Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and the result is going to be blank stares. So many people are surprised to learn that shamanism is very little religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Even more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to most major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has been practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for about 40,000 many possibly very much 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 around the world with carved and painted images drawn straight from shamanic experience. We no more are now living in caves or in really small communities whose members are common known to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that portion of us effective at fearing the dark and seeking the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 1 / 4 of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, even though world could have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask exactly what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, what a shaman is and does is just explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and refers to an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered state of consciousness to meet and help spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this example of meeting spirits is that there’s no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, from your cat and dog, 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 common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, regarded course it’s a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many people could only take into account the perception 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 right onto your pathway begins since the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the correct, through the corpus collosum – which is, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming tastes traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted using percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a method to help alter consciousness, actually approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, your journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition all over the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ since they’re 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 is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they are qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and keep the cause of the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences points too a persons mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; perhaps 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.
Obviously, among the questions most frequently asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for several generations we lack an obvious, objective comprehension of such things as spirits. Currently it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings of the idea of spirit reality both the coincide, they may not be precisely the same and yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body in order to use a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so offer an existential overview unavailable to me, but were fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. We all result from this energy, exist there and resume it. It really is living this angle that allows a shaman to experience the absence of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance disease.
My second idea of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the key insight that you have things in the psyche that we usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and possess their very own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it may feel to interact 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.
More information about Psychedelics check out our new website: visit site