Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism as well as the result is going to be blank stares. So many people are surprised to learn that shamanism is not a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Much more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has been practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for around 40,000 a number of possibly a lot 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 around the globe with carved and painted images drawn completely from shamanic experience. We will no longer are now living in caves or perhaps tiny communities whose members are common seen to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that a part of us effective at fearing the dark and seeking aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 1 / 4 of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world could have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask that of a shaman is and also the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, exactly what a shaman is and does is simply explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and is the term for an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness to meet and assist spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience with meeting spirits is the fact that there is no separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from the cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with 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 utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many of us can only think about the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins because shaman redirects the key cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain off to the right, over the corpus collosum – that’s, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming majority of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a method to help you alter consciousness, in reality only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition around the globe, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving 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, San Pedro cactus 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. At the same time they’re qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and secure the cause of the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences suggests that the human being brain is hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; perhaps 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.
And in addition, one of the questions most regularly asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for many generations we lack a specific, objective comprehension of things like spirits. These days it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings of the thought of spirit reality the two coincide, they’re not exactly the same yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body to be able to use a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so come with an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we’re critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. All of us originate from this energy, exist inside it and resume it. It really is living this attitude that allows a shaman to try out the absence of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or wellness disease.
My second idea of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the important insight that there are things from the psyche that we tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and possess their particular life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of how it may feel to get 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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