Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and the result will likely be blank stares. Most people are surprised to learn that shamanism is not an religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Much more surprising may be the discovery that it is the precursor to many major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has been practised on every inhabited continent in the world for around 40,000 many possibly very much 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 worldwide with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We will no longer reside in caves or perhaps tiny communities whose members are typical seen to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that section of us able to fearing the dark and seeking the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although the world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.

Ask that of a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and is the term for somebody capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered condition of consciousness to meet up with and help spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this example of meeting spirits is that there’s no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many of us can only think about the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the connection with 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 principal cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain right, with the corpus collosum – that’s, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming tastes traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by the use of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a means to assist alter consciousness, the truth is no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants this way. Metaphysically, your way begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible simply to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition worldwide, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between the worlds’ since they’re 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 is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they’re qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and support the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences implies that a persons mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; 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, among the questions most often asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a clear, objective understanding of specific things like spirits. Nowadays it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, We’ve two understandings in the notion of spirit reality both the coincide, they aren’t the identical and yet they help me. The Core 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 have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so come with an existential overview unavailable to me, but we’re critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. Most of us are derived from this energy, exist there and go back to it. It is actually living this attitude which allows a shaman to try out the lack of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or wellness disease.

My second comprehension of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and 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 home to me the important insight that there are things from the psyche that we tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and still have their very own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it might feel to have interaction 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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