Elevated: Cannabis as a Tool for Mind Enhancement: Cannabis as a Tool for Mind Enhancement

By Sebastián Marincolo and R. Michael Johnson

Sebastián Marincolo has produced a landmark book on the widely reported mind enhancements experienced during the cannabis high. Using his own Guerrilla Neuro-Philosophical Approach, philosopher and polymath Marincolo summarizes more than 20 years of extraordinary interdisciplinary research

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilaritas Press, LLC.
• Release date: Apr 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781952746222

Book preview

Elevated

Cannabis

as a Tool for

Mind Enhancement

by Sebastián Marincolo



Picture 37

Opening photograph

Praise for Sebastián Marincolo’s work

Sebastian Marincolo’s work is terrific and is going to make a big contribution to the field.

– Lester Grinspoon (1928-2020), medical marijuana expert and Harvard Associate Professor Emeritus for Psychiatry, commenting on High. Das positive Potential von Marihuana, Klett-Cotta Tropen Verlag, Stuttgart, 2013

Marincolo’s book is great evidence that he has further developed a theory of consciousness taking a highly original path. Good philosophers are as comprehensible as possible – they have arguments and do not need to hide anything. It is wonderful to see how his photo art contributes to his research; the photos are magnificent. I have read the book and enjoyed watching the photos with much delight.

– Professor Emeritus Manfred Frank, German philosopher, on High. Das positive Potential von Marihuana, Klett-Cotta Tropen Verlag, Stuttgart, 2013

Nobody has ever broken down the nuances of cannabis psychoactivity quite like Sebastián Marincolo in what he calls a ‘bouquet of cognitive effects and enhancements.’

– Gregory Frye, international storyteller, journalist, and cannabis advocate

I’m loving it! Wow. What an amazing, important work! Your book is such a treasure – a unique resource. Such a definitive statement of everything I’ve been thinking when it comes to marijuana … I now understand the benefits that Norman Mailer, Carl Sagan, and Richard Feynman got from Marijuana.

– Jason Silva, storyteller, futurist, keynote speaker, known for hosting National Geographic’s Brain Games, on HIGH: Insights on Marijuana, Dog Ear Publishing, Minneapolis, 2010

I agree with Marincolo’s argument about the connection between Benjamin’s meditations on hashish and his meditations on art in the Work of Art essay and elsewhere. I believe, as Marincolo suggests, that there are a good many connections with other areas of Benjamin’s thought as well (…)

– Howard Eiland, lecturer at MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, co-editor of Benjamin’s Selected Writings and author of a biography on Walter Benjamin, on What Hashish Did to Walter Benjamin, Khargala Press, Stuttgart, 2015

"For many, Elevated will be taking the understanding of cannabis to a new level. It’s well-reasoned, well-researched, and well-written for both cannabis consumers and professionals in fields such as research and healthcare. While clearly touting the many benefits of cannabis, the book takes a grounded and balanced approach that avoids facile claims about the risk-free wonders of the plant."

– Stephen Gray, teacher and writer on spiritual subjects and sacramental medicines. Author of Returning to Sacred World: A Spiritual Toolkit for the Emerging Reality, and Cannabis and Spirituality

Cannabis is one of earth's power plants on earth, and Sebastian's book demonstrates how to use it skillfully as a performance enhancer that can help us all understand the states of our own minds. Highly recommended for aspiring and experienced psychonauts.

– Joe Dolce, author, Brave New Weed and host, Brave New Weed podcast

Founder, Medical Cannabis Mentor, on What Hashish Did to Walter Benjamin, Khargala Press, Stuttgart, 2015

Marincolo’s writing and manner of thinking are excellent – I am enthusiastic about recommending his work.

– Michael Backes, author of Cannabis Pharmacy – The Practical Guide to Medical Marijuana, on HIGH: Insights on Marijuana, Dog Ear Publishing, Minneapolis, 2010

Sebastian is one of the most prolific researchers and thinkers in the area of purpose-driven cannabis consumption. He will help you enhance both life and work with the practical application of cannabis for empathic understanding, idea generation, creative focus, and non-linear thinking.

– Shawn Gold, Founder Pilgrim Soul, a mission-driven company focused on optimizing human creative performance, on The Art of the High. Your Guide to Using Cannabis for an Outstanding Life, self-published, Eschborn, 2021

Elevated: Cannabis as a Tool for Mind Enhancement

Copyright © 2022 Sebastián Marincolo

All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.

International Standard Book Number (Print): 978-1-952746-21-5

International Standard Book Number (eBook): 978-1-952746-22-2

First Edition 2023

Photographs by Sebastián Marincolo

Cover Design by amoeba

Book Design by Pelorian Digital

Hilaritas Press, LLC.

P.O. Box 1153

Grand Junction, Colorado 81502

www.hilaritaspress.com

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

I. Cannabis, Surfing, and How to Ride a High

II. Baudelaire, Ramachandran, and Colors Containing Music

III. Cannabis, Creativity, and Cognitive Liberty

IV. Cannabis Insights: Myth or Reality?

V. Cannabis, Introspection, and Personal Growth

VI. Cannabis, Mirror Neurons, and Empathic Understanding

VII Cannabis, Love, Sex, and Tantra

VIII. Mind Enhancements and the Endocannabinoid System

IX. Cannabis, Coping, and the Stigma of Addiction

X. Why the Prohibition Against Cannabis Has to End

Endnotes & Photo Index

F

oreword

By R. Michael Johnson

Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I was a lanky, very long-haired, ultra-bookish teenaged heavy metal guitarist in the San Gabriel Valley suburbs of Los Angeles who’d often get stoned with bandmates after practice. Sometimes even before we practiced, and other times, during, but anyway: I distinctly remember an ebullient group conversation among all of us. Maybe it was a series of bull sessions; the memory is by now not perfect. We were talking about how good the new cannabis from Northern California was (at that point, it was all sensemilla – Spanish for no seeds, not Purple Urkel or Girl Scout Cookies or Purple Kush or Blue Dream), and we began testifying impromptu to all the wonderful things we got from this herb: remembering incidents we thought we’d forgotten, how sex with our girlfriends was on some other level now (at least one of us said such), how Coltrane and Bach and Ustad Shujaat Khan suddenly made more sense and that they were perhaps the apex of human musical creation even though at the time we were playing copies of Led Zeppelin and Judas Priest and Ozzy; that when we drank alcohol we got rowdy and mean and sloppy and stupid and felt bad the next day, but one guy said he got high during lunch time at high school and went back on campus and had all kinds of empathy for that one weird kid that everyone picked on. Maybe he acted on that empathy. I don’t recall. And yeah, all that made sense to hear. I said that even a glass of tap water the other night tasted divine when I was high. I think they laughed, but it was true; it’s happened to me many times since: a slice of plain sourdough bread and a glass of water from the tap seemed miraculous, like manna. It sounds kooky . . . unless you’ve been there. I could go on and on with remembered conversations like this, but at some point I definitely did say to my friends that There should be a book about all this.

Forty some-odd years later, you’re holding it in your hands. Finally! This is a unicorn; it’s the first book of its kind. Sebastián Marincolo breaks the ice by addressing the Final Frontier of Cannabis: its ability to enhance our experience of life, and yield insights into ourselves and others.

Why has a book like this – written by a PhD/polymath who takes cannabis as seriously as Einstein did photons, or Darwin did finch’s beaks – taken so long to arrive? There’s a number of long, depressing answers, but my favorite short answer comes from Marincolo’s mentor and later friend, the late eminent Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, who coined the term cannabinophobia.

In the late 1960s Grinspoon’s best friend, a fellow intellectual, would come over to visit and get high (Lester did not get high at that time) and talk. Grinspoon knew his friend (Carl Sagan, you may have heard of him) was brilliant, but the weed-smoking seemed ill-advised, and Lester set out to write a book on the dangers of cannabis. Immersing himself in the research, Lester soon found out he’d swallowed the pervasive lies the government had been telling everyone since early in the 20th century. As he researched more and more, he found the truth about cannabis was almost the opposite of what the perceived wisdom was. He’d been a victim of cannabinophobia, and that’s Grinspoon’s neologism. Feel free to use it. Like the 17th century tulip mania in The Netherlands, the witch trials in Salem, the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s, McCarthyism, or any number of satanic panics closer to our times (to enumerate but a smidgen of moral panics), this irrational mania has gone on far too long. It’s been a long, slow slog overcoming the hurdles of cannabinophobia, from hearing that your favorite musicians or Beatnik writers used it, so maybe it’s not that dangerous?, to giggling at Cheech and Chong’s antics, to recognizing the health benefits of cannabis, to the seemingly inexorable march of stark, staring sanity of decriminalization or outright legalization for recreational purposes (but mostly for health) in the US. As I write, only four US states remain at zero tolerance for any cannabis, for any reason. My heavy metal teenaged self never would’ve believed it.

Looking back on all this, me and my crowd never really believed any of the stories that fed the mass mind and kept cannabinophobia going; although I didn’t know about this idea then, we were like initiates in some underground gnostic secret society. These days, you probably know some grandma who uses it for some age-related ailment. If you care to dig a little deeper, you’ll find that millions of medical cannabis patients with severe medical conditions have legal access to cannabinoid medicine in many countries now. These patients, their relatives, friends and their doctors have marvelous stories to tell about its benefits. It’s better this way. As some lame ad once told us, membership has its privileges, but looking back, it wasn’t worth the human suffering of some African-American getting 40 years in Louisiana for being caught with a half-ounce. Screw that noise. And that fascistic idiocy still crops up in the news today.

So anyway: smoking or ingesting cannabis is fun, it can be used for an astonishing spectrum of ailments, you can cook with it, there are many other industrial and other uses for it and it’s easy to grow. And there are now a few thousand books – a tidal wave over the past 15 years – covering those topics. But there never was a book about all the enhancements the cannabis high can confer. The very types of enhancements my friends and I talked about, with our limited vocabularies surrounding such a topic.

Sebastián Marincolo provides us with this vocabulary. His creation of terminology gives us a new mental space to talk about – and think with – ideas regarding our cannabis experiences. As anthropologists and sociologists have documented well, social reality is created by talking to each other. But humans need pegs to hang their ideas about their experiences on. We need the words. We need metaphors. Marincolo delivers the goods here, and this alone makes Elevated pull its intellectual weight: episodic memory, synesthesia, isomorphic extraction, which is the found relationship of ideas that have a similarity of structure that you might not have thought of when straight. The phenomenon of hyperfocusing, etc. But, perhaps more importantly, he sheds new light on novel dimensions for thinking about things we thought we already knew: about pattern recognition, the mighty triumvirate of food/sex/music (and why those things are really good - unto, yea, verily: ecstatic - for some us while high). And Marincolo gives us new ways to think about that special human faculty: imagination . . . while high on cannabis.

He urges us that when we decide to get high we might want to take notes . . .

These are a few of the delightful things you’ll learn about while reading this book. It’s one thing to get high and know intuitively what he’s writing about here; it’s quite another to have intellectual tools to bring to bear when you want to communicate these phenomena to others. I think we must consider these sorts of gifts from the intellectual class an overall societal good.

In this, Elevated seems in a long line of books that can function as an education for the senses, like Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 The Physiology of Taste. Or any book that you not only found interesting and informative, but those works that impel you to experience your reality-tunnel, art, music, nature, science and others’ personalities in some non-ordinary fresh way. One of the first things Marincolo advises is to pay attention to what you're experiencing when high. It sounds simplistic, but we all know (well, most of us?) we tend to fall back on the mode of having fun and just letting things happen as they may, then noticing the high is wearing off, so we may as well go home now. This education of our senses with cannabis is not that cannabis is doing it to us. It takes effort: you are engaging your sensorium in a complex fashion with emotions, signals from your body, and cognition in a synergetic way. It’s not a linear first do this, and only then do that and see what your answer is kind of thing. It’s more of a holistic, right-hemisphere way of learning about yourself and your world. Sometimes I think of it as a sort of yoga: ganja yoga (which I found actually exists!). The Sanskrit word yoga meant to yoke: you’re connecting at least two things. In this case, your nervous system and some aspect of the world out there. It’s sensual, pleasurable, interesting intellectually, and sexy. I find this avenue of education thrilling and I suspect or hope that you do, too. If this seems alien to you but you’re intrigued, Elevated will no doubt prove enlightening.

What makes Dr. Sebastián Marincolo qualified to bring all this stuff down to us? Well, he has a PhD in Philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of mind, that domain of philosophy concerned with the nature of consciousness. The list of his philosophical mentors includes some of the world’s most renowned philosophers of our time: Prof. Emer. William Lycan, Prof. Emer. Simon Blackburn, and his German mentor Prof. Emer. Manfred Frank. For his research, Marincolo steeped in the Cognitive Sciences, like neurobiology, evolutionary psychology and linguistics, and analytic philosophy. Add to this, he’s impressively well-read in literature, law and history. And, though English is his second language, as you’ll see, he writes English in that sort of lucid, pan-European intellectual style that many find refreshing in its cosmopolitan tone.

When I wrote above that this is the first of its kind, that it’s a unicorn: clearly, there have been individuals who could have written that book I wanted to read so urgently when I was 16 or 17, so why didn’t they? Carl Sagan could have (read his florid testimony in Lester Grinspoon’s Marijuana Reconsidered: Sagan is Mr. X . . . or find it online; it’s all over the place), but perhaps his adoring public wasn’t ready to understand that the charming, spell-binding explainer of the Cosmos was a pothead. Alas, it would’ve been a different book, too, as Sagan did not have the deep background in modern philosophical thought Marincolo has. Sagan’s best friend Grinspoon was most definitely heading toward this territory. So, Grinspoon was delighted when in 2008, Sebastián contacted him by email. Grinspoon asked Marincolo to get on the phone and after one hour of talking in their first phone call, he suggested to co-edit a book with him, a selection of anecdotes and essays Grinspoon had been collecting on his website project marijuana-uses.com.

Lester would be proud to have seen his acolyte and friend Sebastián’s new book, this one you're holding now. He read the earlier, much shorter German version of this book – the present work has three added chapters and the other chapters all have been revised and updated – after years of conversations with Sebastián, and wrote the foreword for the German edition that appeared in 2013 and helped make it a big success in Deutschland. The German edition includes a powerful political essay; its big media impact arguably helped to shift the public’s opinion – in 2017, Germany introduced a new law for much better access to medical cannabis and recently, the German Government has announced that it will legalize cannabis for adult use very soon.

Lester thought it was important that famous people, especially intellectuals, come out of the cannabis closet and serve as examples in an effort to overcome cannabinophobia, but Sagan apparently saw it as too much of a gamble. Cannabinophobia strikes again!

Other academics have come out of the closet as cannabis enthusiasts over the past forty years, but not many, and they’re not loudly flaunting it. You’d better be well-established and have tenure first. Radical academics are conservative that way. Chalk it up to cannabinophobia? We’re more likely to find informed, eager and spirited defenses of cannabis from that vast crowd of non-academic intellectuals, poets, musicians, painters, actors, and comedians. (Any scholar of Humor should be interested in the juxtaposition of two odd things that creates surprise and a laugh, with Marincolo’s ideas about cannabis and isomorphic extraction.) When these folk do wax on about how wonderful and beneficial cannabis has been for their creative process, or its ability to expand their empathy, or gain new insights about how they see themselves, etc, they don’t do it from the vantage point of a thinker with the sophisticated training Marincolo has. We hope he’s not the last well-trained intellectual to concentrate his or her thinking on the phenomena of cannabis’s various enhancements. Which brings up two key issues.

First, when I initially read this manuscript, I was relieved to find a level of nuance that seems woefully rare when reading about cannabis. All too often the writer seems either convinced this drug is a slippery slope and it’s only a matter of time before the user ends up sitting around the house all day on heroin or meth. Or, just as irritating, everything about cannabis is sheer magic: it’s a panacea, and if everyone got stoned, the world would be healed. I exaggerate here, but only a little. Websites seem particularly guilty of this, and it’s not difficult to discern the Green Rush money-grab in a lot of writing about cannabis on the Internet. Marincolo is careful and nuanced at all times. He’s not out to make everyone a stoner. You’ll notice that early in the book he mentions the time he got horrifyingly way too high. He knows about such things and is candid, frank, and can explain what to do when you’re too high. Also, he knows of the vast eccentricities of each individual nervous system and the sets and settings people find themselves in. He’s writing with the possible variations and variabilities in the phenomenon of getting high always in mind. It’s simply not for everybody. Nor should it be. How refreshing!

Secondly, from a precociously early age he was interested in what he’d later learn was famously labeled as the hard problem by philosopher David Chalmers: consciousness: how do we account for physical phenomena like processes in the brain, with experience and our mental states, and how do I know that you experience things like I do? Is qualia real, and to what extent?, etc. As he matured in his studies, and continued to be fascinated by his own experiences while high, he thought that cannabis