Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism along with the result will probably be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to learn that shamanism isn’t a religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising could be the discovery that it is the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it may be practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for around 40,000 a few years possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism was 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 from shamanic experience. We no longer are now living in caves or even in small communities whose members are all proven to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that part of us competent at fearing the dark and seeking aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, although world could have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask what a shaman is along with the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, exactly what a shaman is and does is just explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and identifies somebody creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness to get to know and use spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience of meeting spirits is there is no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, between a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working together with sub atomic theory, though of course this is a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where many of us is only able to consider the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins since the shaman redirects the key cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain off to the right, through the corpus collosum – which is, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted through percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a way to help alter consciousness, actually no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your way begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ because they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as a ‘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 can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and keep the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences points too a persons mental faculties are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; even 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.
Obviously, one of many questions most often asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for many generations we lack a specific, objective idea of things like spirits. These days it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings in the notion of spirit even though both coincide, they’re not the same and yet they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in all that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body as a way to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus offer an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we have been essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. Many of us result from this energy, exist there and return to it. It is actually living this attitude which allows a shaman to try out the possible lack of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health and disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the crucial insight there are things in the psyche that i usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their unique life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it may feel to have interaction 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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