Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and also the result might be blank stares. So many people are surprised to understand that shamanism is not an religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Even more surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it continues to be practised on every inhabited continent in the world for about 40,000 many possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously 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 straight from shamanic experience. We not are now living in caves or perhaps in tiny communities whose members are all proven to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that a part of us effective at fearing the dark and getting the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world may have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.

Ask what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and describes a person able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered condition of consciousness to get to know and help spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this connection with meeting spirits is the fact that there’s no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from the dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where most of us are only able to think about the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins because shaman redirects the primary cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that’s, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming most of traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, like drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, for example ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a means to help alter consciousness, actually just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, the journey begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition worldwide, are called ‘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 a ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, San Pedro shamanism is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly simply because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they may be qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and offer the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences points too a persons mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ as well as the mystical; the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds in the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.

Obviously, one of many questions normally asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for several generations we lack an obvious, objective knowledge of specific things like spirits. Currently it’s really a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings from the idea of spirit and though the two coincide, they are not precisely the same but they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within all that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body in order to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so provide an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but were basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. Most of us result from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It is really living this attitude that allows a shaman to have having less separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance disease.

My second idea of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the important insight that there are things in the psyche that we tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of precisely how 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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