Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism as well as the result will probably be blank stares. Many people are surprised to find out that shamanism isn’t a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. A lot more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet not less than 40,000 a few years possibly quite definitely 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 completely from shamanic experience. We not are in caves or even in small communities whose members are all proven to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that part of us able to fearing the dark and seeking aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter 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 exactly what a shaman is and the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, such a shaman is and does is merely explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and describes a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness to get to know and assist spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this experience of meeting spirits is always that there isn’t any separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, from the dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course it is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where many of us could only think about the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins since the shaman redirects the key cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain to the correct, from the corpus collosum – that is certainly, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by the use of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a way to aid alter consciousness, actually just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ because they’re 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 could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they’re qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and keep the reason for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences points too a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to determine 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.
Not surprisingly, among the questions most frequently asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for several generations we lack a specific, objective idea of such things as spirits. Today 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 have two understandings from the notion of spirit reality the 2 coincide, they aren’t the same and yet they help me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body in order to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason offer an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but were fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. We all come from this energy, exist inside it and go back to it. It really is living this angle that allows a shaman to have the lack of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health insurance and disease.
My second understanding of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the crucial insight there are things in the psyche that i tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and possess their unique life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This can be 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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