Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism and the result might be blank stares. Most people are surprised to learn that shamanism isn’t a religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising will be the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent in the world for at least 40,000 many possibly quite definitely longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans. Our hunter-gatherer forbears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs all over the world with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We not reside in caves or even in very small communities whose members are typical proven 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 asking for help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, even though the world might have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask that of a shaman is and the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and identifies somebody creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered condition of consciousness in order to meet and assist spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this connection with meeting spirits is the fact 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 together with sub atomic theory, regarded course it’s a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where most of us is only able to take into account the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins as the shaman redirects the main cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the right, with the corpus collosum – that’s, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming most traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a means to aid alter consciousness, in reality approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition around the world, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire 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 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 since this ‘ordinary’ reality. As well these 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 suggests that a persons mental faculties are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; even 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.
Not surprisingly, one of the questions most regularly 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 specific, objective idea of things such as spirits. Currently it’s really a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings from the concept of spirit even though both coincide, they are not the same nevertheless they benefit me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body in order to use a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so have an existential overview unavailable to me, but were essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. All of us result from this energy, exist within it and come back to it. It is really living this perspective that allows a shaman to try out having less separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and 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 crucial insight that there are things within the psyche that i do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their unique life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it may feel to interact with spirit after 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.
More details about San Pedro cactus go to our web portal: look at here