The Self-Consumed Mind

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When I first entered college, about 10 years ago, I was introduced to Marijuana by a friend. It made me feel like every sensation was amplified, and that it's almost like I could 'feel' my mind. Throughout the years, I occasionally found myself going back to the stuff. I felt in the back of my mind like something deeply important was being illuminated.

Smoking weed for me is like this potential doorway into the understanding of self through suffering. All of my deepest darkest fears rise to the surface, and haunt me to edge of my life. This horrifying reality is somehow a wonderful teacher. It showed me night and day how the subconscious nature of my mind is: as Alan Watts would say, "a quaking mess".


Overwhelming feelings of fear and anxiety commonly overtook me after smoking weed. Though, there were always times like now, when a more calm, centered-self prevailed, and those more primal and frankly self destructive tendencies to focus on negative feelings diminished.

This breakthrough eventually brought me to another revelation. And that was that there are several selfish parties of thought that were pleeing their case within my mind. They all had a certain agenda. They were making their strongest attempts to win my acknowledgement of them as the most vital thing to pay my attention to. These attempts often appealed to my greatest fears and desires.

In the case of me smoking weed, one fearful and anxious part of my mind's potential states usually won the case for my focus completely. I bought into the claims that those thoughts were professing, and it was entirely decided according to the self interested person that I was defining myself as.

I have a strong feeling that this tendency for the mind to amplify thought processes which are erosive by way of their own selfishness is the reason why we as humans are ceaselessly doing so much harm to ourselves and others.

 This all brought me to the conclusion that my thoughts are only waves of potential states that I as the observer can choose to grab hold of or choose to let go of. This is a beautifully freeing realization, and one which I will no longer overlook.

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