Mushroom Wisdom: Cultivating Spiritual Consciousness

Martin W. Ball

Ronin Publishing, Jul 15, 2010 - Religion - 192 pages

Mushroom Wisdom explores the universal aspects of the psilocybin mushroom experience as it relates to spirituality. Author Martin Ball explains how mushroom use can lead the spiritual seeker to profound states of self-awareness and radical understanding of the nature of the self, reality, and the sacred. Topics include looking into the spiritual mirror to uncover an authentic sense of self, developing “witness” consciousness to overcome self-limiting concepts and judgments, and removing obstacles of ego and self-induced suffering to trigger the rich experience of “spirit flow.” The book also addresses the creation and use of ritual, sacred objects, and the importance of sound and silence. Ball distinguishes between using mushrooms in spiritual work as opposed to simply having a pleasant psychedelic experience. Not a guide to how to have “fun” with psilocybin mushrooms, Mushroom Wisdom is a serious investigation into deep spiritual nature, drawing on both a wide array of scientific disciplines and ancient shamanic practices.

Contents

• Seeing the Patterns: 8
• The Clean Heart: 158
• Spirit Flow: 165
• Final Thoughts: 173
• Ronin Books for Independent Minds: 191

Popular passages

Page 8 - LJOU will be granted access to unimaginable dimensions of beauty, grace, and peacefulness. They bring me closer to God, Jesus, Buddha, Gaian consciousness...‎

About the author

Martin Ball
Contributor residences (city, state or country if outside the US or Canada):
Martin W. Ball holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies, with an emphasis on Native American religions, from UCSB. He has conducted fieldwork at the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico and has published several articles related to his work with Mescalero Apache medicine people. As a scholar of religion, Martin has focused on sacred geography, ritual, indigenous healing methods, shamanism, ethnobotany, and the spiritual use of entheogens, as well as comparative mysticism and philosophy of religion and the phenomenology of spiritual experience.
In addition to Martin's formal studies as a scholar and student of Mescalero Apache medicine people, he underwent a profound shamanic initiation with psilocybin mushrooms in 1995, and has been exploring the repercussions and lessons of this event in his own personal spiritual practice since then.

Publications:

“People Speaking Silently to Themselves”: An Examination of Keith Basso’s “Sense of Place” in Apache Cultures – American Indian Quarterly Vol 26, Summer 2002, #3

Sacred Mountains, Religious Paradigms, and Cultural Identity among the Mescalero Apache – Worldviews, Environment, Culture, and Religion, December 2000

Spiritual and Ceremonial Practitioners in the Southwest and Kachina and Clown Societies, chapters in American Indian Religious Traditions, an Encyclopedia, forthcoming, 2006

Bibliographic information

• Title: Mushroom Wisdom: Cultivating Spiritual Consciousness; Spirituality Series
• Author: Martin W. Ball
• Publisher: Ronin Publishing, 2010
• ISBN: 1579511341, 9781579511340
• Length: 192 pages
• Subjects: Religion / Spirituality