Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and also the result will probably be blank stares. So many people are surprised to learn that shamanism is not a religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. A lot more surprising is the discovery that it is the precursor to the majority of major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for around 40,000 years and possibly greatly longer. Historically, shamanism would be 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 no longer reside in caves or in small communities whose members are recognized to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that a part of us capable of fearing the dark and getting the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of your million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, even though the world might have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.

Ask what a shaman is and also the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, that of a shaman is and does is simply explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and identifies a person creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and help spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this example of meeting spirits is there is absolutely no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from the cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, regarded course it is just a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where most of us are only able to take into account 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 the journey begins since the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain right, over the corpus collosum – that’s, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming most traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by the use of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a technique to help you alter consciousness, in reality no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, the journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition around the globe, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm 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 is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they’re qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences shows that the human being brain is hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds from the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.

And in addition, among the questions normally asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for several generations we lack a specific, objective knowledge of specific things like spirits. Today 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 have two understandings with the notion of spirit despite the fact that both the coincide, they’re not the same but they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits within all of that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body in order to use a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore provide an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we are essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. We all come from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It really is living this attitude which allows a shaman to try out the absence of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or wellness disease.

My second knowledge of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche that i do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their unique life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it could feel to get with spirit after 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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