Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and also the result is going to be blank stares. So many people are surprised to master that shamanism is very little religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. More surprising will be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it may be practised on every inhabited continent in the world for about 40,000 many 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 globe with carved and painted images drawn straight from shamanic experience. We no more reside in caves or perhaps in really small communities whose members are all recognized to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that part of us effective at fearing the dark and asking for help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 1 / 4 of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, even though the world could have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.

Ask such a shaman is and also the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, such a shaman is and does is actually explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and describes somebody creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness in order to meet and work with spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this connection with meeting spirits is always that there’s no separation between any situation 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 along with the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with 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 is only able to look at the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it from 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 the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere from the brain off to the right, over the corpus collosum – that is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming tastes traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted using percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a technique to assist alter consciousness, in reality just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, your journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition all over the world, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your worlds’ because they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘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 since this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they may be qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences implies that a persons mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ and also the mystical; even Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.

And in addition, one of several questions most frequently asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for many generations we lack a definite, objective comprehension of specific things like spirits. Today it’s really a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings with the idea of spirit even though both the coincide, they may not be precisely the same yet they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body in order to have a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore offer an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but we’re critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. Most of us result from this energy, exist inside and resume it. It really is living this angle which allows a shaman to try out the possible lack of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or wellness disease.

My second understanding of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the insight that you have things inside the psyche which I usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and also have their own life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it might feel to interact with spirit during a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the operation of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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