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 understand that shamanism is not an religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Much more surprising is the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it may be practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for around 40,000 a number of possibly quite definitely longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously 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 from shamanic experience. We no more are in caves or perhaps in really small communities whose members are proven to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that portion of us effective at fearing the dark and getting aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, although the world could have changed, fundamentally we have not.
Ask such a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, that of a shaman is and does is actually explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and describes a person able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and use spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this experience with meeting spirits is that there is no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, from your cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working together with sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many of us is only able to take into account the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins because shaman redirects the key cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the correct, with the corpus collosum – that’s, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming tastes traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted using percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a way to aid alter consciousness, in reality approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, your way begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with every 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 relating to the worlds’ since they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or viewed 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 since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they are qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and keep the reason for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences suggests that the human being mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; even the 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.
And in addition, one of several questions most frequently 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 definite, objective understanding of things such as spirits. Currently 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, We’ve two understandings with the idea of spirit despite the fact that both the coincide, they aren’t precisely the same yet they help me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within all that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body as a way to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore come with an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we are essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. Most of us result from this energy, exist inside and resume it. It is in reality living this attitude that enables a shaman to experience having less separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example 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 in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the important insight that there are things inside the psyche that i do not produce, but which produce themselves and possess their very own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it may feel to interact with spirit within 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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