Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism along with the result is going to be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to master that shamanism isn’t a religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Even more surprising is the discovery that it is the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent in the world for at least 40,000 years and possibly a lot longer. Historically, shamanism was 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 straight from shamanic experience. We will no longer are in caves or even in really small communities whose members are typical seen to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that a part of us capable of fearing the dark and requesting the help of 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 may have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask that of a shaman is and also the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, such a shaman is and does is merely explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and is the term for someone capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness in order to meet and help spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this connection with meeting spirits is that there’s no separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from the cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with sub atomic theory, though of course this is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where the majority of us could 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.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins because shaman redirects the main cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere of the brain right, through the corpus collosum – that is certainly, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming most of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted using percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a method to help you alter consciousness, in fact only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition worldwide, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to 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 shamanism is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently these are qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and secure the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences implies that a person’s mental faculties are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; even 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.
Not surprisingly, one of many questions most often asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for most generations we lack a definite, objective comprehension of things such as spirits. Nowadays it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings with the thought of spirit even though both the coincide, they may not be the same nevertheless they benefit me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits included in all of that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body in order to use a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason offer an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we have been basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. We all result from this energy, exist inside and resume it. It really is living this attitude which allows a shaman to experience the possible lack of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or wellness disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the insight that there are 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 how it might feel to get with spirit within 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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