Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism and also the result might be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to master that shamanism isn’t a religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. A lot 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 has been practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for at least 40,000 many possibly a lot longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously 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 from shamanic experience. We will no longer live in caves or in tiny communities whose members are common proven to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that a part of us effective at fearing the dark and asking for help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although world may have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask what a shaman is and also the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, such a shaman is and does is just explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and describes somebody able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness to meet and assist spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this connection with meeting spirits is that there’s no separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, from your 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 common 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, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where most of us can only take into account the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience with 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 primary cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere with the brain to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming majority of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a method to aid alter consciousness, the truth is no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your 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, 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 simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. As well they’re qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and offer the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences suggests that a persons mental faculties are hardwired to find out 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 an important part of human perception.
Not surprisingly, one of several questions most frequently asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a clear, objective comprehension of such things as spirits. These days 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 with the concept of spirit despite the fact that both coincide, they’re not the identical and yet they help me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within all of that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body as a way to use a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason come with an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we’re critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. Many of us result from this energy, exist within it and go back to it. It really is living this perspective that allows a shaman to see the lack of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the important insight that you have things inside the psyche i tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it could feel to activate 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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