Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and also the result will likely be blank stares. So many people are surprised to find out that shamanism is very little religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Even more surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has been practised on every inhabited continent on earth for at least 40,000 many possibly greatly 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 around the globe with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We no more are now living in caves or in very small communities whose members are recognized to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that part of us capable of fearing the dark and asking for the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world may have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask exactly what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, what a shaman is and does is actually explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and is the term for someone creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and use spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience with meeting spirits is the fact that there is absolutely no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, between a 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 typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where the majority of us are only able to take into account the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins since the shaman redirects the main cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain off to the right, from the corpus collosum – which is, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted through percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a way to aid alter consciousness, actually approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition around the world, are described as ‘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 seen as ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, San Pedro cactus is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they may be qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and support the basis for the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences implies that the human mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural 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 considering spirituality for many generations we lack an obvious, objective idea 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 list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings in the notion of spirit even though the 2 coincide, they are not exactly the same nevertheless they help me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within all of that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body so that you can possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus offer an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we have been basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. Many of us are derived from this energy, exist within it and resume it. It is really living this attitude that enables a shaman to experience having less separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple 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 there are things inside the psyche which I don’t produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it may feel to interact with spirit throughout 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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