Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism along with the result might be blank stares. Many people are surprised to master that shamanism isn’t a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Much more surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to most major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for at least 40,000 many 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 around the globe with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We not live in caves or perhaps small communities whose members are seen to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that portion of us capable of fearing the dark and requesting aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world may have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask such a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, exactly what a shaman is and does is merely explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and refers to someone creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and help spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this example of meeting spirits is always that there isn’t any separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, though of course this is a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many of us are only able to think about the thought 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 because shaman redirects the principal cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain off to the right, through the corpus collosum – that’s, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by the use of percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a means to help alter consciousness, in reality no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire 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, Psychedelics 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. Concurrently they are qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences points too a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds in the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Obviously, one of several questions most frequently asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for most generations we lack an obvious, objective knowledge of such things as spirits. Today it’s 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 of the idea of spirit and though both coincide, they aren’t the identical nevertheless they benefit me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits within all that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body in order to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so provide an existential overview unavailable to me, but were basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. Many of us originate from this energy, exist inside and return to it. It is in reality living this angle that enables a shaman to experience the absence of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or wellness disease.
My second understanding of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the important insight that we now have things inside the psyche that we tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and also have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it could feel to get with spirit throughout 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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