Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism and also the result might be blank stares. Most people are surprised to learn that shamanism isn’t a religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. A lot more surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for around 40,000 years and possibly greatly 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 globe with carved and painted images drawn straight from shamanic experience. We not live in caves or perhaps small communities whose members are common recognized to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that portion of us effective at fearing the dark and seeking the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although world may have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, such a shaman is and does is simply explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and is the term for an individual able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered state of consciousness to get to know and help spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience with 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 also the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This concept 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’s a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where most of us could only take into account the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins as the shaman redirects the primary cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the correct, with the corpus collosum – which is, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by the use of percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a means to assist alter consciousness, in reality no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition around the globe, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm 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 viewed as a ‘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 because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they may be qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and keep the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences implies that the human being mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; even 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.
And in addition, one of many questions most frequently asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for several generations we lack a definite, objective idea of specific things like spirits. Nowadays it’s really a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings of the thought of spirit despite the fact that the two coincide, they may not be the identical yet they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits within everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body in order to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so have an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we have been essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. Most of us are derived from this energy, exist within it and resume it. It really is living this angle allowing a shaman to try out the lack of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance and disease.
My second understanding of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the crucial insight that there are things within the psyche that i tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and also have their own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it may feel to have interaction with spirit during 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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