Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism as well as the result might be blank stares. Most people are surprised to find out that shamanism is not a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Much more surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority of major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which continues to be practised on every inhabited continent in the world for about 40,000 a few years possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism was 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 not are in caves or perhaps in tiny communities whose members are proven to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that portion of us able to fearing the dark and asking for aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, although world may have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.

Ask exactly what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and identifies an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered condition of consciousness to meet and use spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this example of meeting spirits is always that there’s no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from your dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, regarded course this is a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where most of us can only consider the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from 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 primary cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the right, from the corpus collosum – which is, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming tastes traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted by the use of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a method to assist alter consciousness, in reality only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, your journey begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena 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 seen as ‘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 because this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time these are qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and keep the cause of the shaman’s journey – to ask about for help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences shows that the human being mental abilities are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds with the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.

Not surprisingly, one of the questions most often asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a specific, objective understanding of things like spirits. Currently it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings in the notion of spirit reality both coincide, they may not be exactly the same but they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in all of that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body as a way to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so come with an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but were fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. All of us come from this energy, exist there and resume it. It is actually living this perspective which allows a shaman to try out having less separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance disease.

My second knowledge of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was very simply explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the key insight that we now have things within the psyche which I usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and still have their unique life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how it could 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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