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 understand that shamanism isn’t a religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Much more surprising could be the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for about 40,000 a few years 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 worldwide with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We not live in caves or perhaps really small communities whose members are all seen to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that part of us capable of fearing the dark and requesting aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although the world might have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask such a shaman is and the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, exactly what a shaman is and does is simply explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and is the term for someone capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and assist spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this experience of meeting spirits is always that there’s no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, between a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course it is a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where the majority of us can only consider the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins as the shaman redirects the primary cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the right, over the corpus collosum – that is, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming majority of traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted by way of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a technique to help alter consciousness, the truth is only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your way begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary with each 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 between the worlds’ since they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, Psychedelics is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and secure the reason for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences shows that a persons brain is hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; even Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds in the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Not surprisingly, one of the questions normally asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for most generations we lack a specific, objective idea 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; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings with the concept of spirit despite the fact that the two coincide, they’re not the identical and yet they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body so that you can have a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus provide an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we are essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. Many of us are derived from this energy, exist inside and resume it. It is actually living this attitude allowing a shaman to try out the possible lack of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance disease.
My second knowledge of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the insight that there are things from the psyche that we usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and also have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it may feel to activate with spirit during 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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