Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and the result might be blank stares. Most people are surprised to learn that shamanism is not an religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Much more surprising could be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority of major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for about 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 all over the world with carved and painted images drawn completely from shamanic experience. We not are now living in caves or perhaps in tiny communities whose members are all known to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that portion of us able to fearing the dark and asking for the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world might have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, such a shaman is and does is actually explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and refers to a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness to meet up with and help spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this connection with meeting spirits is there’s no separation between any situation that 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 along with the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course it is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where the majority of us can only consider the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins as the shaman redirects the key cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain off to the right, over the corpus collosum – that is certainly, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming majority of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by way of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a technique to aid alter consciousness, the truth is just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, your way begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition worldwide, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your 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, San Pedro cactus is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they are qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and support the basis for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences suggests that a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; even 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, among the questions most often asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for many generations we lack a specific, objective comprehension of such things 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 from the concept of spirit despite the fact that both coincide, they’re not precisely the same but they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in all of that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body to be able to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore provide an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but we have been critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. Many of us come from this energy, exist there and resume it. It really is living this perspective which allows a shaman to experience the possible lack of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health insurance disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and was very simply explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the key insight that there are things from the psyche that i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and possess their very own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it could feel to interact with spirit after 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.
For details about San Pedro shamanism explore our new net page: click to read more