Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and also the result might be blank stares. So many people are surprised to master that shamanism is very little religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Much more surprising may be the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which continues to be practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for about 40,000 many possibly quite definitely 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 world with carved and painted images drawn straight from shamanic experience. We not reside in caves or perhaps really small communities whose members are all seen to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that portion of us effective at fearing the dark and requesting help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though world could have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask such a shaman is and the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, exactly what a shaman is and does is simply explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and describes a person able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness to get to know and assist spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this example of meeting spirits is there isn’t any separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, between a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, regarded course it is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where many of us can only consider the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins since the shaman redirects the main cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the correct, through the corpus collosum – that’s, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by the use of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a method to aid alter consciousness, in fact just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, your journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around the globe, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ because they’re 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 since this ‘ordinary’ reality. As well they’re qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences suggests that a persons brain is hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ along with 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.
Unsurprisingly, one of the questions normally asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a clear, objective idea of things such as spirits. Nowadays it’s 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 thought of spirit and though the 2 coincide, they’re not the identical but they help me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits within all of that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body so that you can have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus come with an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we’re essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. We all result from this energy, exist within it and come back to it. It really is living this perspective that allows a shaman to have the possible lack of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health and disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the key insight that we now have things in the psyche that we do not produce, but which produce themselves and possess their particular life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it might feel to activate with spirit throughout 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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