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 will probably be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to master that shamanism is not an religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent in the world for at least 40,000 years and possibly a lot 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 around the world with carved and painted images drawn straight from shamanic experience. We will no longer are now living in caves or perhaps small communities whose members are common recognized to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that section of us able to fearing the dark and getting aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though the world might have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask such a shaman is and also the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, exactly what a shaman is and does is just explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and identifies an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered condition of consciousness to get to know and work with spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this example of meeting spirits is there is absolutely no separation between anything 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 also the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course it’s a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where the majority of us is only able to consider the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins as the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain to the correct, through the corpus collosum – that’s, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted by the use of percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a means to help you alter consciousness, actually only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition around the world, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole 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 ‘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 because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they’re qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and support the basis for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences points too the human mental abilities are hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds with 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 most frequently asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for a lot of generations we lack an obvious, objective knowledge of things like spirits. Currently it’s really a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings of the concept of spirit even though the 2 coincide, they’re not the identical but they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits as part of everything exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body to be able to use a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason come with an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we are basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. Most of us come from this energy, exist there and return to it. It is really living this attitude that enables a shaman to have the absence of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or wellness disease.
My second understanding of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the important insight that we now have things in the psyche that we do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their own life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it may feel to get with spirit throughout 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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