Search engine for touristic excursions to any place in the world Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism and also the result might be blank stares. Most people are surprised to find out that shamanism is not an religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Even more surprising could be the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has been practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for around 40,000 a number of possibly greatly longer. Historically, shamanism was 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 completely from shamanic experience. We no longer live in caves or even in very small communities whose members are all proven 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 seeking the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though the world may have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask that of a shaman is and also the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, what a shaman is and does is just explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and refers to an individual creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered condition of consciousness in order to meet and assist spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience with meeting spirits is that there isn’t any separation between something that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where many of us can only look at the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins since the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain right, with the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming tastes traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by the use of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a technique to aid alter consciousness, in reality just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ because they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as a ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, Psychedelics 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. As well they are qualitative spaces, states of 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 within the cognitive sciences shows that a person’s mental faculties are hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds from the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Obviously, one of many questions most frequently asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for many generations we lack a definite, objective understanding of such things as spirits. These days it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings from the idea of spirit despite the fact that both the coincide, they are not precisely the same but they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in all that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body to be able to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus come with an existential overview unavailable to me, but were essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. Most of us are derived from this energy, exist inside it and come back to it. It is really living this perspective allowing a shaman to experience the absence of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health and disease.
My second understanding of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the crucial insight that we now have things within the psyche that we usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and also have their unique life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it may feel to interact with spirit during 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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