Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and also the result is going to be blank stares. Many people are surprised to master that shamanism is very little religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Much more surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet for at least 40,000 a number of possibly quite definitely longer. Historically, shamanism would have been 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 no more are now living in caves or even in small communities whose members are all recognized to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that part of us capable of fearing the dark and requesting the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people that much easier works today because, although the world may have changed, fundamentally we have not.

Ask exactly what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a number of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, exactly what a shaman is and does is actually explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and identifies a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness in order to meet and help spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this example of meeting spirits is the fact that there is no separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, from your cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality as well as the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is typical currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where many of us is only able to think about the perception of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins since the shaman redirects the key cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the right, from the corpus collosum – that is, from your structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming most of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by the use of percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a technique to assist alter consciousness, the truth is just about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, the journey begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition around the globe, are referred to as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the an entire world of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving 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, Psychedelics is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly because this ‘ordinary’ reality. Simultaneously they may be qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and secure the cause of the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from the spirits. Contemporary research in the cognitive sciences suggests that a person’s brain is hardwired to determine 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.

Unsurprisingly, one of several questions most often 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. Currently it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, We have two understandings of the concept of spirit even though both the coincide, they are not the identical nevertheless they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within everything that exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body so that you can use a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and thus come with an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we have been critically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of the Great Spirit. All of us result from this energy, exist there and return to it. It is actually living this attitude which allows a shaman to experience the absence of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or wellness disease.

My second knowledge of spirit is much 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 where you can me the key insight that you have things inside the psyche that i don’t produce, but which produce themselves and also have their unique life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of how it might feel to get with spirit after 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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