I've set my life priorities with help of weed. They still hold to this day. I've done some of the best decisions on direction of my life with weed. Looking back +-10 years ago, damn those were some fine decisions. Weed gives me, when alone, often semi-constant stream of very creative ideas just popping out of sub-consciousness. I've come up with ideas for startups at least 50x, often to find later somebody is already well into executing it (often in areas I normally don't touch, ie self-belaying machines for climbing, or self-shaping moving wall for climbing - I never ever saw/heard about any of those, but it seems they are quite popular in US).
The rate, amount and depth of those ideas just isn't there when sober. The rate is so high that I sometimes don't manage to record them all.
All this was done alone, just me and my emotions. YMMV, but for my introvertish personality type, it works wonders. There are drawbacks of course, like with everything else. But postponing dealing with issues is more of an alcohol style effect.
The rate of good ideas (or rather, the feeling of that, as it is) was called "interpretation madness" by one podcaster.
When you relate alcohol with postponing one's emotions, perhaps this is because you've seen that happen. So have I.
But I've also seen dozens of friends get stuck in their emotional (and educational) development for years because of weed.
Don't forget the hashishins - the drug is literally named after a bunch of assassins who smoked to forget.
It's a mind altering drug, can be quite powerful, can create (easy to shed) psychical dependence. As we say back home about fire - good servant, bad master.
Weed has different effects on different people. Assuming that weed will have the same effect on everyone is obviously a bad assumption.
There are tons of stories about many different things (gluten, msg, sugar, caffiene, coffee, tea, ice cream, tylenol, etc. etc.) having different effects on different people. Sometimes those differences are completely perceptional, and sometimes they are physical, but the outcomes are definitively different.
It's a deep cognitive bias to ignore this fact.
I have never been more apt to deal with issues than since I started smoking weed.
I do think it’s possible to use it as a tool to help you deal with stuff though, and I think that’s what the person I was replying to was doing.
There are some similarities in the effect, yes. But the problems with weed is it's effect is temporary and it messes up your awareness. Also you can not do in in many public places. Should I mention that certain types of meditation make you even more intoxicated? :)
But if you keep your interest and intention to try experience something different - I'm sure you will find out.
After that, you begin listening to your body and the brain more, and to track the state of them both instead of taking it for granted. That's how the way to ‘mindfulness’ starts. You learn that the two states are in a feedback loop: if you're tense, you get angry and anxious, which gets you more tense. To break the loop, you could of course hit a blunt, but that's not always an option, or at least not always the best one. Alternatively, you can take some time to free the brain from being hung up on the worries and to free the body from being contorted by tenseness.
For example, many people are so focused on planning for the future that it's unhealthy. Mindfulness can help to distract their minds for the unhealthy though pattern.
Either way it's good to work through a few different courses and find something that works. For example MBCT.
Until those, I thought meditation was inherently coupled with eastern mystic bullshit with zero benefits for anyone who didn't want to buy into a bunch of other baggage.
He has a book by the same name as the mobile app. The first chapter (read out loud here) is what first started convincing me that mindfulness was something I should seek out and develop: https://samharris.org/podcasts/chapter-one/
I started doing it while laying in bed before falling asleep. Ended up with a daily morning practice sitting up on my bench.