Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism as well as the result will probably be blank stares. So many people are surprised to master that shamanism is not a religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising will be the discovery that it is 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 on the planet for about 40,000 years and 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 completely from shamanic experience. We will no longer are in caves or perhaps small communities whose members are known to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that portion of us competent at fearing the dark and requesting the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask exactly what a shaman is and the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, what a shaman is and does is actually explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and identifies somebody creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and assist spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this connection with meeting spirits is always that there isn’t any separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from your dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many people can only think about the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins because shaman redirects the main cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the correct, with the corpus collosum – that’s, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming majority of traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted using percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a means to help you alter consciousness, the truth is approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, the journey begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition around the globe, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between the worlds’ as they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘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 simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they may be qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and secure the basis for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences points too the human mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and 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.
Not surprisingly, one of the questions most often asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for most generations we lack a specific, objective comprehension of things such as 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 have two understandings in the notion of spirit even though the two coincide, they’re not precisely the same and yet they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body to be able to use a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus offer an existential overview unavailable to me, but we are essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. Many of us result from this energy, exist within it and come back to it. It is really living this perspective that allows a shaman to experience the lack of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health and disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simple explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the crucial insight that you have things from the psyche that i tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and also have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it may feel to get with spirit within a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the whole process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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