The Art of the High – How to Use Cannabis for an Outstanding Life, First Pages
The Art of the High. Your Guide to Using Cannabis for an Outstanding Life
The following text is from the first pages of my book “The Art of the High. Your Guide to Using Cannabis.”
The minimalist guide explains how to use a cannabis high to focus attention, better remember past events, recognize new patterns, or intensify the imagination. Based on his interdisciplinary research, Marincolo shows how to minimize existing risks and use the multiple shifts in consciousness during a high to create art or music, better understand people empathically, enrich one’s love life, or arrive at deep and meaningful insights.
Contents
1. Cannabis, Animals and Evolution
2. Begin Your Journey
3. Enhance Your Mind
4. Living with Cannabis
Cannabis, Animals, and Evolution
First Experiences
A cannabis high can relax us, focus our attention, and bring us into the here-and-now. The taste of maple syrup explodes on our tongues, seemingly in slow motion. We laugh as if we have never laughed before, endlessly, often without remembering why we started laughing in the first place.
But this is only the beginning.
Throughout history, millions of cannabis users have experienced effects like these. Only a fraction of them got to know the broad spectrum of the potential of a cannabis high. Many have opened the door to a new world, but they have never really entered into it.
If we want to start our journey into the high, we first need to know more about the cannabis plant, about plants in general, about the relationship between plants and animals, and especially between psychoactive plants and animals.
Cannabis and Evolution
The plant cannabis has evolved in two phases: the first of which began some 30 million years ago. In a second, much accelerated phase that started at least around 12,000 years to maybe even 1.75 million years ago, it co-evolved alongside us humans. For most of the time this was a loving and fruitful relationship for both sides.
Humans used cannabis for nutrition thanks to its bal anced mix of fatty acids that seem to be perfectly geared toward our needs. We also used it for a whole range of medical purposes, as documented in our most ancient pharmacopeias, and we also produced our first ropes and paper with it.
We produced durable clothing and used the mind-enhancing and mood-altering properties of cannabis for inspiration, meditation, creative work, music, as an aphrodisiac for lovemaking, for celebrations, and other rituals in many different cultures throughout the world.
As a result of cultivation efforts, the plant became more diverse and was spread all over the planet by humans from its geographical origins in central Asia.
If we want to understand the cannabis plant and its effects on us better, we have to first take a look at its evolutionary history and those two phases.
The Endocannabinoid System
Let’s go even further back in time: the success story of cannabinoid molecules in evolution starts long before the evolution of cannabis plants.
Cannabinoid receptor-like proteins can be found in still existing organisms that go way back in evolution, such as sea squirts. This means that animals started to build their own endogenous cannabinoids, the endocannabinoids, more than 600 million years ago, and long efore the cannabis plant appeared on the evolutionary stage.
Today, these endocannabinoids can be found in all vertebratesand many non-vertebrates.
In the early 90s, some 20 years after the discovery of the endogenous opioid system, scientists discovered an endocannabinoid system (ECS) in animals and in the human body. Since then, thousands of scientific articles have appeared studying this system.
Like almost all other animal species, we humans produce endocannabinoids in the brain and in the body. The two most prominent ones are anan damide (AEA) and 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG). We also have receptors detecting those endocan- nabinoids, the best known of these are called CB-1 and CB-2 receptors.
The endocannabinoids and their receptors together function as an endocannabinoid signaling system in our brain and body. It is responsible for a whole variety of cognitive and physiological functions.
The endocannabinoid system is probably our most important system maintaining homeostasis – the main tenance of a stable internal environment despite changes in the external environment.
The many functions of the endocannabinoid system include the control of functions of attention, learning, sensory perception, memory, sleep-wakefulness cycle, and many other important cognitive processes, as well as neurogenesis (the formation of new brain cells), appetite regulation, the regulation of mood, emotions, body temperature (thermoregulation), metabolism, stress, and pain. It also helps the body to withstand and repair damage and is involved in immune reactions and many other functions.
In recent times, scientists have come to believe the endocannabinoid system is embedded in an expanded signaling system in the brain called the endocannabinoidome.
The phytocannabinoids in cannabis have an effect on this system because of their chemical similarity to endo- cannabinoids and can therefore systematically influence and, under favorable conditions, enhance some of its basic functions.
The worldwide success of cannabis as a plant certainly has to do with the fact that the phytocannabinoids have a directly influence on many of the functions of the ECS.
There are hardly any endocannabinoid receptors in the brain stem, which controls vital functions such as our breathing and control of heart rate. On the other hand, you find many endogenous opioid receptors there. This is why an overdose of opioids can kill you by slowing or stopping your breathing, but on the other side, there is no single officially documented death from a cannabis overdose to date.
Clearly, then, we can see manifold therapeutic uses of cannabis as well as a whole bouquet of interesting effects on our consciousness during cannabis high because phytocannabinoids act on an endocannbinoid system involved in controlling all those functions.
The existence of the endocannabinoid system and its many functions in our brain and body allows us to better understand why phytocannabinoids can have such a broad spectrum of physiological effects on us. But if we want to come to a deeper understanding how certain varieties of cannabis can have different effects on us, we have to better understand cannabis as a plant. And in order to do this, we need to understand more about plants in general. (…)
