Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism as well as the result is going to be blank stares. Many people are surprised to learn that shamanism isn’t a religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. More surprising is the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority of 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 about 40,000 a few years possibly greatly longer. Historically, shamanism would be 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 completely from shamanic experience. We no longer reside in caves or perhaps in tiny communities whose members are all proven to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that a part of us capable of fearing the dark and requesting help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask that of a shaman is and also the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, such a shaman is and does is simply explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and describes an individual able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness to meet up with and use spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience of meeting spirits is always that there isn’t any separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with sub atomic theory, regarded course it’s a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where the majority of us could only consider the thought 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 as the shaman redirects the primary cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the correct, with the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted using percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a way to assist alter consciousness, in reality approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, your way begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between the worlds’ as they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘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 as this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they may be qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and keep the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences points too the human being mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; perhaps 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.
Unsurprisingly, one of many questions most regularly asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for most generations we lack a clear, objective knowledge of such things as spirits. Currently it’s really a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings of the concept of spirit even though both coincide, they aren’t the same yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within all that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body to be able to have a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason have an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we are critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. We all originate from this energy, exist inside and resume it. It really is living this perspective allowing a shaman to experience the absence of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance disease.
My second comprehension of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the important insight that you have things in the psyche i tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and have their particular life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it could feel to interact with spirit within a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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