Search engine for touristic excursions to any place in the world Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism as well as the result will likely be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to learn that shamanism is not a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to most major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on the planet not less than 40,000 years and possibly greatly longer. Historically, shamanism would have been 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 reside in caves or in small communities whose members are known to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that section of us effective at fearing the dark and getting the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 1 / 4 of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though world could possibly 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’. In reality, exactly what a shaman is and does is actually explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and refers to an individual able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness to get to know and work with spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this connection with meeting spirits is the fact that there’s no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, from a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where the majority of us can only think about the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins since the shaman redirects the key cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the right, through the corpus collosum – that is, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming most of traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted by the use of percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a method to help alter consciousness, in fact no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, the journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your 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 can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly as this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they’re qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences shows that a persons mental faculties are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; even Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Not surprisingly, one of several questions most often asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a definite, objective comprehension of things like spirits. Today it’s really a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings in the notion of spirit even though both the coincide, they are not precisely the same nevertheless they help me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body so that you can use a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so have an existential overview unavailable to me, but were critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. All of us come from this energy, exist inside and go back to it. It is actually living this attitude allowing a shaman to have having less separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health insurance and disease.
My second idea of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the crucial insight there are things from the psyche that i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and still have their particular life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it may feel to interact 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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