Ask any passer-by on any street to spell out shamanism and also the result might be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to find out that shamanism is very little religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. More surprising may be the discovery that it’s the precursor to the majority of major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has been practised on every inhabited continent on the planet not less than 40,000 a few years possibly very much 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 around the globe with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We will no longer reside in caves or in really small communities whose members are common proven to us. Many people live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but our brains, that part of us effective at fearing the dark and seeking aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of the million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world might have changed, fundamentally we haven’t.

Ask what a shaman is and the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, such a shaman is and does is just explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the word, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and describes an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities when it’s in an altered condition of consciousness to get to know and assist spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this experience of meeting spirits is that there’s no separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, from a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with the non-material realities from the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is usual currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working together with sub atomic theory, regarded course it’s a predominantly physical, instead of a spiritual, oneness that such scientists are trying to describe. However, where many people are only able to take into account the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the connection with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins as the shaman redirects the key cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere from the brain to the correct, with the corpus collosum – which is, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. In the overwhelming tastes traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted through percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the West as a method to help you alter consciousness, the truth is no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this manner. Metaphysically, right onto your pathway begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with every culture and tradition around the world, are identified 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 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 can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly since this ‘ordinary’ reality. As well they are qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences points too a person’s brain is hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds with the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception.

Unsurprisingly, one of several questions most regularly asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for most generations we lack a definite, objective understanding of things such as spirits. These days 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 have two understandings in the thought of spirit despite the fact that the 2 coincide, they aren’t precisely the same nevertheless they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within everything that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body to be able to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my small ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so provide an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but were basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. We all come from this energy, exist inside it and return to it. It is in reality living this perspective which allows a shaman to have having less separation between things that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health and disease.

My second comprehension of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simple explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought the place to find me the insight there are things in the psyche that i usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of how it can feel to activate with spirit during 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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