Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism along with the result is going to be blank stares. Many people are surprised to learn that shamanism is very little religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. Much more surprising will be the discovery that it is the precursor to many major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for at least 40,000 years and 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 directly from shamanic experience. We not are in caves or even in really small communities whose members are all proven to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that a part of us capable of fearing the dark and asking for the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, although world might have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.
Ask what a shaman is and the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, what a shaman is and does is just explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and identifies someone creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and work with spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this connection with meeting spirits is always that there is no separation between whatever 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 along with 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 dealing with sub atomic theory, regarded course this is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where most of us is only able to consider the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.
Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins since the shaman redirects the key cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain right, from the corpus collosum – which is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming majority of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted through percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a way to aid alter consciousness, the truth is just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around the world, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena 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 can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and offer the basis for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences shows that a person’s brain is hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; even Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds in the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.
Not surprisingly, one of several questions normally 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 understanding of such things as spirits. Nowadays it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings with the notion of spirit reality both the coincide, they are not the identical yet they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits in all of that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body as a way to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus come with an existential overview unavailable to me, but were basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. Many of us come from this energy, exist inside it and return to it. It is really living this angle that allows a shaman to experience the possible lack of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance disease.
My second idea of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the insight that you have things from 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 the beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it might feel to get with spirit within 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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