Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism as well as the result might be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to master that shamanism isn’t a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Even more surprising could be the discovery that it’s the precursor to most major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which continues to be practised on every inhabited continent on the planet not less than 40,000 a number of 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 around the globe with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We will no longer reside in caves or perhaps really small communities whose members are common proven to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our mind, that a part of us able to fearing the dark and asking for help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of an 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 that of a shaman is along with the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, such a shaman is and does is merely explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the term, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and identifies someone creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness to meet and assist spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, with this experience with meeting spirits is always that there is absolutely no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from your dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality as well as the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is common 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, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where the majority of us can only think about the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the experience with 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 principal cognitive process through the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most of traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted using percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a technique to aid alter consciousness, in fact only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your way begins if the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the whole world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to the worlds’ because they’re the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Although often considered primitive or seen as an ‘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 since this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they’re qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and offer the cause of the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences shows that the human being brain is hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and also 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 many questions most regularly asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided considering spirituality for most generations we lack a definite, objective understanding of such things as spirits. These days it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their email list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings with the idea of spirit despite the fact that the two coincide, they may not be precisely the same but they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits as part of all that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body to be able to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus offer an existential overview unavailable in my experience, but were essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. We all are derived from this energy, exist there and go back to it. It is actually living this angle that allows a shaman to try out having less separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance disease.

My second knowledge of spirit is a lot 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 the place to find me the important insight that we now have things within the psyche which I tend not to produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of methods it may feel to interact with spirit after a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the whole process of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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