Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism and the result is going to be blank stares. Many people are surprised to understand that shamanism is very little religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. More surprising will be the discovery that it is the precursor to most major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for around 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 world with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We not are in caves or in small communities whose members are typical proven to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that part of us competent at fearing the dark and getting help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though the world might have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask such a shaman is along with the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, that of a shaman is and does is merely explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and refers to someone able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness to meet up with and help spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience of meeting spirits is that there isn’t any separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, from the dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, though of course this is a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where most of us is only able to take into account the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins since the shaman redirects the primary cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the right, over the corpus collosum – that is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming tastes traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted through percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a means to help alter consciousness, the truth is no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your here and now and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition around the globe, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to 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 could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they may be qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the cause of the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences suggests that the human being mental faculties are hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ along with 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, one of many 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 an obvious, objective knowledge of things such as spirits. Nowadays it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings from the idea of spirit despite the fact that the two coincide, they are not the identical yet they help me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body to be able to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore provide an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we are critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. All of us originate from this energy, exist inside it and resume it. It is really living this angle that allows a shaman to have the possible lack of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or wellness disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the important insight there are things within the psyche that i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and possess their very own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of how it might feel to interact with spirit after 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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