Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism along with the result will likely be blank stares. So many people are surprised to master that shamanism is not an religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising could be the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it continues to be practised on every inhabited continent in the world for at least 40,000 a number of possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism would be 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 straight from shamanic experience. We not live in caves or in very small communities whose members are all seen to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that section of us capable of fearing the dark and seeking the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask what a shaman is and also the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, exactly what a shaman is and does is merely explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and describes someone able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered condition of consciousness in order to meet and work with spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience with meeting spirits is that there is no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, from 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 with sub atomic theory, regarded course it is just a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where most of us can only consider the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins since the shaman redirects the main cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted through percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a method to aid alter consciousness, in fact just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each 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 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, 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. As well they may be qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and support the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences implies that the human being brain is hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and 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 regularly asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for many generations we lack a specific, objective understanding of specific things like spirits. These days it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings of the concept of spirit and though both the coincide, they are not precisely the same nevertheless they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything that exists. I am 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 come with an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we are basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. We all come from this energy, exist within it and come back to it. It is really living this attitude that allows a shaman to see having less separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance and disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and was plain and 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 crucial insight that we now have things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it might feel to get with spirit within 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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