Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism as well as the result is going to be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to find out that shamanism is very little religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Even more surprising could be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it may be practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for at least 40,000 a few years possibly a lot 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 from shamanic experience. We no longer are in caves or even in really small communities whose members are known to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that part of us effective at fearing the dark and seeking aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although the world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask that of a shaman is along with the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, exactly what a shaman is and does is merely explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and describes someone capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered state of consciousness to get to know and help spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this connection with meeting spirits is that there is absolutely no separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from a 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 common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course it’s a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where the majority of us are only able to consider the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins since the shaman redirects the key cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that’s, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming tastes traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted through percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a method to help you alter consciousness, in reality just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition worldwide, 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 are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as ‘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 could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they’re qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and keep the cause of the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences suggests that the human mental abilities are hardwired to find out 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.
And in addition, among the questions most frequently asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for most generations we lack an obvious, objective understanding of things such as spirits. Currently it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings from the concept of spirit reality both the coincide, they may not be exactly the same yet they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in all of that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body so that you can use a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus have an existential overview unavailable to me, but we’re critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. Many of us are derived from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It is really living this perspective which allows a shaman to try out the absence of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance disease.
My second idea of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and it 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 the place to find me the insight that you have things from the psyche i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and possess their unique life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of how it can feel to get with spirit after 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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