Ask any passer-by on any street to spell it out shamanism along with the result might be blank stares. Most people are surprised to learn that shamanism isn’t a religion nevertheless the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. More surprising will be the discovery that it is the precursor to many major world religions, such as the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent on earth for at least 40,000 years and 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 worldwide with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We will no longer reside in caves or in really small communities whose members are common known to us. The majority 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 aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people a whole lot easier works today because, although world could possibly have changed, fundamentally we have not.

Ask exactly what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a couple of words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or maybe the word ‘witchdoctor’. In fact, that of a shaman is and does is actually explained. In the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one that sees’ and is the term for a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities whilst in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and assist spirit helpers. What the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, within this connection with meeting spirits is always that there is no separation between whatever is: no separation between me writing and also you reading these words, between a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and also the non-material realities with the spirit worlds. This concept of ‘oneness’ is normal currency in contemporary culture and increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists dealing with sub atomic theory, though of course it’s a predominantly physical, as opposed to a spiritual, oneness that such scientists making the effort to describe. However, where many of us can only think about the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it with the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins because shaman redirects the main cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain right, from the corpus collosum – that is certainly, from the structuring, organising hemisphere, for the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by way of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, such as ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a way to help alter consciousness, actually no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, your journey begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the present and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition all over the world, are described as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena 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 ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, San Pedro cactus 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. At the same time they are qualitative spaces, states to become that reflect and offer the basis for the shaman’s journey – to inquire about help, healing or information from your spirits. Contemporary research inside the cognitive sciences shows that the human being mental faculties are hardwired to see 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.

Unsurprisingly, one of several questions most regularly asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for a lot of generations we lack a clear, objective idea of specific things like spirits. Today it is a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings in the concept of spirit and though the two coincide, they aren’t exactly the same and yet they benefit me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirits included in everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body as a way to possess a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and therefore come with an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but we are basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. All of us originate from this energy, exist there and resume it. It is actually living this perspective allowing a shaman to experience having less separation between items that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health insurance and disease.

My second idea 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 knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought you will find me the important insight that we now have things within the psyche which I usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and possess their own life. Philemon represented a force that has been not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it can feel to have interaction 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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