Martin W. Ball - Mushroom Wisdom: Cultivating Spiritual Consciousness

Table of Contents

An excellent guide to the use of sacred mushrooms as tools in the quest for knowledge of the true self. A much needed contribution written in a clear unpretentious language that is obviously based on deep personal experience.

-- Luis Eduardo Luna. PhD

Fellow of the Linnean Society

author of
Vegetalismo,
Shamanism Among
the Mestizo Population
of the Peruvian Amazon

co-author of
Ayahuasca Visions
The Religious Iconography
of a Peruvian Shaman.

Mushroom Wisdom

Copyright 2006 by Martin W. Ball

ISBN: 1-57951-036-1; 978-1579-51036-7 E-ISBN: 1-57951-077-9; 978-1-57951-077-0

Published by

Ronin Publishing, Inc.

PO Box 22900

Oakland, CA 94609
www.roninpub.com

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or translating into another language, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the author or the publisher, except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Production:

Editor: Beverly A. Potter (docpotter.com)
Cover Design: Beverly A. Potter
Cover Art: Martin W. Ball (martinball.net)
Book Design: Beverly A. Potter
Illustrations: Martin W. Ball

Fonts:

Papyrus: Esselle Letraset
BlownDeadline: Chank
MesoDeko: Deniart Systems
Venis: Chank

Library of Congress Card Number: 2006935886 Distributed to the book trade by Publishers Group West Printed in the United States by Delta Printing Solutions

Preface

M USHROOM WISDOM is a summary of my best advice on using mushrooms and entheogens as agents of spiritual awareness, transformation and experience. It is about the being open, aware, and engaged in the transformative process that is the cultivation of spiritual consciousness. It is about facing darkness and overcoming the limitations of illusions, judgments, and the wounded emotions we carry in our hearts.

Eating entheogenic mushrooms is not for everyone. While many people enjoy these sacred sacraments as recreational entertainments and use them as a means to have fun and magical experiences, they can easily launch a person on a difficult, frightening, and often harrowing experience. Understanding their spiritual nature is not necessarily about having good trips and avoiding bad trips. It is about understanding how plant teachers can be used as the profound spiritual tools that they are and understanding how they work to impart their profound lessons.

This work is about how entheogenic experiencesgood or bad, joyful or fearful, ecstatic or emotionally crushingcan be used as tools for spiritual growth. If one chooses to visit with such teachers and expose oneself to their lessons, shouldnt one approach the experience with knowledge, awareness, and an understanding of how navigate and make sense of the often overwhelming and radical phenomena that they open up for the spiritual seeker?

May those who seek find their way, embraced by the Spirit and bathed in the Light of consciousness and understanding.

What one gets out of such experiences depends on the individual. Once a threshold amount is consumed, mushrooms radically alter perception, sense of being, and experience of self and world. Their value as spiritual tools, however, depends on the mindset, attitude, and disposition of the mushroom eater, and the framework and context in which they are consumed. What this means is that spiritual seekers take an active part in creating the sacredness of the experience. What one brings to the experience heavily influences what one gets out of it, though intentions and context never entirely determine the nature of the entheogen experience. What entheogens present is always new, profound, and beyond any attempt to control them, and that is part of their appeal and wonder. Eating psilocybin mushrooms opens one up to the profound and the spirit, intelligence, and power that exists within all things that manifest in the magical unfolding of the universe.

My purpose in this work is to help those who seek to better understand this process and the means through which these invaluable spiritual tools can be engaged and used to deepen spiritual awareness and experience to create more fully aware, accepting, and conscious spiritual beings.

-- Martin W. Ball

It is Home

Mushroom space is a divine space, a space of
paradoxes, spirit, mind, meaning, beauty, and
wonder. It is intelligent and alive, organic, flowing,
transformative, fluid, open, inviting, playful, serious,
insightful, sacred. It is chaos and order, flux and
change, ebb and flow, life and death, immanent and
transcendent. It is beauty. It is home.

CHAPTER 1

Entheogens, Religion , and Spirituality

A ROUND THE GLOBE and throughout history, plant teachers have had profound and lasting effects on cultures, traditions, religions, and individual experiences of spirituality and the sacred. Often strange and wondrous, plant teachers, or entheogens, plants that evoke God within, are capable of catapulting human consciousness out of the mundane and into the spiritually profound, bringing direct connection to the sacred and the divine. This basic fact has been used by countless cultures to deepen individual experiences of the sacred, from initiation into religious mysteries to shamanic healing, divination, and spiritual journeying.

They are the keys to the dimensions surrounding, us that ordinarily cannot be seen. If they permit, you will be granted access to unimaginable dimensions of beauty, grace, and peacefulness. They bring me closer to God, Jesus, Buddha, Gaian consciousness, my origins, and to a deeper understanding of mu purpose in the universe. The experience, by all measures, is profoundly spiritual.

Paul Stamets

While the experiences generated by entheogens are not necessarily spiritual or religiously meaningful in and of themselves, if attended to with the proper mind set with the proper intention and consumed in a context of sacredness and spirituality, they can be powerful catalysts for spiritual growth and development. While not everyone who consumes entheogens becomes spiritually awakened or transformed, many are, and those with knowledge of the workings of these sacred plants, the shamans, mystics, and visionaries, have developed methods and techniques that serve to help guide others on their spiritual, religious, or healing paths.

Smply consuming a sacred plant does not make one a mystic.

Methods abound throughout history and across cultures for contacting the sacred or generating deep spiritual experiences, some of which are more effective than others. Techniques such as fasting, prolonged meditation, seclusion, physical stress, exercises and breathing methods, for example, have been used for millennia to generate spiritual experiences. Entheogens, while not necessarily inherently generative of spiritual experience, are often far more reliable and consistent than these other methods, however, in generating radical and profound experiences. Shamans have known for thousands of years that certain plants, when prepared and consumed in the proper set and setting with the necessary attention to ritual, structure, and intention, can be fairly consistently relied upon to produce profound and life-altering spiritual experiences in all manner of people from laypersons to ritual experts. It is quite possible that these other techniques of meditation, breathing, isolation, fasting, and so forth are later attempts to recreate the entheogen experience through other means.