Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism as well as the result will likely be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to learn that shamanism is very little religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Much more surprising is the discovery that it is the precursor to most major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent on this planet not less than 40,000 years and possibly a lot 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 world with carved and painted images drawn straight from shamanic experience. We no longer live in caves or in really small communities whose members are all recognized to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that part of us competent at fearing the dark and requesting the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although the world could have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask that of a shaman is and also the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and is the term for someone able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered condition of consciousness to meet up with and work with spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this connection with meeting spirits is there is no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, between a cat and dog, 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 working with sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where the majority of us could only consider the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because shaman redirects the primary cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – which is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming majority of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted by the use of percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a means to assist alter consciousness, actually only 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 simply to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ since they’re 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 simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they’re qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and keep the basis for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences implies that the human mental abilities are hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds with 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 unveiled in 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. 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 with the thought of spirit even though the 2 coincide, they’re not the identical and yet they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits as part of everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body in order to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so come with an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we’re essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. All of us come from this energy, exist inside it and go back to it. It really is living this attitude that enables a shaman to have the lack of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health and disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the crucial insight that we now have things inside the psyche that we don’t produce, but which produce themselves and have their particular life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of how it might feel to get with spirit during 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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