The Observer Changes the Observed

The Observer Changes the Observed

You Think You're Just Watching? Think Again.

Let’s get one thing straight. You are not a passive observer of your life. You’re not sitting in a movie theater watching a film that’s already been made. You are the damn projector, the screen, and the audience all at once. Every single second, your attention is shaping the world around you. Not in some fluffy, woo-woo, “just think positive” kind of way. I’m talking about the hard, cold, scientifically-proven reality of quantum physics.

But let me take this deeper. What we're really talking about here is far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics - the physics that Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine gave us. This isn't just quantum woo-woo. Flowing energy organizes matter. That's the fundamental truth. Your attention, your consciousness - these are manifestations of energy flow, and they literally shape the molecular organization of your reality. Collections of molecules, when energy flows through them, will get smarter as long as they make the universe "stupider quicker" - that's entropy, that's the second law, and that's why observation matters.

The idea that “energy flows where attention goes” isn’t just a nice-sounding platitude. It’s a fundamental principle of the universe. And the sooner you grasp this, the sooner you can stop being a victim of your circumstances and start being the architect of your reality.

The Problem: We’re All Backward-Looking People

Most of us live life looking in the rearview mirror. We are obsessed with the past. We define ourselves by our past failures, our past traumas, our past successes. We are, as my mentor Dr. Bob Melamede would say, “Backward-Looking People” (BLPs). We are trying to drive a car forward while staring intently at the road behind us. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Here's the biochemistry nobody's telling you: BLPs are cannabinoid deficient. I'm not being metaphorical here. Your endocannabinoid system - the pot you make inside your own body - regulates open-mindedness. It regulates your ability to forget old information and embrace new information. Those knockout mice I've studied? The ones without CB1 receptors? Put them in a water maze, they learn where the platform is. Move the platform, and they keep going back to the old spot. They literally cannot relearn. They're stuck.

That's what's happening with backward-looking people. They don't have the biochemical machinery to embrace change. Every change is stress for them. And what buffers stress? Your endocannabinoid system. Cannabis is the ultimate adaptogen.

This backward-looking mindset is a trap. It keeps you stuck in a state of equilibrium, a state of balance. And as Dr. Bob taught me, equilibrium is death. Life, real life, exists at the edge of chaos, in a state of being far-from-equilibrium. It’s in this dynamic, ever-changing state that self-organization happens, that complexity arises, that life thrives.

“The greatest illusion is that we are separate from the world we observe. The truth is, we are co-creating it with every thought, every measurement, every glance.”

When you’re stuck in the past, you’re essentially observing the same old patterns, reinforcing them, and ensuring that your future looks exactly like your past. You are observing a static reality, and so it remains static. You are a rat in a wheel, and you don’t even realize you’re the one making it spin.

The Thermodynamics of Attention

Let me give you the physics that nobody taught you in school. We are dissipative structures - flow-dependent organizations of matter. If you stop eating, stop breathing, stop getting rid of waste, you die. You return to equilibrium. And equilibrium is death.

Health is your distance from equilibrium. Aging is your return toward it.

Now here's where attention comes in: Your nervous system monitors all the energy that comes into you - your sights, sounds, smells, sensations. Your immune system monitors all the mass. These two systems together are how you interface with your environment, and both are fundamentally regulated by your endocannabinoid system.

When you focus your attention, you're literally directing the flow of energy through your neural architecture. You're selecting which patterns get reinforced, which connections get strengthened. This isn't metaphor - this is molecular biology. Your CB1 receptors are regulating calcium channels, modulating neurotransmission, determining which signals get amplified and which get dampened.

Where attention goes, energy flows, and flowing energy organizes matter.

The Application: Stop Watching, Start Creating

So what the hell does this mean for you, right now, in your messy, complicated, beautiful life? It means you have to get intentional about where you place your attention. Are you focusing on your problems, or are you focusing on the solutions? Are you dwelling on your past mistakes, or are you envisioning a future of your own design?

This is the difference between a Forward-Looking Person (FLP) and a Backward-Looking Person (BLP). An FLP understands that the past is a sunk cost. It’s information, nothing more. They use that information to make better decisions in the present, to aim their attention at the future they want to create. They embrace the chaos, the uncertainty, because they know that’s where the magic of self-organization happens.

The difference between FLPs and BLPs isn't just psychological - it's genetic and biochemical. There's actually a polymorphism in the CB1 receptor associated with happiness. Some people are born higher than others. Literally. Everyone in this room is high right now because your CB1 receptors are always turned on to some degree. The question is: are you high enough?

This is why I say cannabis prohibition is fundamentally a human rights violation. It's cannabinoid-deficient people using government force against cannabinoid-sufficient people. It's biochemical racism.

Your endocannabinoid system (ECS) is the master regulator that helps you navigate this process. It’s the biological interface between your mind and your body, constantly working to maintain homeostasis and adapt to a changing environment. When you’re stuck in a backward-looking loop, your ECS goes haywire. You’re in a constant state of stress, of fight-or-flight. But when you become an FLP, when you start consciously directing your attention, you give your ECS the signals it needs to thrive. You allow your body and mind to self-organize into a more complex, more resilient, more adaptive state.

Reflecting on my own experiences, I recognize how often I resisted change and clung to familiar patterns, even when they no longer served me. This resistance was a barrier to growth and well-being, illustrating how challenging it can be to align with the ECS’s role in maintaining balance. Understanding this has been crucial in shifting from passivity to active engagement with change. It’s time to stop being a spectator and start being a player. Here’s how:

The Takeaway: Your Attention is Your Superpower

It’s time to stop being a spectator and start being a player. Here’s how:

1. Audit Your Attention: For one week, consciously track where your attention goes. How much of it is spent on the past? How much on worrying about the future? How much is scattered and unfocused? The results will likely shock you.
2. Set Your Intention: At the beginning of each day, decide what you want to create. What reality do you want to collapse from the quantum field of possibility? Write it down. Be specific. This is your target.
3. Practice Focused Observation: When you work, work. When you’re with your family, be with them. Eliminate distractions. Your focused attention is the laser that cuts through the noise and shapes reality. Unfocused attention is a dim, useless flashlight.
4. Embrace the Chaos: Stop trying to control everything. Life is messy. It’s far-from-equilibrium. Your job is not to create perfect order, but to surf the waves of chaos with intention and grace. Trust in the process of self-organization. And most importantly, learn to feel the flow. Your endocannabinoid system is your internal compass for this. When you’re aligned with the flow of time, moving forward, creating, and adapting, you feel it. There’s a sense of rightness, of engagement, of being in the zone. That’s your ECS telling you that you’re successfully surfing the edge of chaos. When you feel stuck, anxious, or depressed, that’s a signal that you’re fighting the current, that you’re stuck in a backward-looking eddy. Listen to those signals. They are your guide back to the flow.
5. Feed Your Endocannabinoid System: Take your essential fatty acids - omega-3s and omega-6s. These are the raw materials your body uses to make endocannabinoids. When your doctor tells you to take fish oil, they're telling you to get high - they just don't know it. Hemp seeds are excellent for this.
6. Understand the Balance: Your body is always balancing between sugar-burning (doing things, activating, creating) and fat-burning (recycling, repairing, protecting). CB1 regulates the sugar-burning mode. CB2 turns on fat-burning and recycling. You need both, in balance. Too much activation without repair leads to accumulated damage - that's aging.
7. Embrace the Phase Change: We are in the middle of a far-from-equilibrium phase change on this planet. The old structures - political, economic, social - are becoming unstable. This is natural. Before any phase change, variables start going crazy. What emerges from this chaos will be determined by consciousness, by attention, by the collective observation of humanity. Be a FLP. Look forward. The Cannabis Awakening is unstoppable.

This isn’t easy. It takes practice. It takes discipline. But it’s the only way to live a life of purpose, a life of creation, a life on your own damn terms.

Stop waiting for the world to change. You are the one who changes it. Your gaze is the chisel that sculpts the marble of reality. What masterpiece will you create?

The meek shall inherit the earth. And who are the meek? They're the stoners. The cannabinoid-endowed. The people who don't need to dominate because they're not afraid. They're the ones who can look into the unknown future with optimism because their biochemistry allows them to embrace change rather than fear it.

We cannot evolve fast enough genetically to adapt to the changes we're creating in our environment. The only solution is to increase cannabinoid activity in the human population - through nutrition, through supplementation, and yes, through the conscious use of this sacred plant that has co-evolved with us for millennia.

Your observation changes the observed. Your consciousness shapes reality. And your endocannabinoid system is the biochemical interface that makes it all possible. Stop being a spectator. Become a participant in the creative unfolding of the universe.

That's not philosophy. That's physics.

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