Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and also the result will likely be blank stares. Many people are surprised to understand that shamanism is very little religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. More surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it continues to be practised on every inhabited continent on earth for at least 40,000 a few years 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 around the globe with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We not are in caves or even in tiny communities whose members are common known to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that a part of us able to fearing the dark and requesting help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though the world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.


Ask what a shaman is and the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, such a shaman is and does is merely explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and refers to somebody capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered condition of consciousness to get to know and help spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience of meeting spirits is that there is no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, from your dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality as well as 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 working together with sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where the majority of us are only able to take into account the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because shaman redirects the main cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the right, through the corpus collosum – that’s, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming tastes traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by the use of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a technique to help alter consciousness, in fact only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the present and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition all over the world, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to the worlds’ because 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 can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they’re qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and secure the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences shows that a persons brain is hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even the 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, among the questions most often asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a specific, objective understanding 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 list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings of the thought of spirit and though the two coincide, they are not exactly the same yet they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body as a way to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason provide an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we are critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. Most of us result from this energy, exist within it and return to it. It is in reality living this attitude that allows a shaman to experience the lack of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health insurance and disease.

My second knowledge of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the insight that there are things within the psyche that i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and have their unique life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it might feel to interact 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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