Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism and the result is going to be blank stares. So many people are surprised to understand that shamanism is not an religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Much more surprising could be the discovery that it is 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 on this planet not less than 40,000 many possibly quite definitely longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously 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 will no longer reside in caves or perhaps really small communities whose members are all proven to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our minds, that a part of us competent at fearing the dark and getting the aid of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although the world may have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.

Ask such a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, exactly what a shaman is and does is actually explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and refers to a person able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered condition of consciousness to meet up with and work with spirit helpers. What are the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this experience with meeting spirits is there is no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, between a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with sub atomic theory, though of course this is a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where many people is only able to take into account the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Referred to as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms the journey begins because shaman redirects the main cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere from the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is certainly, in the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a means to aid alter consciousness, actually only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, your journey begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between the worlds’ because 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 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 as this ‘ordinary’ reality. Concurrently these are qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and support the cause of the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences shows that the human brain is hardwired to determine the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; even 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 the questions most regularly asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for several generations we lack a definite, objective understanding of things like spirits. These days it is 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 with the idea of spirit and though both coincide, they may not be the identical yet they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body as a way to use a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore offer an existential overview unavailable to me, but we have been 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 in reality living this attitude that enables a shaman to try out the absence of separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health insurance disease.

My second idea of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in the autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the insight that there are things within the psyche i usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and possess their very own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of how it may feel to have interaction with spirit within 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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