Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and also the result will probably be blank stares. Most people are surprised to understand that shamanism isn’t a religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for around 40,000 a few years possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism would have been a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans. Our hunter-gatherer forbears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs around the globe with carved and painted images drawn straight from shamanic experience. We no longer are in caves or in tiny communities whose members are common recognized to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that section of us competent at fearing the dark and asking for aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 1 / 4 of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, even though world might have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask exactly what a shaman is and also the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, exactly what a shaman is and does is just explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and describes someone capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered condition of consciousness to meet up with and assist spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this connection with meeting spirits is the fact that there is no separation between something 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 from the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course it is just a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where the majority of us is only able to think about the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because shaman redirects the main cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the correct, over the corpus collosum – that is certainly, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming most of traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by the use of percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a technique to help you alter consciousness, in reality just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the present and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world 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 viewed as a ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, San Pedro shamanism is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they may be qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and keep the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences points too a persons mental faculties are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds from the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.
Unsurprisingly, one of several questions most often asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for a lot of generations we lack an obvious, objective knowledge of things like spirits. These days it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings with the notion of spirit even though both coincide, they’re not exactly the same but they help me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body as a way to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so come with an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we have been fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. Many of us are derived from this energy, exist within it and return to it. It is actually living this angle that allows a shaman to try out the lack of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health and disease.
My second idea of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the crucial insight that you have things inside the psyche i tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and also have their particular life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it could feel to interact with spirit throughout a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the operation of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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