Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and the result will probably be blank stares. So many people are surprised to learn that shamanism is very little religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Much more surprising could be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority of major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it continues to be practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for about 40,000 many possibly quite definitely 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 completely from shamanic experience. We not are now living in caves or perhaps tiny communities whose members are typical proven to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that part of us competent at fearing the dark and getting the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask such a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, that of a shaman is and does is merely explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and identifies someone able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered state of consciousness to meet up with and work with spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience of meeting spirits is that there is no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from the cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual 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, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where the majority of us could only think about the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins as the shaman redirects the main cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the right, through the corpus collosum – that is certainly, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming tastes traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a technique to help you alter consciousness, in reality only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, the journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with 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 are 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 could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. As well they may be qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and offer the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences implies that a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of 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 the questions most frequently asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for most generations we lack a definite, objective knowledge of things like spirits. Currently it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings of the notion of spirit reality both the coincide, they are not the same and yet they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body in order to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore provide an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we have been critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. We all originate from this energy, exist inside and go back to it. It really is living this attitude which allows a shaman to experience the absence of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance disease.
My second understanding of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in their 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 from the psyche that we don’t produce, but which produce themselves and possess their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it can feel to get with spirit within a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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