Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and the result will probably be blank stares. Many people are surprised to learn that shamanism isn’t a religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Even more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on the planet not less than 40,000 a few years possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism was 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 from shamanic experience. We no more live in caves or even in tiny communities whose members are known to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that portion of us able to fearing the dark and getting help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though the world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask that of a shaman is and also the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, exactly what a shaman is and does is just explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and describes an individual creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered condition of consciousness to get to know and help spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this example of meeting spirits is there’s no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, from the cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also 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, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many people can only consider the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through 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 as the shaman redirects the main cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the right, through the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming most of traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by the use of percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a technique to assist alter consciousness, actually just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, your journey begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the present and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around the world, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to the worlds’ since they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘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. At the same time they are qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and offer the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences points too the human being mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ along with 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.
Unsurprisingly, one of several questions normally asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a clear, objective knowledge of such things as spirits. Nowadays it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings in the notion of spirit reality both the coincide, they are not the identical and yet they help me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits as part of everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body to be able to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus have an existential overview unavailable to me, but we’re critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. We all result from this energy, exist inside it and resume it. It is actually living this perspective that allows a shaman to see the lack of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or wellness disease.
My second understanding of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things inside the psyche i usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and also have their particular life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it can feel to have interaction with spirit after 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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