Jason Silva: Well I think that what’s happening now is a transformational moment here in American
culture.
I think the fact that the majority of Americans now support marijuana legalization is a huge
win for civilization, for mankind, I mean for American society.
It’s like not just for the sort of limitless medicinal potential that cannabis has.
You know cannabinoids have been shown now to even like shrink tumors.
I mean it’s an unbelievably therapeutically active substance.
But also for the simple issue of cognitive liberty, right.
Sort of a country that is founded on the principles of free thought and the idea that everybody
should be able to think what they want to think and do what they want to do as long
as they’re not hurting anybody else.
And this is, you know, nowhere more exemplified than in the right to choose a marijuana joint
over a martini if that’s what floats your boat.
Also, marijuana consciousness as Rich Doyle writes is extraordinarily sensitive to the
initial rhetorical conditions.
You know, Leary’s ubiquitous set and setting to the point that there is no drug by itself.
There is the context in which the drug is taken.
And so when you change the cultural context in which people are able to have marijuana
you change the particular flavor of marijuana consciousness.
You start eliminating the association with criminality and the paranoia and the fear
of getting caught and instead you create a canvas where people can smoke a joint before
going to a boutique movie theater to have a very increased cinematic immersion.
Or you can create spaces where people can maybe vaporize some cannabis before going
and listening to a symphony orchestra.
Or maybe they can go on these beautiful sort of guided marijuana hikes where the set and
setting would be curated for a particular marijuana flavor.
I mean it’s almost like the notion being that intention, you know, you change the intention,
you change the stage and that intention could actually transform the subjective experience
that people have when they participate in the use of cannabis.
And, you know, it’s just very exciting because I think that we’re going to see new forms
of entertainment, new forms of sort of – new cultural spaces for people to partake in what
they’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands of years which is altering our consciousness
whether it’s through external technologies or internal technologies.
I mean mindfulness, meditation, rave concerts, you know, Burning Man, theater.
These are all technologies, techniques – rhetorical technologies that capture and manage attention
and are able to elicit transformational interpersonal experiences.
Only when we are immersed in some capacity, as Diana Slattery says, can you mediate attention
and can you actually have transformational, educational, interpersonal experiences.
And people pay money for that.
They’re like here’s $20, you know, put me in that IMAX movie theater and take me
through a black hole and let me experience Interstellar, you know, where the outer journey
becomes a metaphor for the inner journey, the external outer space interstellar becomes
a metaphysical head trip.
I mean we pay money to be taken out of ourselves.
We pay money to dissolve boundaries.
We pay money to experience intersubjective life worlds.
And anything that helps us get there as long as it’s not hurting anybody else it’s
cool man.
It’s cool.
And so I’m interested.
I’m interested in what’s going to come out of that, you know, what this boutique
high end marijuana culture is going to create.
The marijuana equivalent of the high end wine bar or the really, really trendy scotch bar
where everything from the lighting to the music to the cups in which people drink the
alcohol is created to create a certain mood.
What’s going to be the marijuana equivalent of that?
A sort of highbrow experience for esthetically minded types.
There’s a great book by David Lenson where he talks about the marijuana consciousness
as one which creates this dialectical pattern of reconcilable estrangement.
So the first thing that happens – and again reconcilable estrangement with the world of
perception.
So the first thing that happens is there’s an italicization of experience by distancing
you from the set of stimuli.
It’s why, you know, why a sort of esthet might smoke a joint before going to the Guggenheim.
He’s going there to experience first an alienation from the world of ordinary perception
so things become novel, new and interesting and strange.
And then there’s a reconciliation with that estrangement.
So the world is italicized.
The world is seen as if for the first time.
And then right afterwards there’s a witnessing of that transformation and a reconciliation
with the world of objects so that the thing that is seen as if for the first time can
be regarded, can be revered.
We call this sort of sacred consciousness archetypical consciousness, you know.
So that something like an ordinary scoop of ice cream represents the idea of ice cream,
you know.
A piece of art, a sculpture standing in a museum hallway becomes a sort of archetypical
figure of man trying to make a statement using form and function.
I just think that what it does to consciousness is very useful because it provides a change
in perspective similar to when astronauts go to space and have a change in perspective.
What they call the orbital overview effect that transforms the consciousness of the astronauts
because they’re able to see reality, in this case Earth, from a different perspective
that creates an ontological transformation blasting new tunnels between the mind and
the other.
So too in the world of everyday life people will be able to alter their consciousness
legally in a safe space and have that change in perspective that results hopefully in some
kind of transformation, heightened appreciation, increased compassion, increased wellbeing
and increased creativity.
It reminds me a bit of that Stanford study on the subject of awe where they described
awe as an experience of such perceptual expansion or such perceptual vastness that you have
to reconfigure your mental maps of the world to assimilate the experience.
So maybe the first time you saw the Grand Canyon or the first time you saw the IMAX
film with the Hubble space telescope.
And it turns out that awe, once it passes, leaves us with all these increased feelings
of bliss, wellbeing, creativity, compassion, kindness, right.
And so if we’re able to mediate and assist eliciting those sensations of awe, in this
case by legalizing marijuana in safe context then why shouldn’t we do that?
That’s what kind of excites me, you know.
Just the notion that there are new modalities of consciousness that we will be able to safely
explore and inhabit.