dithyramb said:
OneIsEros, it is true that while diet is crucial for psychic potency, talented people can still wield power in the absence of it. However psychic potency and shamanic healing work are two different things. İf your intention is to purify your body and soul and align with Spirit/God/Higher Consciousness (in a non temporary way) then following dietary guidelines cannot be skipped over.
Ahhh, intriguing. I think you might be on to something there, possibly. Like, scrubbing for surgery. I think that’s plausible.
But in terms of soteriology (Spirit/God/Higher Consciousness) - here I would have to put my religious cards on the table. Though it may not be immediately apparent because of my username, as time has gone on I’ve gotten more and more committed to Buddhist teachings, and while East Asian Buddhist traditions do indeed follow dietary prohibitions reminiscent of “dieta” (even abstinence from spices/pungent foods) - this is far from universal. Go to a Thai Forest monastery sometime, and they will eat literally anything - and you would be hard pressed to find a lineage as relentlessly dedicated to soteriological practice as the Thai Forest tradition (or one that reports success in that pursuit as frequently). For this reason, I tend to separate out soteriology from shamanic healing, though I do not think these pursuits are in contradiction to one another. But, that’s just my personal religious commitments. I honestly do not know enough about cultures that use psychedelics traditionally to know whether shamans pursue soteriological ambitions in the same sense that traditions like Neoplatonism, Vedanta, or Buddhism do (each of which is, to be sure, distinct - but similarly lofty in aim).
I will offer a non-psychedelic magical healing story though that a monk I spoke to who lived in Ajahn Chah’s monastery in Thailand told me, which might poke a hole in your theory. Bear in mind, an Ajahn Chah lineage monk is… not likely to lie. There was a monk at the monastery who was bitten by a poisonous snake. There were no doctors around. So, a local Thai witch doctor was summoned to the monastery. He was drinking from a flask. The monk’s leg was swollen, badly - horribly coloured. They thought he was going to die. This guy comes in, laughing, making off colour jokes, and gets to work. He does some sort of weird Thai version of reiki (I am sure not actually what we call “reiki” - just some local rural Thai magic thing). Supposedly the guy’s leg swiftly lost the inflammation and stopped being sick, and he walked away fine. Now; did this man actually magically heal this guy? No clue. But the forest monks respected this man enough to bring him in, and they regarded his efforts as having been successful. This dude was clearly not following what we refer to as “dieta”. And the monks DEFINITELY would not have looked at this guy as on the track to Nibbana, as they were pursuing - he was just a magical doctor, whom they respected as such.
