Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and the result is going to be blank stares. Many people are surprised to master that shamanism is not a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. Much more surprising is the discovery that it is the precursor to many major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which continues to be practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for around 40,000 many possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism would be a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans. Our hunter-gatherer forbears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs around the world with carved and painted images drawn straight from shamanic experience. We no more reside in caves or even in very small communities whose members are proven to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that a part of us able to fearing the dark and requesting help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, even though the world could have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.

Ask that of a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, such a shaman is and does is simply explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and is the term for someone creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered condition of consciousness to meet and work with spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this connection with meeting spirits is there is no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from the 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 working 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 many people can only take into account the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience with 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 main cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere from the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is certainly, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming tastes traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted using percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a method to help alter consciousness, in fact just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, the journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ because 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 cactus 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 may be qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and secure the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences shows that a persons mental faculties are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of 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 most often asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for many generations we lack an obvious, objective understanding of things such as spirits. These days it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings in the notion of spirit and though the 2 coincide, they aren’t the same but they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits included in all of that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body to be able to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason offer an existential overview unavailable to me, but were basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. Many of us result from this energy, exist within it and go back to it. It is actually living this attitude which allows a shaman to experience the possible lack of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health insurance and disease.

My second idea of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the insight that there are things from the psyche that we don’t produce, but which produce themselves and still have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of the way it can feel to have interaction with spirit throughout 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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