Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and the result will likely be blank stares. Most people are surprised to understand that shamanism is very little religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. More surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has been practised on every inhabited continent in the world for about 40,000 a number of 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 worldwide with carved and painted images drawn completely from shamanic experience. We no longer live in caves or in small communities whose members are seen to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that a part of us capable of fearing the dark and requesting the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, although world could have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask that of a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and is the term for a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness to meet and work with spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this connection with meeting spirits is there is no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, between a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality as well as the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course this is a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where the majority of us are only able to consider the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins because the shaman redirects the main cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain off to the right, from the corpus collosum – which is, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming tastes traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a way to help alter consciousness, actually just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, your journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition all over the world, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire 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 ‘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 simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they’re qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences shows that a person’s brain is hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; 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, 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 most generations we lack an obvious, objective understanding of things like spirits. These days it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings of the concept of spirit despite the fact that the two coincide, they may not be exactly the same yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body in order to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason provide an existential overview unavailable to me, but we are critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. We all are derived from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It is really living this attitude that enables a shaman to experience the absence of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance and disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the important insight that we now have things inside the psyche that i tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and still have their particular life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it could feel to have interaction 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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