Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism along with the result will probably be blank stares. So many people are surprised to find out that shamanism is not a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for around 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 straight from shamanic experience. We no more are in caves or perhaps tiny communities whose members are all recognized to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that portion of us able to fearing the dark and seeking the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although the world could have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask such a shaman is along with the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and identifies an individual creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness to get to know and assist spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this experience of meeting spirits is there is no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, between a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many people could only look at the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because the shaman redirects the primary cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the correct, through the corpus collosum – that’s, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming most traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted by the use of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a technique to aid alter consciousness, the truth is just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, your journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between the worlds’ since they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or viewed as a ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, Psychedelics is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they’re qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and keep the reason for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences shows that a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; perhaps the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds from the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.
Unsurprisingly, one of the questions most often asked by students being shown 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 specific things like spirits. Today it’s actually 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 with the notion of spirit reality both the coincide, they are not the same and yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body so that you can possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore have an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we have been fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. All of us come from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It really is living this attitude allowing a shaman to see the possible lack of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or wellness disease.
My second understanding of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the crucial insight that you have things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it might feel to activate with spirit throughout 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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