sensory pleasure. When you feel good inside and outside, pain – or at least the worst of it – seems to drop away. You become free to have fun touching and otherwise interacting with your loved one.
To activate the sense of touch, all you have to do is focus there! Run your fingers along a surface, touch your own face, reach over and stroke your partner’s hand . . . what you focus on is what you get!
HEARING
It’s universally agreed that marijuana makes music sound clearer, louder, and better, and it certainly augments the pleasure we feel when listening. That enhanced pleasure seems to come not from a change in our physiological hearing system, but from how the brain processes the sound.5
Just to begin, pot alters how we experience time, and music is all about time intervals. Music is based on harmonics and overtones; it’s a resonance that permeates the body, not only through the ear but also through the skin – we feel music all over! Adding weed to the listening experience, with its associated boost to our mood and our enjoyment of sensory stimulation, definitely amplifies the pleasure.
After we listen to a tune a few times, most of us tend to get a bit bored with the repetition. But with marijuana, our memory often fades quickly, and each time we hear the piece as if for the first time. This is a primary positive effect of temporarily shorting out our memory function. In fact, it is a remarkable trade-off for that memory reduction . . . the experience is always new!
Instead of listening in order to compare with a known musical memory, we can relax fully into enjoying the present-moment sensory event.
Cannabis alters the functioning of the occipital lobe, where we interpret sensory events, and this enables us to have a fresh encounter with our favorite music again and again. And THC, as a recent study indicates, increases the pleasure we feel from listening to music – or, indeed, to birds singing, wind blowing, or a friend talking.6 Listening to music together can be a wonderful pastime for a couple, but make sure it doesn’t dominate your relating. Take a breather after a few songs, and take time together to just “be,” without any external stimulus. That’s how to encourage the marijuana muse to deliver something new.
If you’re a musician, even a casual at-home strummer, you might find that playing a tune for your partner can become a powerful experience and awaken unexpected associations. As a recent study concluded, “Cannabis produces psychotomimetic symptoms, which can connect seemingly unrelated concepts, an aspect of divergent thinking considered primary to creative thinking.”
This “thinking outside the box” effect is one of the primary reasons that cannabis is used by so many creatives in their work. Even if you’re singing a simple folk song that you’ve sung a hundred times before, when you’re on grass, that song can come alive – and the act of singing and playing the tune can give both you and your partner great pleasure and inspiration.
GAZING
Our visual apparatus dominates our sensory inputs. We receive around 75 percent of our sensory data from our eyes. Although people report that while using cannabis they see more intensely, with more pleasure and discernment, it doesn’t appear that marijuana affects the physical visual system – except that as blood pressure drops, the iris expands, giving the eyes a different appearance.7 Sexual arousal does much the same.
Health-wise, cannabis offers neuroprotective, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory effects, which can be helpful in improving cell survival in the eyes and encouraging eye health. It may help slow degenerative eye disorders such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. Just getting high regularly seems to provide these visual benefits.
Vision-wise, you have two basic and opposite ways in which you use your eyes to see the world. First, you can focus both eyes together on a point and zoom in on it, seeing just this one particular thing, and shifting your focus to another point as needed. This is how we usually use our eyes, and when you’re high, you might want to notice when you’re looking at the world in this detail mode.
But you can also see in an entirely different way: you can let go of “point fixation” and instead relax and take in the scene before you as a whole. Seeing “everything at once,” it seems, is the gaze of lovers, of people looking at a sunset, of meditators . . . and very often of people who are enjoying a cannabis rush as they look at the world around them.
I encourage you to experiment with this way of seeing because it’s a portal to a vast realm of visual experience that simply has no chance of happening when you’re focused on a point. You’ll find that you often slip naturally into seeing “everything at once” when you’re high. But you can learn to make the shift consciously, as an act of visual volition. Here’s some guidance:
After reading this paragraph, put the book aside for a few moments and look around the room you’re in. Notice how your eyes shift from one item to another, and how they focus not on empty space, but on a surface. Observe how you choose what to look at. Notice how your attention tends to leap quickly from one interesting item to another, rather than looking at one item for any longer than is needed to process the visual information. And now . . . begin to develop your ability to see everything at once by gazing in front of you, without the intent to focus on any particular object out there. Instead, focus a few feet in front of you – in open space! At the same time, tune in to your breathing so that you’re focused both outward, into the open space in the room, and inward, into your breaths coming and going. Continue holding this dual awareness for a few breaths. . . .
If you do this when you’re high, you’ll immediately pop into an altered way of experiencing both the space around you and your own interior space. Space on this planet means air. You’re focusing on the volume of atmosphere in the room you’re in, rather than the things on the surface of that room. When you focus on things, you’re in “doing” mode, busy gathering useful information to process and help you survive. Once you process that visual information – job done, move on.
When you let go of working with your eyes, you also have the freedom to ease up, stop working, and use your visual experience to just enjoy the world around you.
A happy balance would seem optimum, but most of us have been pushed and programmed and otherwise coerced in our social conditioning to stay fixated on things, on surfaces, rather than enjoying the whole at once and experiencing the volume of the room.
If you pay attention to this shift from point fixation to seeing the whole at once, you’ll find that when you’re high, it tends to happen a lot – and when it does, usually you move into a bliss state. Why? Because you’ve let go of your ego’s chronic workaholic control of seeing, and instead you’re looking just for pure pleasure. A great deal of your brain takes a break, enabling you to shift into nonwork pleasure mode for at least a few moments.
When seeing “everything at once” you’ll probably at some point find yourself looking into your lover’s eyes with this gaze. Couples gazing has become quite a phenomenon recently, but I remember, even way back in my life, going to encounter group meetings and being instructed to simply look for five minutes into a stranger’s eyes – and having remarkable experiences. I encourage you to talk about doing this gazing with your partner, and to explore what happens. Be sure to take time to talk about the experience afterward.
You might find that you begin to hallucinate different faces on your loved one’s face. This is perfectly fine and often insightful. Don’t take the faces that appear seriously. Your subconscious mind will have a heyday projecting archetypal faces; just relax and enjoy the show. And you can look at anything around you in this same “everything at once” mode as you allow the outer sensory data to intermix with your memory and imagination to create a unique experience.
SCENT
This fifth sense seems to be dwindling rapidly in humans; it is the least active of our senses. Over 70 percent of the human population lives in smog, which dulls any sense of smell. And our survival is no longer strongly dependent on being able to smell what’s around us. The olfactory sensory neurons in the nose tend to stop working if we don’t focus on them, and with age this sense diminishes much more rapidly than the other senses.8
The loss of smell is called anosmia, and often it is not reversible.9 Sometimes something as simple as a viral infection or a bad cold can cause the olfactory receptors in the nose to conk out – and not return to normal.
In the days of our ancient ancestors, this would have been a major problem; like most animals, we once depended greatly on our sense of smell. Even as recently as a couple of hundred years ago, most people still lived in rural areas, worked outdoors, and tuned in regularly to all sorts of changing scents that would indicate weather alterations, seasonal shifts, and so forth. Now we’re indoors most of the time and forced to breathe stale air from air-conditioning and forced-air heaters that leaves the air, if anything, smelling dead and bad, so we just tune out our sense of smell.10
Marijuana can reverse that trend. People often report that when they’re high, they suddenly become able to smell more acutely and enjoyably – and it’s a great rush! There’s nothing like smelling springtime breezes, fresh piney forests, or salty seaside air.
Our hearts naturally leap up when we behold a rainbow in the sky, but the same effect holds true when we smell new-mown grass or bread just out of the oven. When good fresh smells become vivid and alive, we naturally celebrate.
Notice that smelling and breathing are inseparable; as you breathe in, the air flowing through your nose activates the olfactory sensory neurons. So once again, tuning in to your breathing while you’re high is a good way to optimize your experience.
The olfactory nerve runs from the top of your nasal passages a short distance to your brain and the olfactory bulb in the limbic system. From there, the olfactory information stimulates memories and primitive animal instincts that can provoke action – and at the same time a rush of pleasure.
Right now, or when you’re high with your partner, play this fun scent game to awaken shared scents: Imagine that you’re in a meadow full of springtime flowers . . . now imagine that you’re in a gym during a basketball game . . . and imagine that you’re at the beach smelling the gentle sea breeze . . . imagine that you’re sitting down to eat your favorite meal . . . imagine the scent of your lover. . . .
YOUR SIXTH SENSE
Your sixth sense is your ability to sense your own body position and whole-body presence – where you are in space, where your various body parts are as you move, and other interior aspects of body awareness. Biologically, this sense is called vestibular awareness or proprioception.11 It’s what enables you to feel grounded and balanced in gravity and to maintain your upright posture on the planet.
We hardly notice this sixth sense, but it’s crucial to our balance, movement, and whole-body sense of presence.
When I suggest that you tune in to your whole-body presence, this sixth sense is what I’m aiming your inner attention toward. Maintaining this whole-body awareness while moving through space and time can become a major activity while you’re high, and especially when you’re in physical motion. You probably already know how good it feels to be lighthearted and dancing freely to music, especially with your partner. Just taking a walk while high can be blissful, generating a remarkable sense of well-being and pleasure in the body. And of course, lovemaking is all about whole-body awareness.
Your sense of touch is mediated by your skin, which is rich with nerve endings that constantly communicate with the brain about what is touching you – its texture, temperature, pressure, and so on. When you get high, you can tune in more deeply to this subtle yet basic whole-body awareness. Many people report that they’re mostly out of touch with this level of physical awareness. Getting high can reawaken this primal sense of your own presence. Just tune in to how your skin is a giant membrane, like the membrane of a living cell, holding you within its comforting embrace . . . for all of your life!
Right now, as you read these words, feel free to expand your awareness to include your sixth sense of whole-body presence . . . breathe into this sensory experience . . . tune in to being balanced exactly in the earth’s gravitational field . . . notice how you now feel more here, more engaged in the world around you.
Now let yourself imagine your partner, wherever they might be, also engaged in experiencing their sense of balance and whole-body presence by tuning in to this sixth sense. Imagine that, like you, your partner is feeling fully present in their bodily here and now . . . aware of where they are and how they’re moving in balance with gravity . . .
You’re both always sharing this same feeling – in fact, all human beings and all other living creatures are. It’s one of our primary experiential links with each other. So see if you can stay aware at this core level, even when you’re relating or thinking.
SENSING THIS MOMENT
Overall, one of the main positive impacts of cannabis on human experience is this heightening of all our senses. In a very true way, you become more human, more natural, more grounded in our earthly realms of being when you get high and tune in to all your senses. It’s great to chatter on and on with ideas and imaginations when you’re high, but it’s also truly blissful to allow the marijuana muse to retarget your power of attention away from brainy activity toward sensory awakening.
Suddenly shifting from a cognitive buzz into sensory experiencing can feel very much like a spiritual awakening.
Most of what makes us feel good is related to our senses, be it eating a great meal or running along the beach or dancing away the night or making love. We all know how unrewarding and even downright depressive it can be, for instance, to have sex but stay mostly in our thoughts rather than dropping down into pure bodily sensory pleasure and engagement.
So let’s remember to regularly take advantage of the fact that cannabis tends to tune us in to our senses. Let’s remember to “come to our senses” as often as possible! Put bluntly, how else do we usually engage with our partner, if not through our senses? Even when brainstorming an abstract idea, we communicate through sight and sound. It’s true that we tend these days to get lost in thoughts and tech and head-tripping. Marijuana can very beautifully help us come to our senses.
As you continue reading, expand your awareness first to your breathing and whole-body presence . . . and now also tune in to whatever olfactory inputs you might smell at this moment . . . and notice that breath awareness always involves this shift into sensory awareness. . . .
As you continue reading, expand your sensory bubble to include whatever sounds might be coming into your organism through your ears . . . and experience your sense of time flowing by, in relation to what you are hearing. . . .
And, of course, also notice how your sense of eyesight is continually bringing new sensations into your brain. . . .
Tune in to your awareness of your body as an integral vibrant whole, sitting and breathing and maintaining its posture and balance while you’re doing everything else. . . .
And . . . here you are!