Ask any passer-by on any street to explain shamanism along with the result might be blank stares. Many people are surprised to learn that shamanism isn’t a religion though the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology in the world. Much more surprising is the discovery that it is the precursor to most major world religions, like the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which continues to be practised on every inhabited continent in the world for around 40,000 a few years possibly a lot 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 world with carved and painted images drawn from shamanic experience. We not are in caves or in tiny communities whose members are proven to us. The majority of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the brain, that section of us effective at fearing the dark and requesting aid from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of an million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, even though the world may have changed, fundamentally we’ve not.

Ask exactly what a shaman is along with the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. Actually, such a shaman is and does is simply explained. Within the Siberian Tungus language which produced the phrase, ‘shaman’ means ‘the one who sees’ and identifies an individual creating a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered state of consciousness to meet and work with spirit helpers. Exactly what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, in this example of meeting spirits is the fact that there is absolutely no separation between any situation that is: no separation between me writing and you also reading these words, from a 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 dealing with sub atomic theory, regarded course it’s a predominantly physical, rather than a spiritual, oneness that such scientists want to describe. However, where many of us is only able to consider the understanding of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it over the experience with the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms right onto your pathway begins because the shaman redirects the principal cognitive process in the left cerebral hemisphere with the brain off to the right, with the corpus collosum – that is, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most traditions around the globe this ‘breakthrough’ is going to be assisted by way of percussive sound, including drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised under western culture as a means to aid alter consciousness, the truth is only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants like this. Metaphysically, the journey begins in the event the shaman’s consciousness shifts through the here and now and enters worlds visible and then her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition all over the world, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the arena of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker involving the worlds’ because they are 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 as this ‘ordinary’ reality. As well they are qualitative spaces, states for being that reflect and keep the reason for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research within the cognitive sciences shows that a person’s brain is hardwired to see the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even 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.

And in addition, one of many questions most regularly asked by students being unveiled in shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking of spirituality for a lot of generations we lack an obvious, objective idea of things like spirits. Today 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 from the idea of spirit reality both coincide, they aren’t the same but they work with me. The main Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my own, personal practice and teaching, describes spirits within all that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting an actual physical body as a way to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and for that reason provide an existential overview unavailable in my opinion, but were fundamentally the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments in the Great Spirit. We all originate from this energy, exist there and come back to it. It really is living this angle which allows a shaman to have the absence of separation between issues that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death or health and disease.

My second knowledge of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simple explained by CG Jung as part of his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his personal expertise of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the insight that there are things in the psyche that i usually do not produce, but which produce themselves and also have their unique life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” This can be a beautifully lucid explanation of how it might feel to get with spirit throughout 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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