Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism along with the result is going to be blank stares. Many people are surprised to master that shamanism isn’t a religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. Even more surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent in the world not less than 40,000 years and possibly quite definitely longer. Historically, shamanism would be 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 from shamanic experience. We will no longer live in caves or in really small communities whose members are known to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that a part of us capable of fearing the dark and seeking the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though the world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask what a shaman is along with the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, exactly what a shaman is and does is actually explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and is the term for somebody capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness in order to meet and use spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this example of meeting spirits is that there is no separation between anything 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 with the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where the majority of us can only look at the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins as the shaman redirects the key cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain to the correct, with the corpus collosum – which is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming most of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by way of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a means to assist alter consciousness, actually no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition worldwide, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ because they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or viewed 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 as this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they are qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and support the cause of the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences points too a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; perhaps 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.
And in addition, one of the questions normally asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for most generations we lack a clear, objective knowledge of such things as spirits. Currently 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 of the thought of spirit despite the fact that both coincide, they’re not precisely the same and yet they benefit me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body so that you can have a very human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore offer an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we have been basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. All of us are derived from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It is actually living this angle 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 wellness disease.
My second idea of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the crucial insight that you have things in the psyche that we don’t produce, but which produce themselves and also have their very own life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it can feel to have interaction with spirit within 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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