Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism along with the result is going to be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to master that shamanism isn’t a religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. More surprising will be the discovery that it is the precursor to most major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on earth for around 40,000 a number of 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 around the globe with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We will no longer reside in caves or even in really small communities whose members are common known to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that portion of us effective at fearing the dark and asking for the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although the world might have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask that of a shaman is along with the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, exactly what a shaman is and does is just explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and refers to a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered condition of consciousness to meet up with and work with spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience with meeting spirits is always that there is absolutely no separation between anything that 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 and the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This concept 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 it is a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where most of us is only able to take into account the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins because shaman redirects the key cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere in the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming tastes traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted using percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a way to help you alter consciousness, actually only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to the worlds’ as 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 is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly as this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they are qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the cause of the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences points too a persons brain is hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; perhaps 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.
Obviously, one of several questions most regularly asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for many generations we lack a specific, objective understanding of things such as spirits. Nowadays it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings in the idea of spirit reality both the coincide, they are not the same yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits within all of that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body in order to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore have an existential overview unavailable to me, but we are essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. Most of us originate from this energy, exist there and go back to it. It is actually living this attitude which allows a shaman to have the lack of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health and disease.
My second understanding of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the key insight that we now have things in the psyche that i do not produce, but which produce themselves and also have their unique life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it might feel to interact with spirit during 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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