Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism along with the result will likely be blank stares. Most people are surprised to find out that shamanism is not a religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. Even more surprising may be the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority of major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it may be practised on every inhabited continent in the world not less than 40,000 many 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 around the globe with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We no longer live in caves or even in really small communities whose members are known to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that part of us able to fearing the dark and getting the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 1 / 4 of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though the world might have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask that of a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and describes a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered condition of consciousness to meet and use spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this connection with meeting spirits is there is absolutely no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, between a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course this is a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where many people are only able to think about the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because shaman redirects the key cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the correct, over the corpus collosum – that is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted through percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a means to assist alter consciousness, in reality approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your way begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition all over the world, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ because they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as ‘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 since this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they may be qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and secure the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences implies that a persons brain is hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds in the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Not surprisingly, one of many questions most often asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for many generations we lack a clear, objective comprehension of specific things like spirits. Currently it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings from the concept of spirit even though both coincide, they aren’t precisely the same nevertheless they help me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body to be able to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason have an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we are fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. All of us come from this energy, exist inside and return to it. It really is living this perspective that enables a shaman to experience the absence of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health and disease.
My second understanding of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the insight there are things from the psyche that we tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and still have their particular life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it might feel to activate 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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