Practicing Dharma in an environment awash with Cannabis?

[rockyysdt]

Since decriminalization the country is awash with all kinds of Cannabis, including access to potent strains.

 

Navigating life with its diversions and temptations, how difficult has it become to avoid negative habits?

Instant access to mind altered states vs a slow lifelong dedicated practice of mindfulness.

 

Although Dharma has the potential power to reveal the infinite, progress is not instant, often taking many years to seep in and transform.

On the other hand the temptation of using cannabis can yield instant experience, while also creating a habit often difficult to break.

 

What encouragement can be harnessed to help a traveler to maintain Dharma?

 

[Brucenkhamen]

A drug induced experience isn't comparable with an experience that has resulted from years of dedicated practice, even if they have a similar quality, because while the former creates a dependency on the drug the latter is only dependent on the skill developed to create it. 

 

If that skill created it once it can create it again, or further develop so that it becomes the norm. 

[ricklev]

1 hour ago, Brucenkhamen said:

A drug induced experience isn't comparable with an experience that has resulted from years of dedicated practice, even if they have a similar quality, because while the former creates a dependency on the drug the latter is only dependent on the skill developed to create it. 

 

If that skill created it once it can create it again, or further develop so that it becomes the norm. 

Well, I am not so sure that is true.  Seems like often folks with "years of dedicated practice" are devoted/addicted to the path and not awakening.  It don't seem fair, but I suspect the man or woman that took some mushrooms or other hallucinogen and by golly had an awakening experience may learn just as much as the man or woman with "years of dedicated practice".  Not always true, I am sure, but I don't discount it.   I am not sure marijuana is a powerful enough hallucinogen to bring about surrender, but I don't know. 

 

In fact, I don't know anything.