As magic mushrooms have become increasingly popular in recent years, this has opened the door to the many spiritual benefits these amazing substances have to offer. In fact, a growing body of research shows that psilocybin, the active ingredient in these substances, can be an incredibly powerful spiritual tool. Today, we’re going to tell you a little more about that!
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Thousands of years old
Magic mushrooms, shrooms, or simply “magic mushrooms,” as well as numerous other hallucinogens, have been used for millennia by cultures around the world, with early evidence found in Neolithic cave paintings in the Sahara believed to date back to 7000 BC. But although these cultures discovered the powers of magic mushrooms and psilocybin so many years ago, the modern world has only recently started to take an interest in their potential applications again.
For example, a study by Johns Hopkins University revealed that magic mushrooms can have a profound therapeutic effect. When they interviewed volunteers 14 months after taking the substance, most said they still felt better and, as a result of the experience, were also behaving “better.” Two-thirds of them also said that psilocybin had produced “one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they had ever had.”
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Going Tribal
The internet, incidentally, is full of similar anecdotes about the effects of a wide variety of hallucinogens and psychedelic substances. One of the best-documented of these is a BBC series called Tribe, in which Bruce Parry traveled the world to experience cultures that still live in traditional ways. The series was first broadcast on the BBC as Tribe, and later shown in the U.S. under the title Going Tribal.
Parry spent a month living with tribes in India, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, Gabon, Mongolia, and Brazil, striving to integrate as fully as possible into the host communities. The spiritual beliefs of each tribe were one of the most prominent aspects explored. On the border between Venezuela and Brazil, Parry lived with the Sanema tribe, who believe in a dream world filled with spirits all around them: in the animals, trees, rocks, and water. Four of the five men in the tribe are shamans.
Led by one of the shamans, Parry participated in an initiation ceremony, during which he consumed, among other things, the hallucinogenic substance sakona, which is derived from the sap of the Virola tree. In an interview about the series for The Guardian, Parry shared his perspective on hallucinogens. He described them as an “incredibly profound message,” though he did admit that he doesn’t believe everyone should indiscriminately use psychedelics.
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Learning about the world around us
Returning to the wonderful magic mushrooms, there are generally three types of “trips”: Some people do not enjoy the experience and never try it again. Some people take too much at once or over a certain period and change their minds significantly. This impact is, incidentally, rarely the case with magic mushrooms, and instead often involves much stronger hallucinogens like LSD. And the last “group” of trippers has a positive experience and learns something about themselves or the world around them.
This also applies to Parry, who, after his spiritual experiences, set out once again in search of his own truth. “When I returned from expeditions, I had a number of experiences that forced me to re-examine everything. I had pretty much always known that Christianity wasn’t for me. Since then, I’ve been on my own quest for a different truth. I want to know why we think what we think. Now I would describe myself as a pandeist, almost an atheist—reluctantly,” says the filmmaker.
