Search engine for touristic excursions to any place in the world Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism and the result will likely be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to find out that shamanism is not an religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Even more surprising will be the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent in the world 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 worldwide with carved and painted images drawn completely from shamanic experience. We no longer reside in caves or even in tiny communities whose members are common known to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that portion of us competent at fearing the dark and getting aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 1 / 4 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 haven’t.
Ask that of a shaman is and the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, what a shaman is and does is just explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and refers to a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness to meet and work with spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this connection with meeting spirits is that there isn’t any separation between something that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from your dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, regarded course it is just a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many people is only able to consider the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the connection with 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 principal cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain to the correct, with the corpus collosum – that’s, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming majority of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a means to help you alter consciousness, in reality only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your way begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the present and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around the world, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between 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 can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences implies that a persons mental abilities are hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ as well as 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.
Unsurprisingly, one of many questions most regularly asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for many generations we lack a clear, objective understanding of things such as spirits. Nowadays 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 in the notion of spirit despite the fact that the 2 coincide, they’re not precisely the same nevertheless they work for me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits as part of all that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body as a way to use a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore offer an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we have been basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. We all originate from this energy, exist within it and return to it. It is really living this angle that allows a shaman to have the lack of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the important insight there are things within the psyche that i do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it might feel to activate with spirit after a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the entire process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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