Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism along with the result might be blank stares. So many people are surprised to learn that shamanism is not a religion however the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. More surprising is the discovery that it is the precursor to most major world religions, such as Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has become practised on every inhabited continent on the planet for about 40,000 a few years possibly a lot longer. Historically, shamanism would be 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 completely from shamanic experience. We not reside in caves or even in small communities whose members are typical proven to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that part of us able to fearing the dark and asking for the help of things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although the world could have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.

Ask what a shaman is and the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or word ‘witchdoctor’. In reality, what a shaman is and does is merely explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and identifies somebody creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered condition of consciousness to meet and use spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this experience with meeting spirits is there isn’t any separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, from the cat and dog, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists utilizing sub atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many people are only able to consider the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Called a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your way begins since the shaman redirects the main cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the right, over the corpus collosum – that’s, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. Inside the overwhelming most of traditions all over the world this ‘breakthrough’ will likely be assisted through percussive sound, for example drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a method to help alter consciousness, actually approximately 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, your way begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your present and enters worlds visible only to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around the globe, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm 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 viewed 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 since this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they may be qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and keep the basis for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences points too a persons brain is hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds in the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.

And in addition, one of many questions most frequently asked by students being shown shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a specific, objective understanding of things such as spirits. These days it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; their list is seemingly endless. Personally, I’ve two understandings in the idea of spirit even though the two coincide, they aren’t exactly the same yet they work with me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits in all that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body so that you can have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my own ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so have an existential overview unavailable if you ask me, but were basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. Most of us come from this energy, exist inside it and resume it. It is in reality living this attitude which allows a shaman to see the absence of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or wellness disease.

My second understanding of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in their autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the important insight that we now have things within the psyche that i usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and possess their very own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of methods it may feel to have interaction with spirit throughout 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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