Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism and also the result might be blank stares. Everybody is surprised to learn that shamanism is very little religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on this planet. Even more surprising is the discovery that it is the precursor to most major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, which has become practised on every inhabited continent on this planet not less than 40,000 a number of possibly quite definitely 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 all over the world with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We no longer reside in caves or perhaps small communities whose members are 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 seeking help from things unseen, hasn’t changed in almost one fourth of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, although world may have changed, fundamentally we have not.

Ask what a shaman is as well as the question may evoke several words about Native American ‘medicine men’ and the word ‘witchdoctor’. The truth is, that of a shaman is and does is merely explained. From the Siberian Tungus language which produced the saying, ‘shaman’ means ‘the person who sees’ and is the term for somebody able to make a ‘journey’ to alternate realities during an altered state of consciousness to meet up with and use spirit helpers. Just what the shaman ‘sees’, what she realises, during this connection with meeting spirits is that there isn’t any separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, between a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality along with 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 working together with sub atomic theory, regarded course this is a predominantly physical, rather than spiritual, oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where the majority of us could only take into account the notion of ‘oneness’, shaman’s actually live it through the example of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, in physiological terms your journey begins because the shaman redirects the primary cognitive process from your left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the correct, through the corpus collosum – that is certainly, through the structuring, organising hemisphere, to the visualising, sensing one. From the overwhelming most traditions worldwide this ‘breakthrough’ will probably be assisted using percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens, including ayahuasca, are widely advertised in the western world as a technique to help you alter consciousness, in fact only about 10% of traditional shamans use plants in this way. Metaphysically, your way begins once the shaman’s consciousness shifts from your here and now and enters worlds visible just to her. These worlds, which vary with each and every culture and tradition worldwide, are called ‘alternate reality’, ‘the realm of the spirits’, or ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘the walker relating to the worlds’ as they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Although often considered primitive or viewed as a ‘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 could be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly as this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they’re qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and secure the basis for the shaman’s journey – to request help, healing or information through the spirits. Contemporary research from the cognitive sciences implies that the human being mental abilities are hardwired to view the ‘unseen’ along with 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, among the questions most regularly asked by students being brought to shamanism is, “What are spirits?”. Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided contemplating spirituality for most generations we lack a definite, objective understanding of specific things like spirits. Nowadays it’s actually a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; this list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings in the thought of spirit and though the two coincide, they are not precisely the same but they work for me. The Core Shamanic, or Western, tradition which underpins my very own practice and teaching, describes spirits in everything exists. I’m a spirit currently inhabiting an actual body as a way to have a very human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are dis-embodied and so offer an existential overview unavailable to me, but we have been basically the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments from the Great Spirit. All of us come from this energy, exist inside and go back to it. It is actually living this attitude which allows a shaman to see the possible lack of separation between stuff that ordinary-reality considers very separate indeed, like life and death or health insurance disease.

My second idea of spirit is a lot more psychological and archetypal and it was plain and simply explained by CG Jung in his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’. Describing his knowledge of spirit helpers Jung wrote, “Philemon… brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things from the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their very own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” It is a beautifully lucid explanation of the way it might feel to activate with spirit throughout 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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