Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism along with the result is going to be blank stares. Many people are surprised to learn that shamanism is not a religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. Much more surprising will be the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority of major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it continues to be practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for about 40,000 a few years possibly very much 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 directly from shamanic experience. We no more are in caves or even in small communities whose members are all seen to us. Most 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 seeking help from 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, although the world might have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.

Ask what a shaman is and also the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, what a shaman is and does is actually explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and identifies an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness to get to know and work with spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience of meeting spirits is there is absolutely no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, from the cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course it’s a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many people are only able to think about the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins as the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain off to the right, over the corpus collosum – which is, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming tastes traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by way of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a way to assist alter consciousness, in reality no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, the journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around 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’ as they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Although often considered primitive or viewed as a ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, San Pedro shamanism 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. Simultaneously they’re qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and offer the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences shows that the human mental faculties are hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; the 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.

And in addition, one of the questions normally asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for most generations we lack a specific, objective knowledge of such things as spirits. Today 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’ve two understandings with the notion of spirit reality both coincide, they may not be the same nevertheless they work for me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits within everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body as a way to use a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus come with an existential overview unavailable to me, but we’re basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. Many of us originate from this energy, exist within it and come back to it. It is in reality living this perspective that allows a shaman to experience the absence of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance disease.

My second knowledge of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the key insight that we now have things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their unique life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it might feel to get with spirit throughout 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.
Check out about San Pedro cactus see this useful webpage: click