Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism and also the result will likely be blank stares. Many people are surprised to learn that shamanism isn’t a religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. A lot more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has been practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for about 40,000 a number of 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 worldwide with carved and painted images drawn completely from shamanic experience. We no longer live in caves or perhaps small communities whose members are typical seen to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that a part of us effective at fearing the dark and requesting the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, although the world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask such a shaman is and the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, that of a shaman is and does is simply explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and refers to somebody able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered state of consciousness to meet up with and use spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this example of meeting spirits is that there’s no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from the dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course it is just a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where many people could only take into account the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience 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 primary cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere with the brain off to the right, over the corpus collosum – that is certainly, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming majority of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted through percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a way to aid alter consciousness, actually no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, your way begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now 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 realm of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ because they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as ‘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 is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. As well they’re qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and support the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences shows that a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; perhaps 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.
Obviously, one of the questions most regularly asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for many generations we lack a specific, objective comprehension of things such as spirits. These days it’s really a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings from the notion of spirit reality the two coincide, they aren’t the identical and yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body so that you can have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore provide an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we’re fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. Many of us come from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It is in reality living this angle allowing a shaman to experience the possible lack of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health and disease.
My second idea of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply 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 insight that we now have things within the psyche that we do not 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 precisely how it might feel to interact with spirit after a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the whole process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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