Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and also the result is going to be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to find out that shamanism is very little religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. Much more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which continues to be practised on every inhabited continent on earth not less than 40,000 a few years 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 completely from shamanic experience. We no longer live in caves or perhaps in really small communities whose members are common seen to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that a part of us competent at fearing the dark and asking for aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 1 / 4 of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask such a shaman is along with the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, what a shaman is and does is actually explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and refers to someone creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness to meet up with and assist spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience of meeting spirits is that there is absolutely no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with 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 working together with sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where most of us could only take into account the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins as the shaman redirects the primary cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that’s, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming most of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted through percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a way to help you alter consciousness, actually approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, the journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition all over the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between the worlds’ because they are 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 is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly as this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they may be qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and support the basis for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences implies that a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; even Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of 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 the questions normally asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for several generations we lack a definite, objective understanding of things such as spirits. Currently it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings with the idea of spirit even though the 2 coincide, they’re not the same and yet they help me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits within 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 in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus have an existential overview unavailable to me, but we’re basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. We all result from this energy, exist there and return to it. It is actually living this perspective that allows a shaman to have the absence of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health and disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the insight that you have things in the psyche that we don’t produce, but which produce themselves and possess their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it may feel to interact with spirit after a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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