Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism and the result is going to be blank stares. So many people are surprised to learn that shamanism is very little religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Much more surprising could be the discovery that it is the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has been practised on every inhabited continent on earth for at least 40,000 years and possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism would have been 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 no longer live in caves or even in small communities whose members are known 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 aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though the world could have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask what a shaman is and the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, exactly what a shaman is and does is just explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and is the term for someone able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered condition of consciousness to meet and use spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this connection with meeting spirits is that there is absolutely no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from your dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course it is just a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where most of us are only able to think about the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins because shaman redirects the primary cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming tastes traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by way of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a way to assist alter consciousness, in reality no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, your way begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition all over the world, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ since 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 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. Simultaneously they may be qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and secure the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences suggests that the human brain is hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; even 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.
And in addition, among the questions normally asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for many generations we lack a specific, objective knowledge of such things as spirits. Today it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings of the notion of spirit reality the 2 coincide, they may not be precisely the same yet they help me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in all of that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body to be able to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so provide an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we are fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. Most of us originate from this energy, exist within it and return to it. It is in reality living this angle allowing a shaman to have the possible lack of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health and disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and was very simply 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 there are things within the psyche that i tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and have their particular life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it could feel to have interaction with spirit within 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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