Shamanic Understanding:
"What is fascinating to consider is how these early shamans figured out that a potent brew could best be made from these two ingredients being mixed together."
ayauhasca.us
An entheogen ("generating the divine within") is a chemical substance used in a religious, shamanic, or spiritual context that may be synthesized or obtained from natural species. The chemical induces altered states of consciousness, psychological or physiological (e.g. bullet ant venom used by the Satere-Mawe people). Entheogens can supplement many diverse practices for transcendence, and revelation, including meditation, yoga, and prayer, psychedelic and visionary art, chanting, and music including peyote song and psytrance, traditional medicine and psychedelic therapy, witchcraft, magic, and psychonautics.
Entheogens have been used in a ritualized context for thousands of years. Their religious significance is well established anthropologically. Examples of traditional entheogens include psychedelics like peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, and ayahuasca, psychedelic-dissociatives like Tabernanthe iboga, atypical psychedelics like Salvia divinorum, quasi-psychedelics like cannabis and Ipomoea tricolor (Morning Glory), deliriants like Amanita muscaria. Traditionally a tea, admixture, or potion like ayahuasca or bhang have been compounded through the work of a shaman or apothecary. For more information please visit Entheo/Genesis.
Shamanic practitioners look at the spiritual, soul and energetic nature of illness or distress that may manifest on a psychological, emotional, cognitive, physical, relational, communal and ecological level. From this perspective illness is considered as a spirit messenger and ally that speaks to us about the way we are living our lives. The spirit messenger is informing us that some aspect of our life is out of balance and attention is needed to re-address the balance. When we choose to listen with the ears of our heart illness and pain can informs us of the necessary adjustments that are needed to come back into rightful relationship with ourselves and life and re-connect to our deeper truth and the path of our heart.
The word 'church' is used to convey the idea of a spiritual community, not of any building or place. Worshippers of the Sacred Mushroom need neither a special place ('cathedral') nor special people (priests, popes) to practice their religion - the only being they need to experience religion is the Sacred Vine.