Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism along with the result is going to be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to learn that shamanism is not an religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Even more surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to most major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for at least 40,000 years and possibly a lot longer. Historically, shamanism was a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans. Our hunter-gatherer forbears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs all over the world with carved and painted images drawn completely from shamanic experience. We no longer are now living in caves or even in tiny communities whose members are common recognized to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that portion of us capable of fearing the dark and seeking aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although world could have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask that of a shaman is along with the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, that of a shaman is and does is merely explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and is the term for an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered state of consciousness to meet and assist spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this connection with meeting spirits is always that there is no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and 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, regarded course it is a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many people can only consider the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because shaman redirects the principal cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere from the brain right, with the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming majority of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted using percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a technique to help alter consciousness, the truth is just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, the journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ because they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen 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 could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly as this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they are qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the cause of the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences points too the human mental faculties are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; perhaps the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.
Unsurprisingly, among the questions normally asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a specific, objective understanding of specific things like spirits. Currently it’s really 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 in the concept of spirit despite the fact that the two coincide, they aren’t exactly the same nevertheless they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within all that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body to be able to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason offer an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we have been fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. Many of us come from this energy, exist inside and return to it. It is actually living this attitude which allows a shaman to experience the absence of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health and disease.
My second understanding of spirit is a lot 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 key insight that we now have things within the psyche which I tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and also have their particular life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of methods it could feel to interact with spirit during a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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