Search engine for touristic excursions to any place in the world Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism as well as the result might be blank stares. So many people are surprised to master that shamanism is not an 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, which may be practised on every inhabited continent on earth for about 40,000 years and possibly quite definitely longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously 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 straight from shamanic experience. We not reside in caves or in very small communities whose members are all seen to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that part of us competent at fearing the dark and seeking aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask that of a shaman is and the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, such a shaman is and does is simply explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and describes someone able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered state of consciousness to get to know and use spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this connection with meeting spirits is there isn’t any separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, between a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality as well as the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many of us could only consider the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins since the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain right, over the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming tastes traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted using percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a technique to assist alter consciousness, in reality approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, the journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm 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 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 as this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they are qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and keep the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences shows that the human being brain is hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; perhaps the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds with the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.
Obviously, one of many questions most regularly asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a clear, objective understanding of things such as 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, I’ve two understandings with the notion of spirit despite the fact that both the coincide, they are not the identical but they benefit me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in all of that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body so that you can have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus provide an existential overview unavailable to me, but we have been fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. Most of us are derived from this energy, exist inside it and resume it. It is really living this attitude that enables a shaman to have the lack of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health insurance disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the key insight that you have things from the psyche i tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and possess their particular life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of how it may feel to get 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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