Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism and also the result is going to be blank stares. Most people are surprised to learn that shamanism is very little religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. Even more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent on the planet not less than 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 world with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We no longer are now living in caves or perhaps small communities whose members are typical known to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that part of us able to fearing the dark and seeking help from 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, even though the world may have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask what a shaman is and the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, exactly what a shaman is and does is just explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and describes someone able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness to meet up with and help spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this experience with meeting spirits is the fact that there isn’t any separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, from your cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing 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 most of us are only able to look at the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because the shaman redirects the key cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the right, over the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming majority of traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted using percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a technique to aid alter consciousness, the truth is no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, the journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition around the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between the worlds’ because they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, San Pedro shamanism is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously these are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and keep the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences suggests that a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; perhaps the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds with the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
And in addition, one of several questions most often asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for several generations we lack a specific, objective idea of things like spirits. Currently it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings with the idea of spirit despite the fact that the two coincide, they aren’t the identical nevertheless they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in all of that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body to be able to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason have an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we’re fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. We all result from this energy, exist there and go back to it. It is actually living this angle which allows a shaman to have the absence of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance disease.
My second understanding of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the key insight that you have things inside the psyche that i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and have their very own life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it can feel to activate 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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