Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism as well as the result will likely be blank stares. So many people are surprised to find out that shamanism is very little religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. More surprising will be the discovery that it is the precursor to many major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which continues to be practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for about 40,000 a number of possibly quite definitely longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans. Our hunter-gatherer forbears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs around the world with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We will no longer are now living in caves or perhaps in really small communities whose members are seen to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that section of us competent at fearing the dark and asking for aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, even though the world may have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask exactly what a shaman is along with the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, exactly what a shaman is and does is actually explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and refers to an individual creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and use spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this experience with meeting spirits is the fact that there isn’t any separation between something that is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, from the dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where many of us could only take into account the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins since the shaman redirects the main cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – which is, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming tastes traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted through percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a means to assist alter consciousness, the truth is just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, your journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between the worlds’ as they are 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 can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and secure the reason for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences points too the human brain is hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds in the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.
Unsurprisingly, one of the questions most regularly asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a specific, objective knowledge of things such as spirits. These days it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings in the thought of spirit reality both coincide, they aren’t exactly the same but they work for me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body to be able to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason offer an existential overview unavailable to me, but we are critically 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 really is living this perspective which allows a shaman to try out the lack of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or wellness disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it 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 where you can me the key insight that we now have things within the psyche i do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it may feel to activate with spirit after 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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