Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism along with the result will likely be blank stares. Most people are surprised to find out that shamanism is not a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Even more surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority of major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for about 40,000 many possibly a lot longer. Historically, shamanism was 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 straight from shamanic experience. We no more reside in caves or in tiny communities whose members are typical proven to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that portion of us competent at fearing the dark and asking for help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world may have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask what a shaman is along with the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, that of a shaman is and does is actually explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and refers to somebody able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered condition of consciousness to get to know and work with spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this connection with meeting spirits is there is no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, from a 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 normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, though of course it is just a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many people can only take into account the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins because shaman redirects the key cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most of traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by the use of percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a means to help alter consciousness, in fact just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around the globe, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena 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 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 could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they may be qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences suggests that the human being mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; perhaps the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds with the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.
And in addition, one of many questions normally asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a definite, objective knowledge of such things as spirits. Nowadays 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, We’ve two understandings of the concept of spirit reality the two coincide, they are not exactly the same but they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body in order to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore offer an existential overview unavailable to me, but we are essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. We all originate from this energy, exist within it and return to it. It really is living this perspective that enables a shaman to try out having less separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health and disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the crucial insight there are things within the psyche that we usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and possess their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of how it could feel to activate with spirit after a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the operation of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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