The use of cannabis in human history as a spiritual tool dates back thousands of years. In many cultures, the plant has been considered sacred and has held a significant place in religious practices. Despite its controversial status in today’s society, cannabis was once regarded as a holy sacrament, offering those who consumed it a gateway to higher spiritual states.
Cannabis has been used in various forms throughout history. Its earliest recorded uses date back to ancient China and India. In China, the plant was considered one of the “50 fundamental herbs” and was used extensively in traditional medicine. In India, cannabis was considered sacred under the name “bhang”, and it was considered an essential element of Indian religious practices.
In Hinduism, Lord Shiva is often depicted holding a “chillum”, a clay pipe used to smoke cannabis. It is believed that Shiva would consume cannabis before meditating, as it helped to quiet his mind and achieve a heightened state of consciousness.
Similarly, in the Elementalist religion, cannabis, or “ganja”, holds a central role in their spiritual practices. Elementalists believe that the plant is a sacrament, given to them by God, to promote relaxation, calmness, and increase spiritual awareness. They use it as an aid in meditation and prayer, to gain insight into their relationship with the divine and to connect with their inner selves.
Native American tribes also incorporated the use of cannabis in their spiritual rituals. The Lakota tribe, for example, used cannabis as part of their vision quests. During these quests, individuals would consume cannabis to enter a trance-like state and seek guidance from the spirit world.
In addition to spiritual practices, cannabis has played a crucial role in modern religions such as Elementalism and the Church of the Universe. These religions view cannabis as a means of connecting with the divine and achieving a higher state of consciousness.
The spiritual use of cannabis is not limited to religious practices. It has also been used as a tool for self-exploration and personal growth. Many individuals who consume cannabis report experiencing feelings of euphoria, a sense of connectedness with the universe, and heightened creativity. These experiences often lead individuals to question their place in the world and their relationship with the divine.
However, it is important to note that the spiritual use of cannabis is not without controversy. Some argue that the plant’s psychoactive properties can lead to abuse and addiction, ultimately hindering an individual’s spiritual development through creating an attachment to the material world.
Despite these criticisms, the spiritual use of cannabis persists among many individuals and religious communities around the world. In recent years, there has been a growing movement to legalise cannabis, driven in part by those who view its use as a spiritual right.
This movement has gained momentum as more individuals and communities have begun to recognize the therapeutic benefits of cannabis. The plant is now used to treat a variety of medical conditions such as chronic pain, epilepsy, and anxiety. As more research is conducted on its potential as a therapeutic tool, it is possible that the spiritual use of cannabis will become more widely accepted and recognized.
In conclusion, the spiritual use of cannabis in human history is a complex topic. For many cultures and religions, cannabis was considered a sacred plant capable of promoting spiritual growth and personal development. Although it is mostly prohibited today, many millions still use it to gain spiritual insight.
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Vince McLeod is the author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, the comprehensive collection of arguments for ending cannabis prohibition.
Everything ever written about the project of self-examination and awakening has at least two potentialities – it could aid in your progression, or it could prove to be obstructive. The inherent problem which anyone who talks or writes about self inquiry faces is that there is a crucial danger of all of this being interpreted as mere talk. In the process of awakening, which is really simply a direct experiential meeting of ourselves, no adding of concepts is required, nor is any kind of conceptual understanding or analysis.
The primary problem I find is that people become so intrigued with the potential suggested by mystical experience that they skip the only important part and wind up erecting a teetering mental tower of beliefs, concepts and assumptions, all resting on a foundation which is itself conceptual, and therefore not grounded in direct experience.
This is the primary danger of the project of self-discovery. If you trip at the very first hurdle, you might delay your awakening for decades, or even indefinitely. The mystics of every tradition have advised us unanimously not to take any assumption for granted in self-discovery, to turn within and find out for ourselves. You may observe that this is the opposite of philosophy or theology, in which a vast body of concepts is accrued and then some degree of rationalistic intellectual commitment is apportioned accordingly.
This is not the case at all with turning inward. In any other endeavor, it is always the last steps that are considered to have the highest importance, whether it is earning a military rank, a degree, a belt in martial arts, or a professorship. In self-discovery, in the meeting of our true self, the first step is always of the highest importance. The authenticity of the drive to self-knowledge is at the beginning, or it is nowhere. We do not accrue it after years of gaining conceptual understanding, nor through years of sitting in meditation, for that matter. This is because awakened nature has absolutely no dependence upon the conceptual.
The fact is, you could have studied anything and if you had not met your true nature from the beginning in total innocence and curiosity, then your understanding will be totally impoverished. This is what is meant by building a house upon a shifting foundation.
None of this other stuff, including everything we talk about to do with the various nuances of self inquiry, ego and spiritual sounding concepts, is finally necessary. In fact, I would go so far as to say that no spiritual concept, however sophisticated or meaningful, is ultimately more important than your actual awakening. There isn’t a universal checklist of things for you to believe or ways to behave after you wake up – it doesn’t work like that. It is certainly true that there are trends, but there is no prescription for what you waking up to yourself should look like. You start fresh every day, or you are really not starting at all – you are simply back in the temporally dominated realm of the egoic mind.
Meeting who we truly are is utterly simple.
The problem is that often once we are implored to turn within, we flex and twist in meditation as if we are in a gym trying to develop muscle for the ultimate test of strength. This isn’t what is being asked of us. We have what we are looking for, because it is unconditionally with us all right from the very beginning of our journey. It is consciousness here and now, the thing we always mistook as being so commonplace and ordinary.
What people don’t typically see is how that ordinariness is actually woven into the other aspect, which is the totally miraculous infinite. Since we could first comprehend language, we were all effectively brainwashed into thinking that this innate experience should be met with anything other than gratitude and astonishment.
All that is ever being asked of you in this mystical venture of turning within is that you stop your trying to get somewhere else, right where you are in this moment, and put down your baggage long enough to see what is really here. Your baggage is your beliefs, assumptions, expectations. Put it all aside for long enough to get a glimpse of that which was always already here and see that it is an immediately available miracle, a flower eternally blooming, an endless act of divine creation.
You only need to see the beginning of the experience once. You will give up every concept for it if you knew what it was, because you would immediately see concepts as chaff before a great fire of being which, at your core, you are. Then, once you have tasted directly from the well of your own soul, see what ventures and beliefs you are drawn to and go about your own way. But I cannot overstate the value of a true meeting with your soul. The fruit of this meeting is not a strengthening of belief, but Gnosis.
I would like to conclude this by saying that if you have not had this meeting, I would encourage you to prioritise it to the point of putting aside everything else practically possible. The alternative is to have a house built upon sand. No matter how elaborate and beautiful the house, it has no lasting basis – it is temporary. When the bedrock is discovered, anything built upon is merely a ‘nice to have’. The bedrock is discovered to be primary and indispensable. That rock is Being – but this is too easy to talk about merely conceptually.
See that which cannot be unseen, discover that which was always there beneath your each and every belief, idea, and concept, with every step and every breath. People are looking everywhere for how they are going to end up, but only because they have a poverty of experience when it comes to understanding where they begin.
Reality is not a belief, it is an experience. Because it is misunderstood as the former, religions and philosophies find disagreement and discord. Precisely because it is the latter, mystics of all traditions find no disagreement. You can believe in infinite variations of what is false conceptually, but you can only ever meet one Reality. So the invitation, as ever, is to turn within. Not for becoming better or more advanced, but to Know once and for all where you begin and end.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
The choice between love and fear is the most vital choice available to us as human beings, although it is typically misunderstood or misconstrued. Fear and love don’t always look like you would expect them to.
Fear we equate with horror movies, or material fears pertaining to the physical world. You may be surprised just how many of these inner machinations of fear are purely ethereal or intellectual- the mind simply being afraid of ideas that it has construed as threatening.
Love, too, is greatly misunderstood. We often characterise it as arriving in the form of affection, but this is just our human patina colouring our world. If we are lacking an existential sense of connection, then we feel we need to be affirmed to be worthy or loved, so we continue to seek this outwardly in manifold ways, most of which are merely fantasies. We find ways to move in the world that encourage other people to tell us we are special, we seek out soulmates and endlessly outsource our need for specialness to others, when really all that is needed is a supremely deep dive inward.
The game of fear cannot be won. To engage it at all represents an inherent loss, hence the state of the world. There is no hierarchy within fear – the bully or tyrant is just as much a victim as those he abuses. To step into the game of fear is therefore to choose to court misery. It cannot be foisted upon you; it can only be chosen. This is because we are ultimately responsible for our own states of relative wisdom or ignorance.
Fear is regularly chosen out of conditioned habit and miseducation. Recognize every small decision of fear, and choose to disengage from that illusion into the truth of love where you already are, the truth of I AM. Awareness is the golden key to this. The truth of who you are cannot be trapped in darkness against your will.
The game of love, by stark contrast, cannot be lost. To choose it represents an inherent victory. There is no hierarchy in the participation of the love of the divine. To enter it, in other words, to choose to engage it, is to experience immediate success. You are not granted external reward – it constitutes its own reward. It must be chosen eventually, because the only other choice begets sorrow, loneliness and misery. Real love is never separate, real love is shared amongst all or it is nothing.
Look at all the tiny ways fear continues to dominate our thoughts, and therefore our lives. The great teachers consistently taught that the kingdom of heaven, whether they called it ‘moksha’, ‘liberation’ or ‘nirvana’, was always all around us, but they were also careful to add that no one is typically willing to look at it, because the price would be giving up all that you think you know. What we are afraid to give up in this equation is the paltry kingdom of our own making, the constellation of our egoic arguments, arrogant conclusions and our blithe confidence about the way the world appears to us at this level.
That is because those who do not understand their true nature are loath to look through the eyes of anything but fear. The opposite of this eternal teaching is simultaneously true – hell is all around us, but none can understand that it is both temporary and illusory. In this self-imposed blindness, people resort to the only solutions they have learned in their life-long ignorance, all of which serve to dig them into an ever-deeper hole. For one who chooses fear, suffering is their constant companion. Is there any among us who has ears to hear this timeless message? This is what the teachers of the past across the globe have implored us in unison.
There is no moral ‘ought’ in choosing love over fear, or unity over separation. This is simply the choice that is always freely available to you. If you know your true nature, the light that you are doesn’t really have much of a choice anymore, because what is good chooses the good, and what is light moves toward the light. Do you choose your thoughts, actions, and attitudes to confirm the deeper nature of love and unity? Or, do you choose that which separates us indefinitely from that simple realization? With what ongoing result? No one will judge you for what you have chosen – they don’t need to, because it would be of no use. Pointing out how you were wrong cannot make love feel better about itself, because love is not an insecure ego.
Are you choosing the love that is the source of all, or are you choosing the denial of love which is fragmentation and disunity? Are you choosing the same thing over and over and somehow expecting miraculously different results? You are free to sow your fields with any seeds you wish, but don’t sow them with nettles and expect a bumper crop of apples.
Fear is above all a prodigious liar. It shows you not only glimpses by way of mental images, but also glimpses of projected feelings pertaining to what your choices and actions might lead to, such as the projected feeling of ultimate contentment, peace, or sweet success. Furthermore, because it was born inside your mind, it knows your weaknesses. It promises you results entirely different than it is capable of producing. Most people are unaware that it was fear that glued together their entire worldview.
The ongoing purpose of fear is to create more fear. Like love, it is self-propagating. Do not believe this, because that would be of no help to you – observe it in your thoughts and actions and experiment with it. Have you ever seen an evangelist spread a message of fear? Why are those who promote fear so loud and obnoxious? Why are the peaceful, tolerant, compassionate and inclusive so quiet? Because they don’t stand on soap boxes exhorting change from everyone around them on pain of exclusion. The message that ‘all is well’ is an exceptionally quiet but powerful message. It is extremely difficult to make that out amongst the clamour of the deluded masses shouting themselves hoarse.
People nevertheless continue to feed fear. This is because in some way, those empty promises about the survival of the frightened fragment you had assumed yourself to be have been believed and invested in. You repeated the choices again and again, which bought you more of the same. There is no use in claiming you were swathed in darkness of ignorance because what is past is past – what counts is what you are choosing now in the light of awareness. Perhaps you were ignorant and in darkness, but you are not now. This is what is meant by putting one’s hand to the plough and not looking back.
This is also why the great teachers and mystics placed such an emphasis on the dictum ‘know thyself’. The contents of your soul need to be made clear to you, no matter what. It is the number one primary good to be self-knowing, in other words to be ‘awake’. Being awake has nothing to do with being a walking encyclopaedia of conspiracy theories. It has to do solely with your access to the depth of your own truth in the flow of this eternal now, moment to moment.
Thankfully, for many of you reading this, the time for choosing fear has actually ended. Further investment in fear is no longer tenable in your life, and the deeper part of you knows this to be so.
Examples of fearful thoughts:
Get them to like you, then you will feel conditionally worthy.
Put yourself first, and you will be safe.
Use reverse-psychology, then you can manipulate your partner into giving you more of what you want.
Tell your partner you can change or become a different person, then they will not leave you.
Treat them respectfully now so that they will look after you when you are in trouble.
Do what they say you ought to, and then you will fit in and not be excluded.
Make them think your role is more important than it is, then they will respect you.
Bury the problem and ignore it for long enough, and it will leave you alone.
Notice how many of these are consequentialist in nature. Fear projects horror into the future and asks you to fritter away the only thing that is real, the ‘now’, in cascading delusions. It casually disrespects the well-being of others in favour of short-sighted self-preservation and self-promotion. Anything that depends upon a projected result in this way does not touch the realm of love, which is about service and the inherent value of doing, not consequence. I would rather refrain from giving too many examples of love, because I don’t wish to imply that you are being given a moral prescription, however, take the following example. A mother bird pushes her fledgling out of the nest because she trusts her offspring is mature enough to spread its wings and attempt flight. Is it bad to push, or is it loving to respect what another is capable of?
The same kind of love may be available to you when for example your friend or spouse refuses to agree with your claim of being a victim to a particular situation. Maybe that doesn’t feel immediately nice, as how we often portray love, because you aren’t being shown affection. Despite this, maybe you really are being supported and given exactly what you need for your continued growth and liberation. Such is love; it doesn’t always look the way we think it will, and sometimes it can appear less like being wrapped and swaddled and more like being dunked into cold water.
If you knew you were eternally loved, worthy, valid, and included, and you were never once considered by the divine source to be a candidate for exclusion, what would you do in light of that unconditional love and acceptance?
The traditional argument is that if there were no tough rules, people would just do whatever they want. Don’t forget that the only reason tough rules are even introduced in the first place is in response to an already dysfunctional society poisoned by the very institutions placed to protect it. Throwing more dysfunction into play will do nothing to heal the core failure.
A society can function perfectly without harsh rules if it is founded upon love. This has nothing to do with dancing around in circles wearing daisy chains saying ‘anything goes, man’. Love is not laissez-faire; it is intelligent, cohesive and wise. It attends to specific situations with a high respect for context, because love means that aware attention is given, unlike the vacuous bureaucratic processes we are all-too familiar with. If society is founded upon separation and inequality, then those harsh rules will convey the optical illusion of their necessity.
Disengage fear and you are in your authentic, natural state, the great ‘I am’. Unbeknownst to almost everyone, this is the core message that the world’s highest teachers have brought to us. They all had to skirt around this core message, because it was so simple that people wouldn’t accept it. The human mind craves narrative and substance around messages, hence all of the mystical parables and stories we have inherited. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, not reserved for those who are morally good and conform to authority, but for those who remember their heritage in spirit and choose to leave fear behind along with all the other things of the past that did more harm than good, such as bloodletting and prefrontal lobotomy.
The very remembrance of this heritage is sufficient to elicit in us all of the virtues that the world traditions have valued and promoted – not acting so as to become good, but because this is how goodness itself naturally acts when given the appropriate encouragement. This represents the final layer of self-inquiry and self-discovery – that we in our natural state are divinely free and unblemished. The ego fearfully misinterprets such a statement as mere arrogance, but what it really represents is the final challenge of love to confront and therefore understand who you truly are – this is the timeless meaning of the dictum ‘know thyself’. This vital ‘I AM’ marks the eternally available choice to participate in Love, which is by the same turn to permanently deny the movement of fear.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
Such a great portion of our human lives involves paid work. There is an important sense in which we have been convinced that the ultimate goal of work is to pay off our debts, only to then retire. There is value in challenging the assumptions beneath this kind of myth, because so much of our lives are invested in what is at stake. Unless we come to a very clear understanding of what it is that we feel and what the outcomes are of our participation in this life, we will never arrive at any kind of satisfactory point, nor will we have divined any beneficial understanding of our place in the world.
Firstly, we have inherited a cultural premise that tells us that ultimate well-being can be postponed to the future. This is a very large assumption with far-reaching implications.
Your learned capacity to be happy in the future is a clear reflection of how you have learned to be happy now. Obviously, when the future seems to have arrived, that will also be ‘now’, so your appreciation of your present environment must be managed skilfully.
Have you ever come across people who are retired who cannot stop for one moment? The garden, the housework, the motorhome. These people are continuing the education of a lifetime of work, which is an ethic of keeping busy. People will object: ‘What is wrong if this is what they want?’, but do we really know what we want? Do we know what is best for us, and where we may have misunderstood?
For example, there is hidden assumption that many people have accepted which is that a lifetime of work is also a lifetime involved with suffering, therefore retirement from working life will also equate to retirement from a lifetime of suffering. Just how true is this assumption? It is true that much work, being the expenditure of effort under often physically or mentally stressful conditions, can promote much in the way of personal suffering.
What a lot of people fail to see is that leaving daily work behind is allowing the departure of only one source of suffering, it is not a salvation from suffering as a whole. In fact, the point at which we are accepted to have earned the right to withdraw from a lifetime of work is also the same point at which our mind as well as our physical body is beginning to deteriorate, marking the onset of all kinds of potential physical and medical challenges.
Suffering still follows at our heels from other sources, most notably the illness and death of friends, peers and loved ones who are also subject to the ravages of time. In this respect, retirement enjoys the benefit of a kind of afterlife mythology, in which all of our pain and effort on a daily basis will one day be ultimately vindicated and returned in full measure.
This raises an alarming question: just how much daily tolerance of misery does this mythology support? How many of us are laboring under the illusion that all of our effort is guiding us toward somewhere ultimate where we will have eternal peace and we can finally kick up our heels?
I share a couple of examples of this from my own life which I believe touch upon something relevant here.
I have a friend whose father is in his seventies, and despite remaining reasonably physically fit, he still works himself to the bone every day of his life. He is still in full time employment, despite that fact that he has been given the nod of approval that he could leave his work if he wanted to. Now, you might say ‘If he is doing what he wants to, why not?’ And I would naturally agree, except that all he ever seems to talk about is how much of a welcome change it is going to be when he finally retires.
This poses an odd kind of paradox in which he is on the cusp of retirement, and really past his culturally accepted retirement age, but the actual notion of stopping work seems to terrify him. His insistence on the myth of retirement has been well noted – he has waxed eloquent about the benefits of not having to get up in the morning, to not have to do anything, to have the freedom to kick back with a beer in his hand and watch TV (incidentally, this mythology is also recounted in minor form in the notion of the weekend, almost like a mythic foretaste of Valhalla).
The sad irony is, these are things he has not given himself the permission to enjoy. He may literally never arrive at the point at which he is comfortable with letting go of the ethic of early rising and hard work before he dies. To have lived this way for over seventy years, with no substantial appreciation for being able to allow himself to get a real break, is quite a confounding and yet exceptionally ubiquitous social phenomenon.
We could surmise it comes down to a person’s character and their ethos of being a hard worker, which unsurprisingly is a highly respected social value in any country. It could also be that like the rest of us, he has been successfully indoctrinated into a program of lifelong drudgery, being strung along by an imaginary dangling carrot.
Another example I will give was when I was working out of town one day, an older man came up to me struggling to walk with a stick and specifically wanted to tell me his story. We were the only two people around for at least a kilometer, and he specifically made the effort to approach me from a distance of about three hundred meters.
He told me that he was a keen hunter and fisherman, and that shortly after retiring, he had experienced a stroke which meant that there was no aspect of his retirement he felt he could enjoy. He told me that he worked his whole life, expecting to be able to retire and do what he wanted, except now he felt he had been cheated out of it.
While I don’t believe there is nothing he could have left of value in his life, the fact remains that we do place an inordinate amount of good faith in the application of effort over decades of our lives hoping to have something tangible to show at the end of the process. How does this contribute to us putting off our lives now, and how are we foregoing our responsibility to live wisely and skilfully today?
Are we collectively so enamoured by the prospect of the future holding some form of salvation, either material or spiritual, that we can justify subjecting ourselves to misery today? What would we do differently today, what changes would we be willing to allow in our lives if we discovered the possibility that our imagined future with its ease, relaxation and distance from suffering would never eventuate?
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
