This article originally appeared in High Times’ 50th Anniversary print issue. It is an excerpt from Jason Silva’s book Sacred Derangement: A Field Guide to Outrageous Creativity, Radical Self-Expression and Living in Awe, published in August 2025 and available now on Amazon.
An excerpt from Jason Silva’s new book Sacred Derangement. On cannabis, consciousness as cinema and the idea that the self is something you direct rather than something you have.
Get Out of My Movie
David Lenson, in On Drugs, isolates with rare philosophical precision a feature of cannabis consciousness that transcends the usual cliches about intoxication. He writes:
“The cannabis user wants to take control of his or her consciousness, and what it contains at any given moment. The 1965 phrase of dismissal ‘Get out of my movie!’ expresses this heightened stewardship of internal life. What offends must be avoided, and what pleases can be enjoyed instant by instant with contemplative exactitude.”
It is an observation that expands in all directions. Beneath its casual idiom, “Get out of my movie!” is a compact philosophy of perception, a declaration that the stream of consciousness is not a given but a medium, and like any medium, it can be directed, edited, framed and scored. The cannabis state makes this explicit, revealing consciousness as a private cinema in which the self holds the dual role of director and audience, playwright and player.
Ordinarily, we inhabit our mental life as passive spectators, accepting the rush of sensory and cognitive impressions as the fixed reel of reality. Cannabis alters the contract. It decelerates the projection speed, decompressing the compression of everyday perception into a slow-motion reel. Suddenly, the granular structure of experience becomes visible: the way light refracts across a glass, the stratified harmonics of a chord, the subtext in a companion’s …
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Author: Jason Silva / High Times
