The Cannabis Sail
The ship is you, that is your Set.
And your Setting is the wind and sea, your environment.
Now take a good look in and around you.
How seaworthy is your boat?
How favorable is the wind in your direction?
How cooperative the waters to your destination?
Such questions the smart captain asks,
When deciding to raise the sail or not.
Cannabis may be thought of as a vehicle, a sort of train that helps you get from point A to point B. Or cannabis may be like a friend that lends a helping hand, gets you on your feet again. Or a new person you meet that offers a different perspective on things, a different take on life. Sometimes we all need that. Just as the body of cannabis provides strong fiber for making canvas and rope, so too the spirit of the plant offers threads of connection and communication within and between people. It can help tie and bind us together in strong social fabrics of all forms and colors. It helps us get in better touch with our self, helps us learn who we are. And it helps us get away from our self, to better tune into the world and people around us. And sometimes it helps us tune out the world around, because sometimes we need to do that too.Like a pair of glasses, cannabis helps us see. It helps us see what we want in life and what we don't, whether from within or without. Sometimes we might feel scattered, too out-there, and cannabis reels us in, helps us focus. And sometimes things get too intense, we need release, and cannabis provides relief. Strange how one simple little plant can do so much. And yet, when we truly look at it, this plant has been with us for millions of years. We share a common heritage, and ultimately, perhaps a billion years ago, we shared a common ancestor; and we've been coevolving together, plant and animal, ever since. As single cells swimming in primordial seas we swam alongside these chloroplast-filled globs. And it was their extraordinary ability to gather light-energy from the Sun that allowed us animal cells to survive as we did, by "eating" their plant food and the oxygen they excreted. And when around four hundred million years ago we all began making our way onto land for the first time, it was our plant friends that led us there, again forging our path all along. Then, as now, we animals would not be here without them, these green partners of ours.
Considering our coevolutionary path, is it any great wonder why we should have cannabinoid receptors in our bodies? Our biochemistries, plant and animal, have been intimately comingling since the dawn of life. And it is not just a single chemical entity we share, but rather hundreds. Nor can our relationship with the plant be reduced and understood in mere lock and key, ligand-receptor, dynamics. For, in terms of organismal complexity, such chemical interactions are at least three orders of magnitude removed from higher central nervous system function and processing. In other words, to understand human behavior, mood, etc. strictly from a chemical-receptor standpoint, is to miss the mark from here to the moon, as the synergistic processes of nature are at work here.The vast bulk of modern medical research is still operating in terms of Newtonian mechanics. In other words, the dominant establishment is over one hundred years behind the times. As a whole, conventional medical models fail to incorporate the findings of Einstein and understand the implications of quantum theory, that energy and mind-consciousness are primary to existence. Further still, the dominant medical paradigm has not yet fully grasped the implications of Chaos science in its art and practice. That is to say, the research of pharmacology and practice of pharmacy in general still thinks and operates in terms of linear dynamics, when in fact we know nature behaves, as a rule, in a nonlinear manner. What does this mean?Most simply, in any complex system---and we know of nothing more complex than the human body and brain in particular---nonlinear dynamics are at work because so many different parts are interacting together, just as individual players in a large orchestra. And what this means in terms of nonlinear dynamics is that one cannot understand the whole merely by knowing the individual parts. In other words, the entire symphony can never be grasped by studying the workings of the individual instruments or the individual players. Why? Because synergy is at work here. And it's synergistic dynamics that causes the nonlinear behavior of complex systems.What is synergy, or a synergistic process? The idea is simple enough. Synergy is a non-additive or "ultra-sum" process. That is, in an additive or sum process, 1+2=3. In a synergistic or "ultra-sum" process, 1+2=4 (or more). That's the basic idea anyway. When individual parts work together synergistically the end result is greater than the added result of those same individual parts working independently. Bottom line, when a synergistic process is at work, the end result can be much greater than you might otherwise expect.Let's look at cannabis and the human body. Each of these organisms contains hundreds of chemicals. Of course, the biggy in cannabis, which always receives the bulk of attention because of its psychoactive effects, is THC, or delta -9-tetrahydrocannabinol. And it's true, this chemical is quite significant in terms of the plant's healing properties and psychic effects. But to mistake this one chemical---as with the case of pharmaceutically isolated and marketed dronabinol---as the sole active ingredient does a gross disservice to the plant (as well as the patient). For this approach completely misses the undeniable process of synergy at work here. Consider instead the dozens of chemicals in the plant interacting with dozens of chemicals in the human body. Now that's synergy!So we put whole cannabis, with all its various chemicals, in the human body. And the result? A physiochemical symphony, the exact orchestral output of which is beyond prediction based on the study of its individual players. But there's more to it than that. For the level of chemical interaction is only one level of complexity. To get to the brain and behavior we must move from the chemical level to the cellular level, then to tissues, then organs, then organ systems, then the organism as a whole. In other words, in going from a chemical understanding (which by itself is beyond conventional prediction) we've now moved up at least 5 or more levels of complexity. And at each level, I think it's fair to say a full magnitude of biological capability and potential is realized. Imagine a single orchestra playing with a dozen or more other orchestras. Then imagine this grouping of orchestras playing along with another dozen such orchestral groupings, and so on and so forth. Now try to imagine this grouping of groupings repeating about 4 or 5 times over from cell to brain. I think this is a close approximation of the degree of complexity, or orchestration if you will, of your human body. Most amazingly, this unimaginably complex orchestration is happening all the time, every second, whether you are aware of it or not. Asleep or awake, you don't need to lift a finger or think a single thought to make all this orchestration, cell to brain, happen. And yet somehow, going the other direction, brain to cell, you are still the conductor of this vast orchestra, able to lift a single finger at will, or think any number of thoughts. It's an incredible mysterious paradox, don't you think?! And it all depends on homeostasis, that is, keeping the human body, and mind, in balance. 
