Reflections On My First Psychedelic Weed Experience

On Tuesday, July 30th, I shared a 30% THC one gram joint with my friend Jake (not his real name to protect identity) near Waterton National Park in Canada.

I was very excited. Jake and I had been backpacking for the last two weeks in Glacier National Park and I believed the nature setting would accentuate the experience.

I had never smoked a going on its own. The only time I had smoked a joint before was during my MDMA trip to prolong the effects of the ecstasy. I was excited to feel what weed was like on its own.

Jake himself was an experienced weed taker. He respected weed a ton as it had facilitated a lot of his spiritual growth. He believed many people don’t realize its power because they don’t see it as a psychedelic and they aren’t as in tune with their bodies as we are.

Before smoking the joint, Jake and I discussed how much we would do, what in general we would do, and how we would handle any problems after taking the weed. Upon smoking the joint we started walking back to camp.

Just three minutes later Jake began to get way more colorful and I became super present. The green of his sweatshirt shown like emeralds in the sun.

Jake turned to me laughing and said, “I think you’ll get a little more high than you were expecting.” That was an understatement. The joints of our generation are ridiculously more strong than thirty years ago. And it had only been three minutes. 420 blaze it am I right?

As we walked back we admired the clouds. I noticed their wispy fluffy nature and the way they moved ever slowly in the sky as if saying hi to the ground. We saw a rabbit, dragon, and sonic jogging, in the clouds. Next we noticed the grass dancing back and forth with the wind.

It was beautiful.

Weed made us see old things as if they were new. This is where we got our first weed thought. Accordig to Jake weed thoughts are profound realizations you have about the nature of life while high. Sometimes there is some truth to them, sometimes they’re dumber than a blubberfish.

The weed thought we had was about the importance of keeping your childlike curiosity. As we age, we naturally begin to build habits of feeling, thinking, and behaving. We label things as chair, cloud, or grass and stop seeing it with wonder. Keeping some degree of this childlike curiosity even as you age is what keeps life engaging, awe inspiring, wonderful.

Even with this insight, the walk back felt like forever. I kept looking back and seeing the camp eternally far away. Apparently, weed can give you time loops so this wasn’t surprising.

Once we got back to camp, we brought some of our leftovers from yesterday’s dinner to our tents to eat. We had if I may say so, a five star meal of chicken, broccoli and mashed potatoes, lettuce and mustard. It tasted, delectable. Being high makes food taste, more vibrant.

Bodily movement, however, was difficult. I could walk and eat okay. But swallowing and bringing the fork up to my mouth—fine movements—were an effort. I got a weird dry mouth and puckered lips as well. I probably sounded like Ebenezer Scrooge while eating that meal.

After dinner, Jake left to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately, this began my first first paranoid section of the trip. I had heard weed could cause paranoia but I hadn’t experienced it myself yet. I thought I was pretty rational—I’d be fine.

I was sort of right.

I began having irrational fears about the future. Was I going get so high I’d lose control of my heart and die? This was ridiculous, weed is one of the safest drugs you can take—it’s practically impossible to overdose. Was my ego going to leave and never come back? Weed lasts for only a few hours. Did Jake get lost? The man’s a G, not possible.

Thankfully, Jake came back and put on some music at the table. I remember feeling a profound sense of gratitude I had him on this trip. He’s very grounding, has a magnificent mustache, and knows what he’s doing. The weed was stronger than I was expecting and if he wasn’t there I could easily have seen it becoming a bad trip.

That’s why I was sort of right. I had some paranoia but compared to what it could have been, it was manageable. I can only imagine the terror I could have had if I was in a worse mindset and setting.

Mindset and setting are crucial to having a good trip. You need to respect drugs, even weed despite being so normalized. At high doses like we were having it was psychedelic.

I told Jake I couldn’t believe how people didn’t realize how powerful weed was. He explained the reason it might be so powerful for us is we are more in touch with our bodies and minds compared to most people and I have done psychedelics before so I’m primed to see the similarities.

I had a second weed thought—people have lost touch with their bodies. We intake all these processed foods, processed drinks, get addicted to things like video games, drugs, etc. and don’t spend time meditating on our emotions and others. If people were more in tune with there bodies—perhaps through things like exercise, good eating, meditation, and responsible drug use—they wouldn’t have these problems.

I closed my eyes and was bewildered at how vivid it was. I could see countless colorful shapes and environments. It was kind of like a lucid dream. I could imagine things into existence but couldn’t force them. Ultimately, it was slightly out of my control. I could see Minecraft blocks, Egyptian sphinxes, Terraria pixels, gears, geometric patterns, and more. It was so fun I just sat their in the movie for probably thirty minutes.

When I opened my eyes I could see Jake dancing to the music playing, singing the words, and imitating the instrumentals. He seemed to know how to do everything. I remember thinking, wow, there’s this whole music world I haven’t been able to experience of Jake as much because I’m not that into music. He used to go to music school before transferring to Cornell.

How could I explore that passion more with him in the future?

The synesthesia by this point was crazy. Jake came close to me to sing the lyrics of the song on his phone. I felt like the phone was actually giving off heat onto me as if it was a fire.

I went to go to the bathroom which started the second paranoid section of the trip. Is a bear coming for me? Will people notice I’m high and call the cops? What if the weed experience never stops and I’m forever stuck here?

Thankfully, coming back to Jake grounded me again. He was laying on the ground and I took my sleeping bag out to lay beside him. We watched the clouds overhead in wonder and I closed my eyes again, escaping to awesome worlds of my imaginations.

After a while we both went to bed.

The next day I talked about the trip with Jake which proved wonderfully illuminating. He explained one of the principle things he struggled with during the trip was conflict between the ego and his weed thoughts. Many times throughout the experience, he had a weed thought and his ego told him it was stupid or “just the drug talking.” He believed this was ego defense. The ego doesn’t like how little control it has over you during a psychedelic so it tries to downsize the experience.

The secret is to not dismiss or accept the weed thoughts right away.

Often they hold profound truths. But they can also be super misleading. You have to be open minded.

Doing this weed trip gave me an analogy for understanding the power of psychedelics for spiritual growth.

Going into the psychedelic world is like putting on your psycho astronaut gear and venturing into space. Each time you come back to Earth you bring a bit more of the rest of the Universe with you until you become more and more connected to yourself, others, and the Universe as a whole. The psychedelics swivel the knobs of consciousness in different ways and make you attune to different things in your environment in ways you don’t while sober.

While sober, you have a much diminished conscious because to be too conscious would make it hard to go through everyday life. And to get things done.

The journey is not in touting one state as “better” than another. They just are. By integrating the psychedelic state with the sober one you can live more connected, alive, and joyful.

The last thing I’d like to note is how weed was different from my other drug experiences.

Weed gave me many of the same psychedelic experiences as mushrooms—time loops, feeling connected to a larger Universe, seeing things with a childlike wonder, synesthesia, greater color and sound perception, open eye distortions and slight visuals when it got dark, full vivid closed eye visuals (very patterned in nature and less alike to visualizing another reality), many thoughts as the same time that felt profound and yet difficulty latching on to one though for long, hyper presence and focus, and finally greater connection to bodily feeling.

However, weed was quiet different to my MDMA experience—none or not the same euphoria (in fact, veered to wards the paranoid, existential, or scared at times), no increased perception of my and others emotions, no pull to be physically close to someone else like through hugging, and no stimulant effect.

It’s different from alcohol in that you don’t feel as “relaxed.” Sometimes I was paranoid tense which doesn’t occur while drunk. I had more control over my body than on alcohol. It’s nothing like nicotine albeit nicotine was quiet tame in comparison. Nicotine just gave me a slight head rush and euphoria but nothing much else.

What are my next steps?

I would love to do mushrooms again in the future but don’t currently know how I’ll get it. It’s still idiotically illegal in the U.S. But I don’t see doing this until later in the year or next year. As for weed, I’d love to do it again with someone like my brother, dad, girlfriend, or another close friend. The most important thing to me, however, is to never be addicted psychologically or physically.

I’m not against doing it for fun, but at my stage of life I’m more interested in the spiritual benefits of drug taking than anything else.