4/20: Spiritual benefits of cannabis? (video)

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Cannabis sativa (CBD/THC), spiritual benefits?

Cannabis has served as an entheogen— a substance used in spiritual or religious contexts to bring out the divine within — throughout the Indian subcontinent since the Vedic period.

This dates back to approximately 1500 BCE, but perhaps as far back as 2000 BCE.

Cannabis has been used by shamanic and pagan cultures.

Hindu sadhu toking ganja from a ceramic pipe

They used it to ponder deeply religious, spiritual (spirit world), and philosophical subjects related to their tribe or society, to achieve a form of pseudo "enlightenment," to unravel unknown facts and realms of the human mind and subconscious, and also as an aphrodisiac during rituals or orgies.*

• *Umit H. Sayin, May 31, 2014, "The Consumption of Psychoactive Plants in Ancient Global and Anatolian Cultures During Religious Rituals: The Roots of the Eruption of Mythological Figures and Common Symbols in Religions and Myths," NeuroQuantology, 12 (2).

There are several references in Greek mythology to a powerful drug that eliminated anguish and sorrow [nepenthe].

I feel so wholly, I mean high, holy, uh.

Herodotus wrote about early ceremonial practices by the Scythians (the Buddha's Shakyian/Saka peoples of Central Asia, Gandhara, Indo-Pakistan, Afghanistan, NW India), thought to have occurred from the 5th to 2nd century BCE.

• The Scythian/Shakyian Indo-Aryan custom was to drink "SOMA," Iranian-Aryan haoma, which had ganja, fermented mare's milk, and possibly a blue lotus or other psychedelic or entheogenic mushroom referred to as amrita, the "ambrosia" of the Greeks.

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  Radical (ranajitpal.com)

  See Dr. Ranajit Pal for alternative history of the significance of this region of the world and the spiritual luminaries originating here: The Buddha, Mithra (Maitreya/Messiah), Zarathustra (Zoroastrianism), and so on.

Wandering Hindu sadhus (holy persons) have used it in the Indian subcontinent for centuries [3]. Mexican-Indian communities occasionally use cannabis in religious ceremonies by leaving bundles of it on church altars to be consumed by the attendees like censer incense [4]. More