Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and also the result might be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to understand that shamanism is not an religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Much more surprising may be the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has been practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for at least 40,000 a number of possibly greatly 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 all over the world with carved and painted images drawn completely from shamanic experience. We no longer reside in caves or in small communities whose members are proven to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that part of us effective at fearing the dark and requesting the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though world might have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask that of a shaman is and also the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, that of a shaman is and does is actually explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and identifies an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered state of consciousness to meet up with and use spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience of meeting spirits is always that there’s no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, from a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working together with sub atomic theory, though of course it is just a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many of us is only able to take into account the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins because the shaman redirects the key cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the correct, from the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted through percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a way to aid alter consciousness, in reality just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, the journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition around the world, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to the worlds’ because they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘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 since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they may be qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and keep the basis for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences shows that the human brain is hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; perhaps the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds with the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
And in addition, one of several questions most often asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for most generations we lack a specific, objective understanding of specific things like spirits. These days it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings in the thought of spirit reality both coincide, they may not be the identical and yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within all of that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body as a way to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus provide an existential overview unavailable to me, but we are fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. We all come from this energy, exist inside it and return to it. It is really living this perspective allowing a shaman to have the absence of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health insurance and disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the key insight that there are things inside the psyche i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and still have their unique life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it could feel to activate with spirit throughout a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the entire process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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