Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and also the result is going to be blank stares. So many people are surprised to understand that shamanism isn’t a religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on earth. Even more surprising may be the discovery that it is the precursor to most major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which may be practised on every inhabited continent on earth for at least 40,000 years and possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism was obviously a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans. Our hunter-gatherer forbears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs all over the world with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We no more are in caves or even in very small communities whose members are common proven to us. Many of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that portion of us effective at fearing the dark and asking for help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost 25 % of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people less difficult works today because, even though the world could have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.

Ask exactly what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, that of a shaman is and does is merely explained. Inside the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the individual who sees’ and is the term for an individual capable of making a ‘journey’ to alternate realities while in an altered state of consciousness to meet and help spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this connection with meeting spirits is the fact that there is no separation between something that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, between a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities in the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is common 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, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where the majority of us are only able to look at the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Identified as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins because shaman redirects the primary cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere in the brain to the correct, from the corpus collosum – that is, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, towards the visualising, sensing one. Within the overwhelming tastes traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted through percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, like ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a technique to aid alter consciousness, actually no more than 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, the journey begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts in the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition all over the world, are identified as ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker between your 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, San Pedro shamanism is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and is felt, smelt and experienced as clearly as this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they are qualitative spaces, states to be that reflect and offer the reason behind the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information in the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences implies that the human mental faculties are hardwired to find out the ‘unseen’ along with the mystical; the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds from the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly an important part of human perception.

And in addition, one of several questions normally asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for several generations we lack a clear, objective comprehension of things such as spirits. Today 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’ve two understandings from the thought of spirit and though the two coincide, they are not the identical yet they help me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body to be able to use a human experience. The spirits I meet in my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so offer an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but were basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments with the Great Spirit. All of us come from this energy, exist inside and go back to it. It is really living this attitude allowing a shaman to try out having less separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, for example life and death or health and disease.

My second knowledge of spirit is a bit more psychological and archetypal and was plain and simple explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his desire of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought where you can me the key insight that there are things in the psyche which I don’t produce, but which produce themselves and also have their particular life. Philemon represented a force which has been not myself.” This is the beautifully lucid explanation of the way it may feel to activate with spirit during a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe the operation of journeying to my students as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external.
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