Plant Medicine Divine Nature

The thing about mystical experiences (psychedelic and non-psychedelic ones alike) is that they are experiential. Contrary to religion, which teaches beliefs that you may choose to adopt or not, spirituality teaches through personal experience.

In some ways, the hardest thing to integrate about the psychedelic experience is not the trauma it brings up, the stuck emotions it helps you process, or the beliefs it can reveal.

In some ways, the hardest thing about the psychedelic experience to make sense of is the fact that these substances exist to begin with. Not only do they exist, they exist abundantly in nature.
You can eat, drink, or smoke a plant, fungus, or animal secretion that produces an altered state of consciousness that may trigger the following experiences:

• Hyper-personalized memories that have left an emotional imprint on your psyche come up
• You experience the interconnectedness of everything in existence
• Your ego dissolves, followed by the transcendence of it
• You travel to the consciousness of other beings on this planet
• You travel to other places in our universe (beyond planet earth)
• You meet and dialogue with foreign entities
• You speak to deceased loved ones
• You alter your consciousness in ways completely foreign to the regular waking state, e.g. hearing colors
• … and so much more

Whatever your experience may be, making meaning of it is a big portion of your integration. If you don’t believe in the existence of a greater intelligence, how do you explain the fact that chemical compounds in nature can create these experiences?
Plant medicine experiences are incredibly diverse, but there’s one universal truth they all share: they leave you with the insight that there is a greater intelligence at work.

Because of that, they’re commonly called entheogens, which comes from the term “god within.”
Whatever you may call it — a higher intelligence, the Divine, Source, or even God. The label doesn’t matter, what matters is its formless and nameless existence. The experience of this intelligence is what gives plant medicine all of its profundity and power. Researchers at Johns Hopkins showed early on that the degree to which people had a healing experience with psilocybin mushrooms depended on whether or not they had a mystical experience during their journey.

If the belief in the Divine is not something that’s been a part of your worldview prior to your mystical experience (which probably for most, it isn’t), it can be a tough pill to swallow. It may be the most foundational belief you hold about the world, and when its challenged, many other fundamental beliefs will be challenged.