TOBACCO AS MEDICINE

“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence” - Osho

Throughout the world, there are many different types of Earth-based spiritualities, with many different spiritual activities associated with them. One which is very ancient is the healing tradition of Tobacco as medicine, which is also used for Earth-offerings as well as prayer or meditative contemplation and is viewed as a spiritual medium for communication with the divine. In its pure organic form, without chemicals added, Tobacco is seen by many aboriginal cultures as one of the most important healing plants available in nature. In our modern globalized culture, I find it inspiring as a North American to point out the intensely meaningful connection between the Tobacco healing and spiritual traditions of North and South America. The two have many potent similarities in the way that they address Tobacco as a healing plant. 

In both traditions, the plant is smoked in a meditative act which might be called prayer, in which spiritual awareness is heightened and it is believed that positive, beneficial healing spirits are called forth or communicated with by the Tobacco for the benefit of the practitioners. Also, both honour the tradition of giving Tobacco to the Earth as a gift or Earth-offering. For example, a bundle of freshly prepared tobacco will be laid on the Earth and left to decompose, which tends to cause a potent spiritual blessing from the Mother Earth to the practitioners in return. Along with this act, sometimes special requests are made for healing or spiritual support. Another tradition involves the gifting of Tobacco to other people, with no price of any kind, as an act of kindness and love. Again, this will usually be accompanied by spiritual requests for blessings or healing for the receiver. 

Sadly, this is a little known fact which is veiled by heavy misinformation in our institution-matrix of the modern internet research age. Online research will yield mostly disrespectful put-downs against these ancient traditions by medical professionals who are hell-bent on throwing out the spiritual practices in favour of instilling alarm surrounding the health issues of smoking any plant at all. But no distinction is made here between heavily chemicalized Tobacco products, and real  heriloom 100% organic Tobacco. To smoke any plant at all such as lavender or comfrey, will have a carcinogenic effect on the lungs which is unhealthy, although the difference between that and smoking 1000’s of chemicals in store-bought cigarettes, is like night and day. Also it should be noted that the traditions are not just about smoking. 

In fact, the South American traditions include the act of preparing a tea from the Tobacco and drinking that, which produces visions and a powerful healing effect, with no negative effects to health whatsoever. This act of drinking tobacco water is something that would cause death if practiced with commercial store-bought chemical cigarettes. Also, I personally would not dare to do it even with so-called heriloom organic tobacco from North America. One extreme secret which is shockingly obvious from the first-hand experience of working with teh plants but cannot be found documented online anywhere, is the fact that North American heriloom strains are showing a chemicalized genetic composition, with a much more addictive chemicalized nicotine, a different kind of nicotine altogether, while South American Mapacho, the traditional medicine strain, is not chemicalized. It should be called a completely different strain. This is the only kind I would feel comfortable drinking as a tea. 

It’s important to note that I am not teaching here about this as a way to guide you in these practices, which require a formal traditional experience of direct guidance and support from qualified traditional practitioners of this healing medicine work. However, this is very powerful information even without experiencing it first-hand. On the other hand though, to any existing practitioners of traditional Tobacco spirituality in North America, I strongly recommend gaining access to Mapacho, the South American ancient strain, in order to witness the difference between the two strains for yourself and learn first-hand that the internet has provided false information about the genetic properties of this medicine. The opportunity to work with a more healthy strain of Tobacco will greatly enhance these practices and their benefits. 

Another interesting difference between the South and North American traditions of Tobacco, which also highlights their similarities, is the intensive history of the Tobacco’s combination with psychedelic plant medicine for healing ceremonies of many kinds. For example, in Peru, not only have Ayahuasca, San Pedro, Peyote, Psilocybin and other similar medicines been completely legal, but it has been the core of their culture since the ancient beginnings, looong before the invasion of the Spaniards into this ecological pharmacopea of rich medicinal rainforests. Yet even after industrialization, these traditions have survived and thrived. The Tobacco, in these ways, is seen as a master spiritual communicator and mediator between the practitioner and the master healer spirits of the psychedelic plant medicines. Tobacco provides initiation and guidance, grounding and major spiritual protection, within this beautifully ceremonial and formal healing work of the ancient ways. 

Through working with these psychedelic healing plants, within traditional ceremonial context, with strict observance of the diet, behavioural guidelines and abstinence in surrounding these times, many great teachings of the plant spirits will be eventually conveyed. One which is very easy to learn and fairly immediate, and which people all tend to receive, is that the plant teachers are very powerful. The truth is that the spirits of these plants, however spirit might be ultimately defined, has the power to do miracles and cause incredibly potent effects and benefits in the real world. This is not imagination, but something much larger than life as defined by our conformist and oppressed, limited Western perspective. Initial basic learning in psychedelic healing ceremonies includes growing to have reverence and incredible respect not only for nature, but for the power and importance of these plant medicines as spiritual masters. 

In North America, the war against drugs by the political sector and the tyrany of the medical sector, including big pharma, has brainwashed our continent with misinformation, propaganda and the threat of law, to imagine that these medicines are actually poisonous, when in fact they are a medicine with much more power than these institutions in the grand scheme and by the true definition of power which enhances and mututally benefits all life. It is of course always the most powerful healing and beneficial entities which get the most oppression and disrespect from institutions of authority in our world, since they represent a threat to this domination and false, illusory-based power-over which reigns over and against the masses. It is very important to understand the precise ways in which these false authorities have abused the plants as well as the people, in order to recognize our place as human beings within the larger ecology, as elements, participants, stewards and protectors of a thriving and evolving Mother Earth. 

Let’s look at this : The pharmaceutical system practices what is called reductionism. Although reductionism may be useful in some cases, it tends to represent a huge pattern of abuse to plants. It’s a frame of mind towards plant and human life which breaks it down and separates it into its parts rather than holistically honouring the entire living being of the life form. Perhaps the most popular metaphor about this disrespectful attitude towards living beings would be the extraction and concentration of narcotics found in the Poppy flower into their derivative of opiate drugs. By this disrespect, an innocent flower has become the bane of our existence, and vice versa. But it’s not that the use of an extract is always a misguided choice. Again, it is the lack of respect for the life form which is the abusive element which leads to such negative results as these. For those familliar with psychedelic plant medicine as fully conscious spiritual master teachers here to guide and heal humanity, the importance of avoiding reductionism is incredibly obvious.

For example, big pharma once temporarily succeeded in branding Ayahuasca into a pill form, under the name Da Vine. This concentration into pill form was unnecessary and in contradiction with the traditional preparation methods of the plants. Also, the ingestion of the plant was removed completely from the ancient ceremonial traditions of formal and meditative song and healing spaces of sensitivity and reverence which are impossible to produce outside of the traditional methods. To any skilled medicine practitioner, this is no less than total rape of the Earth, and abuse of the people and so much in relation to this healing medicine. Thankfully, this negative and harmful action was stopped somehow and that pharmaceutical is no longer available. I would strongly advise that this was stopped by the spiritual protection of the plants themselves, just as I speak of these master plant teachers having surprising amounts of power and influence in the real world around us. 

This cautionary story should provide us with some perspective on why we might be grateful in a way for the drug laws which prohibit psychedelic plant medicine from being used legally for healing and recovery. If these medicines were legal, they would automatically be desecrated and commercialized, oppressed and abused, and lied about through propaganda by the medical sector, which would claim authority against the ancient aboriginal traditions. And these traditional practices would still be illegal. Such a horrible fate is absolutely unacceptable. That’s why it’s clear to me that the eventual goal and visionary intention of the plant teachers is not just to legalize these healing medicines in North America, but to illegalize these abusive practices by the pharmaceutical engine of the medical sector, which is so counter to true healing that it does not deserve the term “medicine” at all. Likely, once that is all arranged in a safe and permanently effective way, we will see the plant medicines decriminalized within their traditional ceremonies. 

Already we have those kinds of laws for the Santo Daime Religion of Ayahuasca, but we have much further to go in that work for the Shipibo-Conibo traditions, which are not a religion at all. The Religious Sector is also an institution of power, which is the only way that the Daime has managed to achieve legal status to their church in North America. Historically, the religious and political institution sectors have always worked hand in hand, with law and governance moulding itself with special accomodation for the church as another form of authority over the masses. However, there is great importance to the aboriginal Earth-spirituality of the Ayahuasca healing ceremonies and other practices of the Shipibo-Conibo, which assumes no authority over the people, and projects no doctrine, with its only mandate being to protect its own ancient ways and resist corruption. 

I’m optimistic about the future in this way, and conscious of the power of the medicine to co-create our global future together, in a beautiful way so that the evolved new North American perspective on these psychedelic plants can also give something back in a healthy way to the South American culture through reflection in a global sphere, in gratitude for the Peruvian influence which has nourished this part of the world so much. 

Love, Ba

🕊