Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and also the result will probably be blank stares. Many people are surprised to master that shamanism isn’t a religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Much more surprising could be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority of major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent in the world not less than 40,000 a few years possibly very much 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 from shamanic experience. We no longer live in caves or even in small communities whose members are typical proven to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that part of us effective at fearing the dark and seeking help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though the world may have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask such a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, that of 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 someone capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and help spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this connection with meeting spirits is that there is no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities in 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, regarded course it is a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many of us is only able to look at the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins because shaman redirects the main cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the right, over the corpus collosum – that is, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted using percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a method to help alter consciousness, the truth is only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, the journey begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between 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 shamanism is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and secure the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences implies that the human mental faculties are hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds from the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
And in addition, among the questions most frequently asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a definite, objective knowledge of things like spirits. Nowadays it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings in the thought of spirit despite the fact that both the coincide, they may not be the identical nevertheless they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits within everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body to be able to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so come with an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we are essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. We all come from this energy, exist within it and come back to it. It is in reality living this perspective that allows a shaman to experience the absence of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or wellness disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the important insight that you have things inside the psyche that i do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it can feel to have interaction with spirit after a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the operation of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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