Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism and also the result will likely be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to master that shamanism is not an religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. More surprising may be the discovery that it is the precursor to most major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has been practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for around 40,000 years and possibly very much 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 directly from shamanic experience. We will no longer are in caves or perhaps really small communities whose members are proven to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that a part of us effective at fearing the dark and seeking the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though the world may have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask that of a shaman is and the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe 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 individual who sees’ and identifies someone creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered state of consciousness to get to know and assist spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience with meeting spirits is always that there is no separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing so you 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 concept of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where most of us could only take into account 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 since the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the right, with the corpus collosum – which is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming most traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a way to help alter consciousness, in fact only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, your journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ as they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, San Pedro cactus 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’re qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the cause of the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences suggests that a person’s brain is hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds with the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important 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 most generations we lack a clear, objective idea of things such as spirits. Nowadays it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings in the notion of spirit even though both coincide, they may not be the same yet they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits as part of all of that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body so that you can have a very human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus have an existential overview unavailable to me, but we’re fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. Many of us are derived from this energy, exist inside and resume it. It is actually living this perspective which allows a shaman to have the absence of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance and disease.
My second understanding of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the key insight there are things in the psyche which I tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it can feel to activate with spirit throughout 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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