COCT MINISTRY
CHURCH OF COGNITIVE THERAPY
The Church Of Cognitive Therapy (COCT) aligns with global entheogenic spiritual communities that explore the sacred use of psychoactive substances beyond recreational contexts. The church emphasizes safety, ethical guidelines, and holistic mental and spiritual well-being while integrating traditional plant-based sacraments with therapeutic and spiritual objectives.
COCT Ministry is a modern entheogenic secular, religious, and spiritual movement that blends cognitive psychology, shamanic wisdom, and ceremonial plant medicine, offering a structured yet flexible path toward personal enlightenment, spiritual connection, and introduction to a global community of participation.
COCT Ministry is a pastoral trauma healing platform originally organized to heal veterans with PTSD, cancer, and addiction in 2003. Its origin was constructed using cognitive therapy, neuroplasticity, ancient ceremonial indigenous practices, and aligning with the animist belief in a Universal Divine Life Force that animates all things. These practices and beliefs were instrumental in curing a long period of depression and trauma for the organizer. The ministry's lineage is heavily rooted in veteran-to-veteran-led religious and spiritual practices.
Spiritual Use of Entheogens
The use of sacred plants to commune with the Divine is a global spiritual phenomenon that stretches back to humanity’s earliest religious expressions. Across continents and cultures, entheogens have served as holy sacraments used to elevate consciousness, open the inner senses, and facilitate direct spiritual experience. Archaeological and anthropological evidence shows that entheogenic practices appear in some of the world’s oldest spiritual traditions, with roots extending more than 12,000 years into human history.
From ancient temples to indigenous ceremonies, from major world religions to minority spiritual systems, the use of sacred plants as pathways to enlightenment is universal. These sacraments have been used to heal, to teach, to reveal hidden knowledge, and to strengthen the bond between human beings and the Divine. Whether through shamanic rituals, visionary rites, or contemplative spiritual practices, entheogens continue to serve as powerful tools for connecting with the sacred and awakening the deeper dimensions of the mind, body, and soul
The Spiritual Life
The religious, shamanic, or spiritual significance of entheogens is well established in anthropological and modern contexts; entheogens have traditionally been used to supplement many diverse practices geared towards achieving transcendence, including white and black magic, divination, meditation, yoga, sensory deprivation, asceticism, prayer, trance, rituals, chanting, hymns like peyote songs, and drumming. In the 1960s the hippie movement escalated its use to psychedelic art, binaural beats, sensory deprivation tanks, music, and rave parties.
Plants, Shamans, and the Spirit World
"Throughout human history and perhaps even before Homo sapiens evolved, there has been an innate desire to experience a direct connection with god(s), ancestors, and other inhabitants of the spirit world. When examining some of the most ancient cultures across Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas and up through time to the preindustrial age we observe many clans, sects, and tribes partaking of psychoactive and other plants for spiritual and/or medicinal uses. The uses and curative effect of these plants were strongly interconnected with ritual. For many tribal cultures, the plants in and of themselves were sacred. Supernatural powers resided in their tissues as a divine gift to humans on earth."