Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism and also the result is going to be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to learn that shamanism is not a religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. More surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority of major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has been practised on every inhabited continent on earth not less than 40,000 years and 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 all over the world with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We no longer are now living in caves or even in very small communities whose members are proven to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that a part of us capable of fearing the dark and asking for aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although world could have changed, fundamentally we have 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’. In reality, exactly what a shaman is and does is just explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and identifies a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and help spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this example of meeting spirits is the fact that there isn’t any separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from your dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working together with sub atomic theory, though of course this is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where the majority of us can only think about the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the example 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 principal cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the correct, over the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming most of traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted by way of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a way to aid alter consciousness, in reality just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, your way begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena 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, San Pedro cactus is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time these are qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the cause of the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences suggests that a persons mental faculties are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Obviously, one of the questions most regularly asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for most generations we lack a clear, objective idea of specific things like spirits. Today it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings of the thought of spirit and though the 2 coincide, they may not be exactly the same nevertheless they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in all that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body to be able to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so come with an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we’re critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. Most of us are derived from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It is really living this perspective which allows a shaman to see the possible lack of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health and disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche that i usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their particular life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is 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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