Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism along with the result will likely be blank stares. Most people are surprised to understand that shamanism isn’t a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Much more surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for about 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 around the world with carved and painted images drawn completely from shamanic experience. We not are now living in caves or perhaps tiny communities whose members are all seen to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that section of us effective at fearing the dark and requesting help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 1 / 4 of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask that of a shaman is as well as the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, that of a shaman is and does is actually explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and describes somebody creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered state of consciousness to meet and assist spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience of meeting spirits is always that there is absolutely no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from your dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities of 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 it’s a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where most of us is only able to look at the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins because shaman redirects the primary cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere with the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – which is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by the use of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a technique to help you alter consciousness, in fact only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition worldwide, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to the worlds’ as they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as a ‘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 simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they may be qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences suggests that the human brain is hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; perhaps the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds from 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 frequently asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a definite, objective knowledge of such things as spirits. Nowadays it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings in the notion of spirit reality both the coincide, they may not be the identical and yet they help me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body as a way to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason have an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we have been fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. All of us originate from this energy, exist there and return to it. It really is living this perspective that enables a shaman to try out having less separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health and disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the key insight that there are things within the psyche that i do not produce, but which produce themselves and also have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it can feel to interact with spirit throughout 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.
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