Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and the result might be blank stares. Many people are surprised to learn that shamanism is very little religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Much more surprising will 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 may be practised on every inhabited continent on earth for at least 40,000 many 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 worldwide with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We not are now living in caves or perhaps tiny communities whose members are typical seen to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that section of us competent at fearing the dark and requesting the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, even though world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask what a shaman is and also the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, exactly what a shaman is and does is simply explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and is the term for someone creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered condition of consciousness to meet up with and help spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience of meeting spirits is always that there is absolutely no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working together with sub atomic theory, regarded course it is just a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where most of us are only able to consider the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins since the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain right, with the corpus collosum – that is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming majority of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by the use of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a way to help alter consciousness, in fact just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, your way begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary 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 involving the 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, San Pedro cactus is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly as this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they may be qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and support the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences implies that the human being mental faculties are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds from the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Obviously, one of several questions most often asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a specific, objective knowledge of specific things like spirits. Currently it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings in the notion of spirit even though the two coincide, they are not the identical but they work for me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits as part of all that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body so that you can have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason offer an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we are basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. Most of us come from this energy, exist inside and go back to it. It is really living this attitude which allows a shaman to have having less separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the important insight there are things within the psyche that i do not produce, but which produce themselves and possess their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it may feel to interact with spirit after 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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