Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism as well as the result is going to be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to understand that shamanism is not an religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. More surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to most major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for about 40,000 many possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans. Our hunter-gatherer forbears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs worldwide with carved and painted images drawn straight from shamanic experience. We no longer reside in caves or in very small communities whose members are typical seen to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that portion of us effective at fearing the dark and asking for the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though world may have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask such a shaman is along with the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, exactly what a shaman is and does is just explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and describes an individual creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered condition of consciousness to meet up with and use spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this example of meeting spirits is that there is no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from the cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality as well as the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, though of course this is a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where many people could only take into account the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins since the shaman redirects the key cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the right, with the corpus collosum – that’s, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted using percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a technique to assist alter consciousness, the truth is no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, the journey begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition around the world, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ since they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, Psychedelics is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously these are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences points too the human brain is hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Unsurprisingly, one of several questions most regularly asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for a lot of generations we lack an obvious, objective idea of things such as spirits. Currently it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings of the concept of spirit reality both the coincide, they aren’t exactly the same yet they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits as part of all of that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body so that you can possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus have an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we are critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. All of us are derived from this energy, exist inside it and return to it. It is actually living this attitude allowing a shaman to see the absence of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or wellness disease.
My second understanding of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things within the psyche that i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and also have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of how it could feel to get with spirit during a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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