Transcript of Live Interview:
John Mini with the NEO Shaman Group on 12/21/07

NSG: OK, why are we interviewing you?

JM: Because I want to empower the marijuana community to become a virtual nation of super-balanced psychedelic shamans who can manifest their dreams here on Earth.

NSG: You’re crazy.

JM: Which is lucky for you, or else I wouldn’t be here talking with you about such a crazy subject.

NSG: Point well taken. But the idea of empowering the “marijuana community,” which isn’t a community at all, is crazy.

JM: I think you’re wrong there, too.

NSG: Why?

JM: Because in the first place, what I call the marijuana community already exists as a culture, although it’s rarely talked about in those terms. That’s why I refer to it as a virtual nation. Maybe we can talk about that later on in the interview. In the second place, which I think is much more important, that virtual nation already has all the tools it needs to raise itself to become a very sophisticated and positive group of empowered individuals. The group just doesn’t know how to use those tools yet in a structured way. I’m teaching you how to do that.

NSG: Who are you? Why are you interested in working with people who use marijuana?

JM: I’m an Acupuncturist and Herbalist. I’ve lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1984. Many people who have used marijuana for a long time have come to see me in my clinical practice. A lot of them wonder if using marijuana is harming them in some way. Most of them suspect it is, but they don’t know how.

NSG: What do you know about marijuana that we don’t already know?

JM: Let’s dispel that mystery right now. My purpose here is to educate. If you’re taking unbalanced marijuana, after you hear what I have to say you’ll be able to make more intelligent and informed decisions about what you’re doing. If you don’t take marijuana, but you know people who are, what I’m about to say might help you make sense out of their behaviors and make your life a lot easier.

So let’s pop the bubble once and for all: marijuana has side effects. If you take marijuana those side effects will affect you. The good news is that if you know what the side effects of marijuana are, you can also know what to do to balance them.

NSG: What are the side effects of marijuana?

JM: The Chinese name for marijuana tells the whole story. Its name is Huo Ma, which means Fire Hemp. The Chinese call marijuana Huo Ma because of its fiery nature. Marijuana starts a fire inside of you when you take it. That fire takes a definite progression through your body and mind if you expose yourself to it again and again.

NSG: What’s the progression?

JM: It goes like this. Marijuana can hurt you in seven main ways. First it harms your Lung System. Marijuana begins its damage by drying up your fluid metabolism from the level of the Lungs.

Marijuana dries you out because its hot nature burns up your Yin. Marijuana starts to burn up your Yin the instant you take it. Its progression of drying you out starts with the thin fluids of your lung and stomach. These thin fluids are the basis of all the deeper Yin fluids in your body.

NSG: How can I tell if my Lung fluids are getting dried out?

JM: When your lung fluids dry up, the effect you feel right away is cottonmouth.

NSG: How else can I know?

JM: I just want to touch on some of the most important points here, or we’ll get swamped with too much information. The actual lists of side effects go on and on. There are pages and pages of side effects for each category on a website I’ve created for all this, which is http://www.marijuana-syndromes.com.

NSG: OK, then what’s the next stage?

JM: In the second stage marijuana harms your digestive system by drying up your digestive fluids and confusing your digestive functions.

NSG: Is that what gives you the munchies?

JM: Yes. You’re starting to get it. A large part of marijuana’s direct influence impacts your stomach and pancreas. That’s what gives you the munchies and is a strong part of your rush.

I say you’re starting to get it because I want to train you how to recognize what’s happening when you or someone you know gets high. The process of discovering marijuana’s effects on you is complicated. The best thing I can do is give you a set of guideposts that you can use along the way. The main thing you want to remember is that it’s easy to track how marijuana’s affecting you. All you need to do is pay attention to how it’s changing your perceptions both during and around the time of your high. That’ll point you straight to the level the marijuana’s acting on, and then you can read the guideposts to find out exactly where you are.

NSG: I get it. What’s the third level?

JM: In the third stage, marijuana slowly poisons your whole body with its toxic, hot poisonous nature.

NSG: Isn’t that kind of extreme?

JM: Yes.

NSG: Aren’t you overstating the poison bit?

JM: Yes and no. In the first place, it’s all going to depend on what kind of condition you’re in before you ever start using marijuana. The more compromised you are going in, the faster and more deeply the toxic part is going to affect you. In the second place, all of these categories are broad pictures that I’m painting to give you and idea of what the territory’s like when you begin to tread into it. It’s like a map of the whole place, but any place you’re in at any particular moment is going to be limited by the boundaries of your perception.

NSG: So in this part of the territory, how does that happen?

JM: If you take marijuana on a long-term basis without balancing it, sooner or later you’ll lose your ability to cope with its poison. That’s when physical damage to your body begins. Marijuana’s heat slowly creeps into every part of you, starting with your weakest areas first. The effects you feel will depend on your sensitivity to hot poison, but in general this is when unbalanced marijuana begins to compromise your immune system. So you’ll get colds, flus and other infections more easily, suffer more and have a harder time getting over them.

NSG: What does the hot poison do?

JM: Its heat slowly decreases the functions of your organs. Then your organs may no longer be able to clean their own waste the way they usually do. The poison from the marijuana itself also accumulates. This can lead to a build up of hot poisonous caches in various locations throughout your body. The whole process creates a vicious cycle that gets more and more toxic until your system finally breaks down. NSG: What do you mean breaks down?

JM: That’s what the different stages of marijuana poisoning describe. Each stage has many levels of depth and complicated branches that include physical, emotional, mental, psychological and even spiritual dimensions. When you get to the fourth level, you’re beginning to visit some of the deep damage that marijuana can do. Basically, this is when your immune system begins to get compromised, so you’ll get colds, flus and other infections more easily. NSG: I’m still hung up on the concept of poison. Why do you have to call it poison?

JM: I’m using the word poison as a specific technical term. In the world of medicine, anything that makes you thirsty and alters your perceptions and consciousness when you take it is called a poison. Any substance that has a powerful nature will become toxic to you if you take more of it than your body can process at any one time. Some people get hung up on the word poison like it’s a bad thing, but marijuana is medicine, right?

NSG: Right…

JM: Well the difference between poison and medicine is dosage and timing. Poison is power. I’m honoring marijuana’s power when I invoke the truth about it’s poisonous qualities. If you deny marijuana’s poison, you also deny its power. What I’m saying is that if you learn how to use marijuana at the right time, in the right dosage and in context with other herbs like it’s done traditionally, like all herbs are taken traditionally, then you’ll partake of its power in an empowering way, rather than in a way that may be harmful.

NSG: I totally get it. Now I want to know about the fourth level!

JM: Good. The fourth level is when unbalanced marijuana damages your heart and blood systems by stagnating, heating, depleting and poisoning your blood.

NSG: How does that work?

JM: Marijuana burns up the parts of your blood production that come from the food you eat and the air you breathe. That’s part of the fallout of the first three stages. It slowly cuts you off from getting nourished by life.

NSG: So you’re saying that marijuana makes you anemic?

JM: No. Blood deficiency in Traditional Chinese Medicine doesn’t mean you’re low on Iron. It means the nutritional status of your blood is low. It can also mean that your blood’s ability to carry nutrition is compromised.

NSG: How do I know if that’s happening to me?

JM: The main experience you’ll have comes in the form of sleep disorders. If the marijuana damages your Yin more than your Yang, you’ll get insomnia. If it damages your Yang more than your Yin, you’ll feel sleepy all the time.

Your blood system contains memory and a lot of other mental and psychological elements. Your blood supports the higher functions of your mind. It sustains your thinking, your perceptions and Shen, or spirit. When your blood quality goes down, your ability to do those things goes down, too. This is when marijuana starts taking away your dreams, which is a very common side effect of marijuana use.

Marijuana also burns up your blood itself with its Fire. The quality of your high and the expansion and compression of your awareness puts a huge strain on the mental and psychic capacities of your blood. Blood is a deep stage of yin. The fire of marijuana burns it up.

NSG: What happens then?

JM: That’s when you go into the fifth stage, where marijuana damages your liver system by congesting it with hot poison.

NSG: How do I know if that’s happening to me?

JM: One of the first ways you can tell that marijuana’s affecting your liver system is if you start feeling dizzy and having trouble walking when you're high. That means your liver qi is getting confused. When your liver yin and blood start burning up, your eyes will feel like they're buzzing or like they’re full of insects. NSG: Are there any other signs?

JM: Yes. If you're a woman, it's easy to tell what marijuana’s doing to your liver blood. Just observe your menstrual blood and how you feel around the time of your menstruation. You’ll get typical PMS symptoms as your liver qi begins to congest. NSG: What if you’re a man?

JM: If you’re a man, you’ll start getting irritable and losing your motivation. NSG: Are there any other signs that my liver system is getting damaged by marijuana?

JM: Yes, there are many signs, but the most important one is the most difficult to observe.

NSG: What’s that?

JM: Compulsive behaviors. Compulsion is one of the biggest red flags that your liver's qi and Yin are getting damaged. And the compulsion doesn’t have to be to marijuana. It can be to anything. I think one of the most important issues surrounding habitual marijuana use is that it influences many different parts of your personality at the same time.

NSG: Can you give me an example?

JM: Yes. I’ll give you what I think is the most important one of all. Have you ever noticed a sense of restlessness when you get high? (An eerie silence fills the room.) Even if you’re using marijuana to relieve pain, it might give you a weird feeling of uneasiness. That’s because your body’s telling you something’s wrong. That uneasiness means your liver qi is getting poisoned and confused. The feeling comes from your liver qi wanting to get you out of the situation you've put yourself in. But marijuana’s grip on your kidney qi doesn’t let you motivate yourself and move beyond the danger. Marijuana sets you up with a physical paradox that’s very difficult to get out of on a neurological level.

The strength of your uneasiness shows you how deeply marijuana’s damaging your liver yin. The strength of your feeling of helplessness shows you how much the unbalanced marijuana’s taking down your kidney qi.

The paradox between the anxiety you’re feeling and the illusion that you can’t do anything about it creates trauma in your nervous system. Trauma reprograms your nervous system in an effort to cope with what’s happening to you.

The trauma we’re talking about here creates a syndrome that I call MIST. MIST stands for Marijuana Induced Stress Trauma. MIST physically reinforces a passive, victimized attitude toward life.

NSG: What can we do about MIST?

JM: Don’t let the illusion of marijuana keep you from taking positive action for your healing. Your body’s feedback mechanisms are there for good reasons. They’re there to heal you and move you forward in life. If you want to break free from MIST, you’ve got to pay attention to the signals your body is giving you and take action right away. The longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be.

NSG: Well like what kind of actions?

JM: It can be anything, and as long as it’s not harmful to yourself or others, it’s probably worth doing. What I’m saying is that your body has billions of years of intelligence and more inside of it and it knows what’s right and wrong and it knows how to heal itself if you give it the opportunity.

NSG: OK, where do we go from here?

JM: Let’s talk about the next stage, where unbalanced marijuana can damage your kidney and jing sexual essence systems.

NSG: How does marijuana do that?

JM: By devastating your kidney qi, yin and yang. Over time, unbalanced marijuana can deplete and depolarize your jing sexual essence. When that happens it confuses and exhausts your natural sexual functions.

NSG: Can you explain what all of that means?

JM: Sure. Your kidney system is responsible for your long-term health. It regulates the enduring cycles your body goes through over the course of your whole lifetime. By the time unbalanced marijuana gets to the level of your kidney system, it’s altering the course of your life in a serious way.

NSG: How can I tell when marijuana’s affecting my kidney system?

JM: You’ll experience fear or paranoia. When it goes deeper you'll start losing your memory.

NSG: What were we talking about? (Laughter.) Oh yes! What’s jing?

JM: Traditional Chinese Medicine views the body like it’s an alchemical cauldron, or a moonshine still. We say your body distills the substances you eat and breathe into concentrated subtle essences. Your body refines these essences into higher qualities of matter and energy, and then uses them to support its different functions. Jing is the highest level of physical refinement in this system.

NSG: How can I tell if marijuana’s burning up my jing?

JM: When the marijuana poison goes to a really deep level, things will seem like they’re happening in slow motion when you’re high. Time appears to go on forever. You’ll be in the “Infinite Now” experience. What's really happening is your perceptions are moving very fast. That’s when marijuana’s burning up your jing sexual essence.

NSG: What are the consequences?

Your jing is the storehouse for your life potential. It’s your reserves. Your jing is responsible for the quality of your life experience and maybe the length of your life as well. In the Chinese Medical world we believe marijuana’s effects are serious because of how it affects your jing. You might be trading a portion of your life potential for your relationship with marijuana.

NSG: How’s that?

JM: Traditional Chinese Medicine sees the brain as a reservoir of jing. One of marijuana’s qualities is that it moves quickly into your brain and to very specific receptor sites on your core nerve cells. The parts of your brain that have the highest concentration of these receptors are the ones that control your experiences of pleasure, thought, memory, sensation, concentration, time perception and coordination. These are the areas of your brain that get the most stimulated and poisoned over time, so they’re the ones that get the most damaged.

Beyond that, I believe that marijuana induces aging.

NSG: What?

JM: The main reason marijuana extinguishes your life force and longevity over time is because of the way it affects your kidney and jing systems. Marijuana’s very nature induces the aging process, at least from the viewpoint of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

NSG: How does marijuana induce aging?

JM: Whenever any organ system in your body is over-working, your kidney system will get involved to help out. The strain unbalanced marijuana puts on you drains your kidney qi, yang and yin. Losing yin is a big part of the aging process. Losing your kidney yin withers you up. Losing your kidney Yang means losing the heat you need to maintain life. Losing your kidney qi means losing the functions of your organs. Marijuana speeds up and intensifies these processes that happen naturally as you age.

NSG: I still don’t get how that makes you age.

JM: OK, let's compare the effects of marijuana with the effects of aging:

Marijuana poisons you little by little over time. It creates heat in your body. It dries up your body fluids, your yin and your jing sexual essence. It confuses your digestive system, compromises your immune system and reduces your mental and emotional abilities.

The main issues that happen as we age are the same. We get toxic and inflamed. The fire of time evaporates your fluids and your yin and jing. Your digestion slows down and gets weaker. You have less energy in general, so it gets harder to thrive as time goes on.

So marijuana's effects, at least in terms of Traditional Chinese Medicine, are the same as the process of aging. They’re equivalent.

NSG: Yow.

JM: Yow. Shall I continue?

NSG: Yes, please.

JM: OK, let’s talk about sex. Some people use marijuana to increase their sexual pleasure. But over time marijuana poisons the centers in your brain that are responsible for your sexual pleasure. So as you enjoy your experience in the moment, marijuana burns up the physical basis of your sexuality.

When you’re in this phase, your erotic sensations get heightened, but only if you’re high. As the marijuana poisons your liver and kidney systems and confuses their functions, your sexual energy starts to disperse. You’ll know you’re in this stage when you begin searching for new and unusual ways to have sex and stimulate yourself.

NSG: Uh oh. (Laughter)

JM: It gets much worse. Did you know that marijuana affects people differently according to their gender? NSG: No.

JM: It’s true. We say marijuana depolarizes your Jing. This means that if you're a man, it can tend to make you become more feminine. If you're a woman, it can tend to make you more masculine. We’re not just talking yin and yang here. It happens on the physical level of your hormones and tissues. Keeping your jing polarized is the foundation of your physical energy. If you want to stay healthy and live a long time, you’ll want to keep your Jing polarized for as long as possible. Marijuana takes you in the opposite direction. NSG: So what could the next stage possibly bring?

JM: The final stage is where marijuana damages your shen, or spirit.

NSG: How does it do that?

JM: If you’ll remember, marijuana’s psychoactive nature puts a heavy strain on your blood and nervous system because it pushes you to go into psychedelic realms of perception. It also systematically destroys every stage of your fluid metabolism. Its hot and dry nature dries up the moistening and nourishing qualities of your blood. That’s how marijuana depletes your brain and nervous system of vital fluids and nutrition. It also deprives them by injuring the mechanisms your organs normally use to regenerate themselves. The result is burn-out.

Shen damage is the final product of burning out. You burn out because of two things. The first is that marijuana uses up the nutritional basis in your blood for getting high. Once you get through this stage, you go into the next, which is physical damage to your body. NSG: How does that work?

Any activity you do has specific nutritional requirements. Getting high is just like any other activity. The more you take marijuana, the heavier demand you’re going to have for the nutrition your body needs to get high. If you’ve scavenged those substances out of your blood, you’ll need to get them from other places in your body. As time goes on, you’ll scour yourself out from searching for all available materials. That means those same materials won’t be available for your other normal bodily processes. The more you get high while you’re in this phase, the more wear and tear you’ll put on yourself and the more you’ll burn out. NSG: Where does all of this leave us? Can we do anything about it, or is this just the way it is?

JM: You can do a lot about it, but you need to strategize and work intelligently. Now that you know a little bit about marijuana’s nature, you can create a definite plan for what you want to do about it.

NSG: Like what?

JM: Well, you could stop using marijuana. But if you don’t want to do that, or believe you can’t, you can keep using marijuana, and do other things at the same time that will help you balance out the damage it’s doing to you. Whether you stop using marijuana or continue, there’s an inescapable clinical truth I’ve found in healing: your body will only heal as much as it needs to maintain your basic daily activities. Beyond that, you need to put time, energy and intelligence into your healing. If you want to heal the damage marijuana’s doing to you, you need to do something more.

NSG: Like what?

JM: Put energy and attention into your healing and apply the infinite intelligence you possess to your life. Do anything you can to improve your healing process. Find the best solutions for what’s going on with you and use them again and again. Do whatever you can to live as fully as possible.

NSG: I want specifics. JM: So do I. Traditional Chinese Medicine likes solutions. We look for balance in all things. So if we want to balance the fiery nature of marijuana and the progression it takes through your body, we need to address the seven key areas of damage that we’ve just talked about.

NSG: Can you just review them again one by one in a simplified form so we can get it?

JM: Sure, and I’ll even reframe the whole thing to focus on what you need to do to balance it all out at the same time, so we’ll save a step in the process.

First, we need to balance the damage marijuana does to your qi, lung and immune systems.

Then we need to address the damage marijuana does to your digestive system.

Then we’ll want to clean marijuana’s hot poison from every level of your body.

We’ll also need to address the damage marijuana does to your heart and blood systems.

Beyond that, we need to support your liver system.

And we need to nourish your kidney and jing sexual essence systems.

Finally, we need to help you restore your shen.

Clear enough?

NSG: Maybe to you, but what can someone who isn’t a wizard of Alternative Medicine do?

JM: You begin to address those seven key areas by resting and eating well. That’s the best way to replenish your yin.

You can get acupuncture and take Chinese herbs. Another important thing you can do is challenge your brain and body through exercise and education. The more you use your brain and body, the more it will rise to the demands you put on it. But there’s a point of diminishing returns where you just need to rest so you can recuperate and reorganize yourself. It’s just like any kind of training.

NSG: Do you have any other specific suggestions around diet and marijuana?

JM: You might think you could manage it all through diet alone. But balancing marijuana’s nature through diet is tricky because it’s such a complicated substance. It takes a master herbalist to balance marijuana’s complexity with accuracy and enough power to do something effective in the long term.

Having said that, there’s one food group and five specific foods that I believe can help you balance marijuana’s hot and toxic nature. The food group is really interesting because there are a number of people who have discovered it on their own without knowing how or why.

NSG: What is it?

JM: Raw foods. There’s a growing raw foods cult that’s growing around the world. Moderate amounts of properly prepared raw foods can help you neutralize marijuana’s poison and its heat at the same time. I don’t want to over generalize about the people who have discovered this on their own, but I can say the ones I’ve known who are into raw foods all have one thing in common… (laughter)

Anyway, I want to emphasize the part about moderate amounts of raw foods. A little bit can be helpful, but going overboard is just like anything, it can get you in trouble. Being a fanatic about anything can get you in trouble. Raw food is no exception.

NSG: What are the five specific foods that you would recommend?

JM: The first is Menudo.

NSG: What?

JM. Yes, Menudo. Menudo is one of the best remedies for chronic marijuana damage. But it’s not for everyone’s dietary preferences, and it’s definitely not on the raw foods shopping list.

Okra is also pretty good, but again, it’s not to everybody’s tastes.

Agave nectar and honey are also good to replenish your thin fluids. Agave benefits your spleen system more and honey benefits your liver system more. Rotate them. But both of these foods are very mild. Even if you ate lots and lots of them for years it wouldn’t help you that much in the big picture. They’re just small steps in the right direction, and you want to take all the small steps you can.

Coconut water is another good remedy for long-term marijuana damage, but its nature is a little too cold to take unopposed in the long run. This is the main problem. Many of the substances that are the best remedies for marijuana also have strong natures. You need to know how to balance them out over time so you don’t create more problems for yourself. I’m in the process of writing a book on dietary therapy for marijuana users right now. It’s really interesting because I’m going through each of the levels and stages that we’re talking about here and giving recipes for all of them. I think people are going to love it. It’ll be like unlocking the secret buried treasure at your local supermarket.

NSG: I can’t wait. Any other suggestions on exercise?

JM: Yes. Do whatever seems totally alien and uncomfortable to you. Even do something that’s a little edgy if you can.

NSG: Why?

JM: Because those are the things that give us the biggest neurological challenges. Remember when I said, ‘if you really want to heal the damage marijuana’s doing to you, you have to do something more?’ You need to do something to get you out of your old modes of thinking, being and doing. If you don’t, you’ll only heal at a superficial level.

One thing I’ve learned from studying different forms of indigenous medicine is that only a part of our healing comes from that relaxed and fluffy state you get when you go to certain kinds of popular healers. There are other very important and necessary states of healing that can come from places that aren’t so safe and cozy.

NSG: Is there any other specific information from indigenous medicine that applies to our discussion about marijuana?

JM: Yes. From the perspective of very old traditional medicine systems, and Traditional Chinese Medicine is only one of many, psychoactive substances have divine spirits associated with them. Marijuana is one of those substances. It’s wise to work with the spirit of marijuana with great caution and respect, or it may take a toll on you that will become much greater than its benefits.

NSG: Like how?

JM: In many of the traditional societies that I know of, if you take a psychoactive substance, you need to make some kind of a payment for your experience. The payment is big. You need to pay the shaman. You need to support the community. You need to respect your ancestors through ceremony and sacrifice. You need to pay back nature for the divine wisdom you’re receiving from coming into communion with the psychoactive substance.

That’s not the typical scenario I’ve witnessed with recreational marijuana users. I’ve not even witnessed it with medical marijuana users, and they may owe a greater energetic debt to marijuana than recreational users because it’s helping them to live in ways that they couldn’t otherwise. Then again, from an indigenous standpoint, any non-sacred recreational use of a sacred substance is taboo.

Traditional societies understand that if you don’t make the necessary payment, the energy for your experience has to come from somewhere. Unbalanced marijuana can become a powerful parasite in its relationship with you if you don’t handle it carefully. This parasitic relationship can drive your cycle of tolerance and compulsion to the point that you become marijuana’s slave. That kind of relationship can be very damaging to your shen.

That’s only if we take the simple view, which is the one we’re most likely to accept according to our view of the world. If you really want to talk about the consequences from a traditional viewpoint, you would also have to take into account the damaging effects that come down on those who are close to you, starting with the most innocent ones. But to our modern view, we consider that kind of weird, so we won’t go there.

NSG: Oh goodie. Can you say anything more about the psychological dimension of marijuana?

JM: Yes. There’s a pattern that runs through all of the stages. If you understand that pattern it will help you understand the process as a whole. I say that marijuana is like a magic bus. At first, the bus goes in the direction of your goals and dreams. If you can manage yourself well, and that’s a big if, marijuana may help you to clarify what those goals and dreams are.

But if you don’t jump off the bus when your dreams are scintillatingly clear, marijuana will show you this wonderful world, and then make a big U turn and go in the opposite direction. Then it gains speed in that direction and takes you faster and faster into oblivion. The big question is if you will get off marijuana’s ride while it’s still going in the right direction for you.

NSG: Maybe I’m a Pollyanna, but I’m grasping at straws to remember what was so great about marijuana. Does it have any benefits?

JM: Absolutely yes. Marijuana has a powerful nature and that’s what makes it a powerful medicine. You just have to know when and how to work with it so your experience stays positive all the way around. Unless you caved in to peer pressure when you first experimented with marijuana, there’s probably something about it that you craved on an instinctive level. You might have thought it would heal you or take you to a new and different place in life. It can. There’s a powerful part of you that knows how to heal. That part of you knows marijuana is very strong medicine. Maybe there’s something about the hot nature of marijuana that is or was nurturing or healing for you on some level. Marijuana’s not bad. Some people just misuse it and get in trouble. NSG: So there can be a right time and place for marijuana?

JM: Sure, just like anything.

NSG: What did you want to say about the marijuana community being a virtual nation?

JM: That’s a very important point. Virtual these days tends to have technological connotations, but what I’m talking about is something much more real and organic than that. It relates to the indigenous, shamanic level of things we’ve been talking about a little bit here.

What I’m saying is that, from an indigenous point of view, when you partake of sacred medicine you’re taking a sacrament. That sacrament is literally the body of a god, or in this case a goddess. Taking that sacrament into your body allows you to share a part of the consciousness of that being for a while.

So here are all of these millions of people who are sharing a very sacred experience by being connected to the same being. That being has its own pulse. It has its own intelligence and its own life, and that intelligence connects with the earth and with the cosmos in some very unique and beautiful ways.

Everyone who takes marijuana is sharing the same vibration. It’s like being on the same radio channel or frequency. There’s a communication or a simpatico that takes place both with the being and with the other users. My suggestion is that maybe there’s something bigger in this than the individuals involved can directly perceive.

NSG: Do you think there are any humans who can see it or understand it?

JM: Any particular viewpoint will have its distortions. That’s why I believe it’s up for the community to work it out together in a serious way.

NSG: Where would you begin?

JM: You know, this journey has been going on for a long, long time. I would go to the elders of the traditions that have been most deeply involved with sacred marijuana use for the longest time and ask them. I would go to the Rastafarian elders and work with them in a real way. I would go to the Shivites in India and work with them in a real way. I would create lines of connection, communication and resources between those elders if there aren’t ones already- at least on this plane. I would make sure those elders have the support that they need to do what they need to do. I would do everything possible to help them to ground their vision and watch what happens.

NSG: May it be so.

JM: May it be so.

NSG: How would you sum all this up in a nutshell?

JM: OK, let’s bring it all back to the here and now and get personal. Sooner or later, every intensive marijuana user I know has come to me with the same question: Is it OK to take marijuana? They know what the answer is, but they ask anyway.

I want to be truthful with you. Any habit will have a long-term effect on you and your health. Unbalanced marijuana has side effects that come from its nature. Those side effects will influence you in very specific and predictable ways if you use marijuana on an ongoing basis without doing anything to balance it out.

The good news is that you can take steps to balance marijuana’s side effects and do everything possible to keep your experience as positive as possible. Whatever steps you take, I hope what we’ve talked about here will help you discover that path for yourself and get back your dreams.

NSG: Thank you.

JM: Thank you.


Important Marijuana Articles

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Many of the technical details of John Mini's understandings on the marijuana syndromes and their treatments are contained in
Marijuana Syndromes
How to Balance and Optimize
the Effects of Cannabis
With Traditional Chinese Medicine