

COCT MINISTRY
CHURCH OF COGNITIVE THERAPY
mental, physical, and spiritual development
COCT MINISTRY MEMBERSHIP
Anyone over the age of 21 that uses entheogens for mental, physical, and spiritual development may request a membership practitioner card.
​
A religious defense for the spiritual use of entheogens is still treated as illegal use and non-religious by nearly all judicial branches despite thousands of years of religious and spiritual use by multiple indigenous peoples world-wide.
There exist several tons of information as evidence of the ritual use of entheogens as medicine for mental, physical, and spiritual development. Their use directly affects one religiosity or religious devotion.
​
The First Amendment of the Constitution provides that Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise. It protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
However, notice it does not say the Judicial branch shall not make a law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise of, which the entire judicial system has done through the establishment of the Meyers Tenants. One's mode of worship must meet all of these requirements to get religious protection by the law. 1. Ultimate Ideas: Religious beliefs often address fundamental questions about life, purpose, and death. As one court has put it, “a religion addresses fundamental and ultimate questions having to do with deep and imponderable matters.” Africa, 662 F.2d at 1032. These matters may include existential matters, such as man’s sense of being; teleological matters, such as man’s purpose in life; and cosmological matters, such as man’s place in the universe.
2. Metaphysical Beliefs: Religious beliefs often are “metaphysical,” that is, they address a reality that transcends the physical and immediately apparent world. Adherents to many religions believe that there is another dimension, place, mode, or temporality, and they often believe that these places are inhabited by spirits, souls, forces, deities, and other sorts of inchoate or intangible entities.
3. Moral or Ethical System: Religious beliefs often prescribe a particular manner of acting, or way of life, that is “moral” or “ethical.” In other words, these beliefs often describe certain acts in normative terms, such as “right and wrong,” “good and evil,” or “just and unjust.” The beliefs then proscribe those acts that are “wrong,” “evil,” or “unjust.” A moral or ethical belief structure also may create duties--duties often imposed by some higher power, force, or spirit--that require the believer to abnegate elemental self-interest.
4. Comprehensiveness of Beliefs: Another hallmark of “religious” ideas is that they are comprehensive. More often than not, such beliefs provide a telos, an overreaching array of beliefs that coalesce to provide the believer with answers to many, if not most, of the problems and concerns that confront humans. In other words, religious beliefs generally are not confined to one question or single teaching. Africa, 662 F.2d at 1035.
5. Accoutrements of Religion: By analogy to many of the established or recognized religions, the presence of the following external signs may indicate that a particular set of beliefs is “religious”:
a. Founder, Prophet, or Teacher: Many religions have been wholly founded or significantly influenced by a deity, teacher, seer, or prophet who is considered to be divine, enlightened, gifted, or blessed.
b. Important Writings: Most religions embrace seminal, elemental, fundamental, or sacred writings. These writing often include creeds, tenets, precepts, parables, commandments, prayers, scriptures, catechisms, chants, rites, or mantras.
c. Gathering Places: Many religions designate particular structures or places as sacred, holy, or significant. These sites often serve as gathering places for believers. They include physical structures, such as churches, mosques, temples, pyramids, synagogues, or shrines; and natural places, such as springs, rivers, forests, plains, or mountains.
d. Keepers of Knowledge: Most religions have clergy, ministers, priests, reverends, monks, shamans, teachers, or sages. By virtue of their enlightenment, experience, education, or training, these people are keepers and purveyors of religious knowledge.
e. Ceremonies and Rituals: Most religions include some form of ceremony, ritual, liturgy, sacrament, or protocol. These acts, statements, and movements are prescribed by the religion and are imbued with transcendent significance.
f. Structure or Organization: Many religions have a congregation or group of believers who are led, supervised, or counseled by a hierarchy of teachers, clergy, sages, priests, etc.
g. Holidays: As is etymologically evident, many religions celebrate, observe, or mark “holy,” sacred, or important days, weeks, or months.
h. Diet or Fasting: Religions often prescribe or prohibit the eating of certain foods and the drinking of certain liquids on particular days or during particular times.
i. Appearance and Clothing: Some religions prescribe the manner in which believers should maintain their physical appearance, and other religions prescribe the type of clothing that believers should wear.
j. Propagation: Most religious groups, thinking that they have something worthwhile or essential to offer non-believers, attempt to propagate their views and persuade others of their correctness. This is sometimes called “mission work,” “witnessing,” “converting,” or proselytizing.
​
As one can plainly see this is not a mere suggestion but an establishment of what a mode of worship must meet and if it does then it's ruled as nonreligious with no constitutional protections.
In the event that you find yourself in trouble with the law and faced with charges for unlawful use then plead not guilty and demand a jury trail so you can explain your spiritual use and its mental, physical, and spiritual development to a jury where at least one person or more may identify. If you are sincere and you are found guilty then appeal to a higher court or ask for a change of venue if you believe your peers would not give you a fail trail.
​
There is growing evidence as to the mental, physical, and spiritual development we get from the use of entheogens when used correctly and with respect. We can heal mental, physical, and spiritual wounds and live productive lives.
​
En·theo·gen is defined as [god within; god- or spirit-facilitating] a psychoactive sacramental; a plant or chemical substance taken to occasion primary religious experience. Entheogens provide human-beings with a doorway to the Divine for personal enlightenment, which directly affects one's own religiosity (religious devotion) through mental, physical and spiritual development. These holy sacraments have assisted indigenous peoples and other human-beings with Divine healing for thousands of years.