Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and also the result is going to be blank stares. Most people are surprised to learn that shamanism is very little religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. Much more surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority of major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for about 40,000 a number of possibly a lot longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans. Our hunter-gatherer forbears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs worldwide with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We no more are now living in caves or in very small communities whose members are all seen to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that a part of us able to fearing the dark and seeking the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.
Ask such a shaman is and the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, exactly what a shaman is and does is actually explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and identifies someone capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered state of consciousness to meet and assist spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this example 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 the dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality as well as the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, regarded course this is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where most of us could only think about the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because shaman redirects the key cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain off to the right, from the corpus collosum – that’s, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted through percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a technique to help alter consciousness, actually only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition around the globe, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving 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 is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. As well they are qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and offer the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences shows that the human being mental faculties are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; even Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.
Obviously, among the questions normally asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for several generations we lack an obvious, objective comprehension 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, I have two understandings in the idea of spirit despite the fact that the two coincide, they’re not precisely the same nevertheless they work for me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits in all of that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body in order to have a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so come with 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 are derived from this energy, exist inside it and return to it. It really is living this angle that enables a shaman to have the lack of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I don’t produce, but which produce themselves and possess their particular life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it can feel to have interaction with spirit throughout a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the operation of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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