Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism as well as the result will probably be blank stares. Many people are surprised to understand that shamanism is not an religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising could be the discovery that it’s 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 about 40,000 a number of possibly a lot 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 all over the world with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We not reside in caves or in really small communities whose members are common proven to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that a part of us effective at fearing the dark and requesting the help 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’ve not.

Ask that of a shaman is along with the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, such a shaman is and does is merely explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and refers to an individual creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness to meet and help spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this example of meeting spirits is the fact that there is absolutely no separation between any situation 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 concept of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many of us can only take into account the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins because shaman redirects the main cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the right, with the corpus collosum – that’s, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, on the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming tastes traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by way of 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 reality only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ since they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Although often considered primitive or seen as ‘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 could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently they are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences implies that a person’s mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ along with 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.

Unsurprisingly, one of several questions most regularly asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for many generations we lack a definite, objective knowledge of things like spirits. Today it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings with the thought of spirit and though both the coincide, they aren’t precisely the same nevertheless they work for me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own 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 human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason offer an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but were essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. Most of us originate from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It is really living this perspective allowing a shaman to have the absence of separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health and disease.

My second comprehension of spirit is much more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the important insight that we now have things in the psyche which I tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and still have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of how it may feel to get 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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