do you believe that shamans can heal people of physical ailments during things such as ayahuasca ceremonies, or magic mushroom or traditional salvia divinorum ceremonies? there are many, many people who report having miraculous recoveries from various illnesses and ailments through such methods - not simply psychological issues, or battles with serious addictions some have even claimed miracle cures from cancers and other issues. i have personally witnessed events leading me to believe there is some sort of connection between a psychedelic experience i had and the healing of one close to me who was suffering from a painful disease. i'm curious, because it defies scientific understanding, yet it is a worldwide phenomenon, and people believe in it sometimes very strongly. with no value judgments towards each other (i would appreciate a civil discussion) i would like to find out what frequenters of the psychedelics forum think of in regards to the possibility of ceremonial use of certain psychedelics as a kind of spiritual medicine, with very real physical results in many cases.
addendum: while this poll is most specifically referring to traditional shamanic practices, i do not think it must be strictly limited as such. my sole experience with a healing experience was in a nontraditional setting, though it was of tremendous religious significance to me. feel free to vote outside of the context of being limited strictly to indigenous varieties of shamanism
I was always under the impression that rather than healing the actual physical ailment, the shaman prepared the person for the journey to the next world and thus the person was healed of their fear and pain
I don't see why not. If nothing else, it plays off the placebo effect. Hell, if Buddhist monks can drench their clothes then dry them in the mountains of Tibet by simply meditating, what isn't possible?
pls to elaborate i know you have some rather negative thoughts regarding shamanism itself, but you're that dead set against even a possibility of healings?
I voted absolutely yes, beyond a doubt. I have a friend whose cancer was cured during an ayahuasca ceremony. I believe things I've heard of studies done with LSD when it was first being experimented with where people have been cured of cancer, mental illnesses that went beyond "psychological", epilepsy, etc... but it's not really about stacking up evidence to prove it's possible. It's just something inherent in the experiences I've had. I believe that we're responsible for absolutely everything in reality, and psychedelics can allow us to tap into hyperspace where the maleable nature of things is more obvious... and miracles aren't that miraculous. But a lot of the time, I think that if you go into that space, you get a sense of the perfection of things, and maybe gain acceptance and reverence for the way things are that makes you not even desire to "make miracles". Because you realize that you really couldn't have designed things any more perfectly, and the thought of allowing yourself to continue on as a part of this perfect mechanism, whatever it has coming up, is infinitely more beautiful than the thought of interfering. Healing is a very delicate thing to deal with. You have to be very pure, in order to not be injecting your own fabricated judgments into what you're doing. I actually think that if given the opportunity, most of us are humble enough to deny it, because we know we're not that pure yet. And I'm not talking about healing the way doctors in hospitals heal... that's different. When you fix something on a purely physical level, there's less danger of mucking around further in than you intended and rewiring things in the person's psyche that maybe shouldn't be rewired. Not that you can ultimately really "mess things up", because you can't step outside of the system, but... consciousness is delicate. That's just my opinion...
Oh, and when it comes to healing yourself, then yeah, fire away... I was talking about one person healing another up there.
I think its relatively simple. When a persons mind feels better (like after a positive experience with a shaman), there body will tend to follow.
It obviously depends on what you mean by healing. I agree with the above comment. It without a doubt can heal people psychologically. As far as physically this can be in the mind to some extent. But if the participate is ingesting ayahuasca which is known to cleanse the body of certian parasites i guess it can happen on a physical level, but not because of the shamans work. Im not saying its the "true religion" since there is none, and its not really a religion anyway. Whats more interesting than the shaman healings is the history of it all. Shamans have been navigating the tryptamine dimension for thousands of years with ayahuasca and the mushies so there probably pretty good at what they do. Relayer what do you have against shamanism?
thinking about this deeply made me realize that in the west, 'healing' has become 'delaying the inevitable'. When you are more machine than man to be kept alive, is that healing? there are very fuzzy terms in this discussion. Why would a shaman heal a 90 year old man of prostate cancer . . . it's his time to go, isn't it? He's gotta go somehow. Concepts of what life->death are are also murky here and very individualistic. The truth is you could have a degree on the topic of this thread and still not be able to answer it. If a shaman can heal cancer, then why do cultures with shamans still have people getting cancer? It clearly fails the western science test I believe, but how good is that test? it gets quite deep
