Search engine for touristic excursions to any place in the world Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism and the result is going to be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to learn that shamanism is not an religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. More surprising may be the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it may be practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for around 40,000 a number of possibly greatly longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously 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 more are in caves or perhaps in really small communities whose members are common known to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that section of us competent at fearing the dark and requesting help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a 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 what a shaman is along with the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, that of a shaman is and does is merely explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and identifies a person creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered state of consciousness to meet and work with spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this example of meeting spirits is always that there isn’t any separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from your cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality as well as 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 dealing with sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where many of us can only take into account the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because the shaman redirects the primary cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere in the brain off to the right, over the corpus collosum – that’s, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming most of traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted by the use of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a way to aid alter consciousness, the truth is only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your way begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition around the globe, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ as they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘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 can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. As well they are qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and support the basis for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences implies that a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; 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, among the questions most regularly asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a clear, objective comprehension of specific things like spirits. These days it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings from the notion of spirit and though the 2 coincide, they may not be exactly the same but they work for me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body in order to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore offer an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but were basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. Many of us result from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It is actually living this perspective that allows a shaman to see the possible lack of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance and disease.
My second idea of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the crucial insight that we now have things within the psyche i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and still have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it can feel to get with spirit during 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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