Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism along with the result will probably be blank stares. Many people are surprised to master that shamanism is not an religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. A lot more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it may be practised on every inhabited continent on earth for at least 40,000 years and 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 all over the world with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We not reside in caves or in very small communities whose members are seen to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that section of us competent at fearing the dark and asking for the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, although the world may have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask such a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, what a shaman is and does is actually explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and identifies an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered condition of consciousness to meet and assist spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience of meeting spirits is that there isn’t any separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is common 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 making the effort to describe. However, where many of us can only look at the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins as the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the correct, with the corpus collosum – that is, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming majority of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted using percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a technique to aid alter consciousness, in reality no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ since they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as a ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, Psychedelics 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. Simultaneously these are qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and keep the reason for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences suggests that the human being brain is hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds in the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Obviously, one of many questions normally asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for several generations we lack an obvious, objective knowledge of things like spirits. Currently it’s 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 of the thought of spirit and though the 2 coincide, they’re not the identical nevertheless they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits within all that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body as a way to use a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason have an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we’re essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. Many of us originate from this energy, exist there and go back to it. It is actually living this attitude which allows a shaman to see the absence of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health and disease.
My second understanding of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the important insight that there are things within the psyche that we do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their particular life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it might feel to activate 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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