Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and the result might be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to find out that shamanism is not an religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. A lot more surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to most major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which continues to be practised on every inhabited continent in the world for at least 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 completely from shamanic experience. We not are now living in caves or perhaps in tiny communities whose members are typical known to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that a part of us capable of fearing the dark and requesting help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, even though world could have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask exactly what a shaman is and the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, what a shaman is and does is merely explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and refers to someone able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness to meet up with and help spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this example of meeting spirits is that there is 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 as well as the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with sub atomic theory, regarded course it is just a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many of us could only think about the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins as the shaman redirects the main cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the correct, through the corpus collosum – that’s, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming most of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted through percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a method to help alter consciousness, in reality approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, your journey begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition worldwide, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to the worlds’ because they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, Psychedelics is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they are qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and offer the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences points too the human brain is hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds in 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 regularly asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for most generations we lack an obvious, objective idea of things like spirits. Nowadays it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings with the notion of spirit even though both coincide, they may not be precisely the same and yet they work for me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits within everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body to be able to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus come with an existential overview unavailable to me, but we have been essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. We all come from this energy, exist inside it and resume it. It is in reality living this angle which allows a shaman to try out having less separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance and disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the crucial insight that you have things in the psyche that we tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and possess their own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it might 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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