The Shaman’s Medicine
A few thoughts I formulated on the Shaman medicine practice utilizing psychedelics being used widely in different types of Shamanism or higher levels of healing.
The use of psychedelics is not an end in itself in my opinion to achieve a greater level of consciousness or achieve an obtainable higher perspective. It may have its place used as an adjunct to form new ways of seeing things and adjusting to the world in a different way but it's not something that actually gives you lasting transformation.
Because the use of these agents allows you to have an altered state of experience, with some peak states and some insights, the usual tendency is to then come back to your everyday consciousness and any elevation in these higher states tends to slip away.
It appears most people tend to go back to their normal patterns of thought and lifestyle fairly quickly. Thus it can be frustrating because the idea is that people go back and take more of the psychedelic drug to maintain these new levels once they have lost them.
Psychedelic communities using these medicines have people returning over and over again for years to try and get resolution or transformation inside themselves without being able to sustain these changes long term. What I have seen in people using psychedelics sparingly in conjunction with a healthy lifestyle, and getting into their bodies, being fit, knowing themselves, doing self inquiry, taking care of themselves with things like meditation, doing real spiritual work, real self transformation work and then adding psychedelics can activate and maintain the structural changes they seek.
Psychedelic can bring deeper levels of understanding and experience of those kinds of practices and people using it as an adjunct to their growth and experiences. As they integrate these experiences into daily life it becomes like an anchor they can work with all the time to continue raising their levels, their baseline of understanding of what is going on.
One of the benefits of utilizing Psychedelics is that they can give you an insight into a world that you might have never seen before and as a result of that insight you will be able to access different states of consciousness for periods of time. It can open things up and help people gain clarity.
There's plenty to be said about the fact that implementing psychedelics can often times open people up to a kind of extra dimensional / mystical experience of the world, which many people have never had before and it can be an extremely game-changing kind of experience if you're ready for that kind of thing.
