Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism along with the result will probably be blank stares. So many people are surprised to master that shamanism is not a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. More surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to many major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent on earth not less than 40,000 years and possibly greatly longer. Historically, shamanism was 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 directly from shamanic experience. We will no longer are in caves or perhaps in small communities whose members are proven to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that a part of us competent at fearing the dark and requesting aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % 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 what a shaman is along with the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, that of a shaman is and does is merely explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and is the term for an individual able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered condition of consciousness in order to meet and use spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this connection with meeting spirits is there is no separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing so you reading these words, from a cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, though of course it is just a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where most of us can only look at the thought of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins because the shaman redirects the main cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere in the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by the use of percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a means to aid alter consciousness, in reality approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, your way begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition around the globe, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to 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 shamanism is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly as this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they may be qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and keep the cause of the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences points too the human being mental faculties are hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ along with 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 many questions most frequently asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for most generations we lack a specific, objective understanding of things like spirits. Nowadays it’s 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 with the thought of spirit reality both coincide, they’re not the same and yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in all that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body so that you can possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus offer an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we have been critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. All of us result from this energy, exist inside and go back to it. It is really living this perspective which allows a shaman to see the lack of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, including life and death or health insurance and 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 experience of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the important insight that we now have things in the psyche which I usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and also have their own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of the way it can 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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