Cannabis Research: Unger

Came across an excellent research paper:

Mescaline, LSD, Psilocybin and Personality Change

Sanford M. Unger, Ph.D.*

from: Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes
Vol. 26, No. 2, May, 1963. © The William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation

courtsey: http://bluehoney.org/

Although this paper discusses the effects of only LSD and magic mushroom – Psilocybin and Mescalin, most of the experiences of the subjects are astonishingly similar to the ones I had after taking Cannabis. To quote a few:

The predominance of visual experiences in the picture is striking— not only on account of the persistent hallucinations and illusions, but by the impressiveness of seen real objects, their shape and color….

Changes in the perception of visual form occur in virtually everyone…. Consistently reported [are] the plasticity which the forms of the visual world assume . . . the emphasis upon play of light and color, as though light were alive

The above observation explains my light blobs through the palm fronds turning into various deities (refer to my post titled – II Voyage – Imagination Overdrive).

Then again:

There is an awareness of an abnormal distance between the self and what happens in its consciousness; on the other hand, the experience of an abnormal fusion of subject and object

Some degree of depersonalization probably occurs during every LSD experience . . . the detachment of the conscious self, a sort of detached ego. This self is in touch with reality and is in touch with the self experiencing the psychic phenomena.

It is difficult to classify the state of consciousness during the intoxication which allows such self-observation and, at times, seems to foster detachment and self-scrutiny.

. . . in a state of clear consciousness [the subject] . . . is able to describe in detail the manifold mental changes daring drug intoxication

I have noted very similar experiences in my post titled – III Voyage:Multiple consciousness

III Voyage:Multiple consciousness

The third time, apart from the earlier experiences, another dimension of experience was added – the mental/abstract dimension. This time, as soon as I felt entering that ‘certain’ state of mind/consciousness I started taking down notes. I took a spoon of Cannabis powder at 3:30pm and entered an altered state within an hour. Unlike earlier when it took longer for the plant to take effect. I will write about my explanation for this at the end of this post.

I realized how different the experience is every time I consume the plant. This time the emphasis was on conceptual clarity, lateral logic, and right brain thinking. It was almost as if the right brain had almost completely taken over. Ideas, concepts rose in the mind like smoke…or water….ephemeral….they were within my grasp now and the next moment they just evaporated…multiple ideas entered the mind…I was aware of parallel streams of thought…as if I had multiple minds and multiple personalities and each mind was reacting independently to every thought..ideas and feelings were like a web, intercrossing and interchanging…streaming past my consciousness. Realized exactly what Gurdjeiff meant when he wrote that every human is made up of multiple ‘I’ s. Logic became very fuzzy, could not follow one stream of thought, could not recollect the previous thought…physical senses became super sensitive, became aware of my breathing which was a bit heavy and erratic. I was made of multiple personalities each reacting independently to a given thought or feeling and above and apart from all this there was a ‘permanent’ me who was watching this ‘show’ like a non-attached witness. The metaphysical concept mentioned in the Bhagavat Geeta, of two ‘Selfs’ one individual self which lives, feels and does and the other permanent Self who watches without any attachment or revulsion, became crystal clear. I was ‘living’ /’experiencing this truth.

Emotions and desires ran very deep, imagined a snow clad mountain with a monastery on it….the yearning to be there brought tears in my eyes…..

Memories of scenes and moods came and went, as if the ‘buttons’ in my visual memory bank, were being randomly pressed.

Breathing was much heavier, always felt thirsty, wanted to drink something sweet. Throat felt slightly constricted.

Realised how a schizophrenic would feel….but my mind seem to be devided into two- one half was schizophrenic and the other half was the ‘sane watcher’, passive observer, almost as if a part of my mind was standing outside of me and was watching me.

The rise in body temperature did not feel the way a fever feels. But seemed to be less of the flesh and more of the mind and consciousness.

A mere suggestion easily evoked whatever feeling I wanted to, with great intensity. There was no sense of tiredness or exhaustion, but an energetic calmness of the body and mind.

Multiple personalities, multiple moods, come and go, not in a linear fashion but like a web. It was like a multiple or layers or multidimensions of everything: thoughts, feelings, visiual memories, moods….trying to recall previous thought felt like trying to recall a dream…very ephemeral…reality felt dream- like, shallow, pathetic, trivial. The people around me appeared to behave very mechanically like robots. All existence appeared to be very superficial, petty, irrelevant…..

Realized that logic does not have to be linear, like cause and effect. In this state my ‘normal’ left brained logic, was completely taken over by some form of lateral right brained logic which helped me to not ‘understand’ but ‘realize’ some of the metaphysical and spiritual concepts I had read about. Human consciousness was like a sphere, with the outer layer water/gaseous-like always moving, disturbed, in a flux, in ripples and currents. Beneath this swirling exterior was a calm relatively solid core.

I realized that one needs a higher level/higher dimension of conceptual intelligence not the normal rational intelligence to understand the nature of Reality – Gyan Yoga. That is why so many enlightened souls have said that the mind is a hurdle towards true realization.

My appetite felt like that of a ‘hungry ghost’ from Tibetan book of the Dead. Mind seemed to be very porous/susceptible to the thought forms around me.

The unreality of all around me was overwhelming. I began thinking why was every experience/voyage different. Could it be possible that we have multiple receptors in the mind for this kind of a chemical and they are stimulated at random depending on the state of mind you are in, your personality and the state of your spiritual evolution.

The nature of the human mind is so fleeting….everything is so fleeting and at the supeficial level….the state of mind can be so confining that it almost traps you at one level….you cannot penentrate deeper or higher…

Mind is almost on the edge of hallucinating but not quite there yet…its like an orgy of abstract thoughts taking forms that a ‘normal’ mind cannot grasp. Complete comprehension of the phenomenal world and its transitiary nature. I am trapped, at the same time, in a very mental/abstract plane as well as a very primal plane.

Soon the light headedness is replaced by melancholy, a slight depression, the environment seems threatening and people around me appear to be hostile…cold strangers…unfriendly…the effect began to wear off after six hours…but the physiological hangover continued till next morning….muscles were very relaxed…body temperature slightly high…loss of appetite…slight constipation.

My theory for, why does Cannabis give you a different experience everytime is that probably the human brain has quite a few dormant recepters for the active chemical/s in Cannabis, and everytime we consume Cannabis a different set of receptors are stimulated.

II Voyage – Imagination Overdrive

The second time was different. Physiological and physical symptoms were the same as before, but my mind/consciousness reacted differently. All the senses were became super-sensitive. Imagination went into an overdrive – I was looking at a blurred vision of lights shining through the palm fronds in the darkness of the night and slowly the hazy blobs of light began to take shape- limitless shapes and forms of sculptures of light…they looked like some deities in a temple, some feminine, others masculine, but they kept shifting….flowing from one form to another…..almost infinite. As long as I stood there staring at them they kept changing….had I stood there for eternity they would have taken on eternal number of forms….!! I never realized that the human mind was capable of such imagination!!

I then began staring at a window of a house. The window looked into a dimly lit room. My mind began to sense different moods in the room, as it imagined how the inside of the room could look…again infinite shapes and infinite moods. In a normal state, quite a few people, when they enter a house or a room for the first time, they can sense a mood in the room/house. Atleast I can. Edgar Allan Poe once wrote in one of his short stories that there are combinations of simple natural objects which have the power of affecting our moods. But under the influence of Cannabis, the interior of the imagined room took up limitless combinations of things and shades thus invoking limitless moods…one after another…in me.