Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism and also the result is going to be blank stares. So many people are surprised to understand that shamanism is not a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. A lot more surprising may be the discovery that it’s 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 at least 40,000 a number of 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 around the world with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We not reside in caves or even in really small communities whose members are proven to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that section of us competent at fearing the dark and asking for the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, although the world might have changed, fundamentally we have not.

Ask exactly what a shaman is along with the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and identifies a person creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered state of consciousness to get to know and use spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this example of meeting spirits is there is no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from the cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality as well as the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course it is just a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where the majority of us is only able to consider the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins because the shaman redirects the primary cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the right, with the corpus collosum – that’s, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming most of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by way of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a method to help you alter consciousness, in fact no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your way begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ because they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Although often considered primitive or viewed as a ‘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 as this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently these are qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences implies that a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; perhaps the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.

Obviously, among the questions most regularly asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for a lot of generations we lack an obvious, objective knowledge of such things as spirits. Currently it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings from the concept of spirit despite the fact that both coincide, they aren’t the same and yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body in order to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason have an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we have been critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. We all result from this energy, exist inside and return to it. It is actually living this angle which allows a shaman to experience having less separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health and disease.

My second comprehension of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the key insight that we now have things from the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of the way it could feel to interact with spirit within a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the whole process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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