Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and the result will probably be blank stares. So many people are surprised to understand that shamanism is not an religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. A lot more surprising could 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 earth for at least 40,000 a few years possibly greatly longer. Historically, shamanism was a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans. Our hunter-gatherer forbears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs worldwide with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We will no longer reside in caves or even in tiny communities whose members are common proven to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that section of us capable of fearing the dark and requesting aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although the world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask such a shaman is along with the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, what a shaman is and does is just explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and identifies somebody able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness to get to know and help spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this connection with meeting spirits is the fact that there is no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, from the dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course it’s a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where the majority of us could only look at the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the right, through the corpus collosum – that is certainly, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted through percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a means to help you alter consciousness, in fact only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to the worlds’ because they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or viewed 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. As well they’re qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and secure the cause of the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences implies that the human being brain is hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; the 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.
Not surprisingly, one of many questions most frequently asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for most generations we lack a definite, objective idea of things like spirits. Currently 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 in the notion of spirit despite the fact that the two coincide, they may not be exactly the same yet they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits as part of everything exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body in order to use a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus offer an existential overview unavailable to me, but were critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. We all originate from this energy, exist inside it and return to it. It is really living this attitude that allows a shaman to try out having less separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or wellness disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the key insight that we now have things in the psyche that we tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and still have their very own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it might feel to have interaction with spirit throughout a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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