Shamanism - The Heart and Mind

Shamans are those learned in the ability to heal themselves and their communities. Shamanism is not a culturally specific or arbitrary concept but “a specific complex of characteristics found in magico-religious practitioners of hunter-gatherer and simple pastoral and agricultural societies around the world” – from the Amazon to Africa to Siberia and East Asia. In contemporary Western scholarship, we have called shamans such names as medicine men and spirit healers and with more negative connotations, witch doctors and sorcerers.

Because of the “basic uniformity of [the] shamanic method,” it is suggested that shamans across the globe arrived at their techniques through trial and error. With a lack of modern technology, shamans were the sole healers of the tribe – they saw all disease and ailment as both physical and spiritual. The shamanic healing process is a “great mental and emotional adventure,” an adventure which will cause the patient to rethink any preconceived notions about reality. For the shaman, “caring and curing go hand and hand” – it through self-sacrifice, an offering of oneself on the deep levels of consciousness, that the shaman is able to, through an emotional bond, heal others.

Although shamanic knowledge can be passed down from generation to generation, some shamans are spontaneously initiated by answering the ‘call’. Shamans were often referred to as ‘wounded healers.’ This is to say, it was a shamans initial bout with a life threatening illness which acted as a crash course in healing. If the shaman could heal himself, he would live on with the ability to heal others. This bout with death is often exemplified in the ‘death and rebirth’ experience. Shamans report the initiatory experience of being torn apart and subsequently reassembled by the spirits, coming back to waking consciousness with new found abilities in divination, diagnosis, and prophecy.

The shaman learns from spirits in non-ordinary states of consciousness. The Conibo in the Amazon claim that they “learn from the trees,” as well as other shamans. According to the shamanic worldview, one’s “personal power is fundamental to well-being,” the maintenance of which takes firm dedication and self-discipline. Through shamanic ecstasy, trance states which are often called soul journey or soul flight, the shaman is able to regain his personal power and professional capabilities. Through soul recovery and spirit relations, “including control of animal spirits and transformation into animals,” the shaman accumulates power.

The primary shamanic illness is “soul loss [which is] characterized as injury to the core or essence of ones being. Soul loss can be felt as a loss of connection with others, belonging, and meaning in life. It is the reintegration, the assimilation, of these vital aspects of our self which provides healing. Through journeying in the spirit world, the shaman can retrieve the fragmented parts of a patient. This can involve “enactments of the shaman’s battles with terrifying spirits to rescue the patient’s soul.” The psychologist would consider such spirits as “fears and dissociated aspects of the self.”

Michael Harner, in The Way of the Shaman, differentiates between what he calls an Ordinary State of Consciousness (OSC) and the Shamanic State of Consciousness (SSC). In the SSC, much like the dream world, the appearance of mythological creatures such as dragons and wyvern is commonplace. Shamans maintain that the spirit or dream world is the real world, and what we in the West would dismiss as mere fantasy is in fact more fundamental than ordinary waking reality. The shaman treats waking reality more symbolically and the dream world, or spirit world, more literally.

The Shaman has the ability to “move between states of consciousness at will.” Various methods are employed to assist the Shaman in entering these altered states, or SCC. These include but are not limited to monotonous drumming, rattling, dancing, music, chanting and even the use of psychoactive plants and fungi such as the ayahuasca brew and psilocybin containing mushrooms. The shamans of Siberia referred to their drums as their horses, for they would carry them into these altered states – to the lower, middle, and upper worlds. Here is North America various Native American tribes have performed the ghost dance to achieve trance and ecstatic states. The shamanic soul flight, the practice of healing and divination, is often performed in “all-night ceremonies involving the entire community.” The spiritual aspect of the shaman is said to leave the body and traverse the other world.

The Khond Indians of the Indian hinterlands of Orissa use music to facilitate and alleviate various types of possession. Both the Khond shaman and priest use “musical language to interact with gods, spirits, and the souls of dead people.” The shaman uses this musical language to intercede on behalf of those in the tribe to cure various forms of possession which have manifested as illness. To the Khond, the music is seen as a ‘supernatural voice’ “because it has the power to transcend the human dimension and translate between humans and the more powerful divinities, spirits and souls who intervene in daily life.”

Like most shamanic cultures, the Khond have a deep connection with their natural environment. The gods and spirits are personifications of the natural environment, thus the shaman is responsible for maintaining the equilibrium of the natural and celestial realms. In the instance that this equilibrium breaks, because of an unhappy ancestor, evil spirit, or numerous other reasons, the shaman is forced to employ his musical language to heal the manifestations of such imbalance.

Sindhe Mahji, a Khond shaman, says he learned all of his “rhythms directly from his tutelary spirit” which had communicated with him in “dreamlike experiences and ecstatic journeys in the supernatural world.” It is this same tutelary spirit which, for the shaman, acts as a negotiator with other spirits. When the shaman is healing another person in the tribe, the deity or spirit takes possession of the shaman whose soul stays nearby to oversee the ritual – the shaman always has full control over the spirit which possesses him and can reenter his body at will.

The Khond shaman enters his or her trance state with a combination of instrumental music and vocals. The instrument of choice is the ‘winnowing fan’ which is said to have been given to the Khond by the deities – the fan serves the dual purpose of an instrument and an agricultural tool, furthering the connection the Khond attribute to the land and spirits. The Khond attribute certain music and rhythm to specific deities that on hearing their particular performance descend to Earth. The Khond and their musical language illustrate one of the numerous forms shamanism can take.

Harner gives us a Westerners experience of being initiated as a shaman among the Conibo Indians of the Upper Amazon. Harner, after arduous inquiry, was given the opportunity to drink the sacred ayahuasca brew, which the Conibo alternatively called “the little death.” After drinking the shaman-prepared brew, Harner found himself traversing the spirit world. Although he considered himself the be an atheist, Harner was positive a soul boat of half-bird people were coming to take his soul away – he was sure he was dying. He had become aware of the “compartmentalization” of his brain, a secret which was “reserved for the dying.” Harner came across a group of whale like beings with pterodactyl wings who claimed to be “the masters of all life on Earth.” Feeling refreshed the following morning, Harner relayed this dismal message to the Conibo shaman, who replied, “Oh, they’re always saying that. But they are only the masters of Outer Darkness.” Harner was amazed the “barefoot, blind shaman” knew of and could relay his exact experiences.

A few years later Harner found himself amongst the Jivaro Indians of the Ecuadorian Andes. After trading his shotgun for shamanic training, Harner found himself on a journey to a sacred waterfall with two shamans. Harner was given a “three inch thick pole of balsa wood” which was referred to by the shaman as a magical staff “more powerful than a gun… used to fight off demons.” After a treacherous expedition to the waterfall, Harner found himself shivering, fasting and sleep deprived in a dark cave under the waterfall. He was instructed to repeatedly shout “Tau, Tau’ to attract the ancestors. After some time, Harner reported, “a strange calm pervaded my consciousness… I no longer felt cold, tired, or hungry…the wall of falling water became iridescent, a torrent of millions of liquid prisms… I had the continuous sensation of floating upward…”

Next, Harner and his shaman companions traversed a nearby mountain where Harner was instructed to eat maikua, a native species of datura, a plant which is classified in the West as a deliriant. With nightfall Harner swallowed the shaman-produced tincture. He found himself once again in the spirit world facing off against a “gigantic, withering reptilian form… [whose] body shone in brilliant hues of greens, purples, and reds… and [had] a strange, sardonic smile.” Remembering what the shamans had told him, Harner charged the demon with is magical stick which caused a “splitting scream” and a subsequent silence to the jungle – the demon had vanished. Harner’s initiation would allow his shaman companions to teach him the practice of acquiring spirit helpers used to diagnose and heal others.

The shaman’s means to achieve altered states, such as exhaustive dancing, can be seen from a scientific perspective. The activation of the automatic nervous system and subsequent exhaustion of the sympathetic division leads to “collapse and a parasympathetic –dominant phase.” This facilitates a natural state of consciousness, an altered state, in which the body recuperates. Such altered states involve activation “of ancient reptilian and paleomammalian levels of the brain, stimulating these aspects of the person to incorporate preverbal processes into experience and consciousness.” Similar if not identical altered states can be achieved with simple relaxation and breathing techniques such as those practiced in meditation. Similarly, rhythmic drumming and rattling produces certain frequencies in the brain which correspond with different wave patterns, an example being the slow delta waves which accompany the dream and sleep state of consciousness. These SSC involves “systematic brain discharge patterns that produce interhemispheric synchronization and coherence, an integration of brain discharges across the neuraxis of the brain that produces a synthesis of behavior, emotion and thought.”

The idea of non-ordinary states of reality has been met with disbelief and outright hostility in the West. Harner points to the idea of “cognicentrism, the analogue in consciousness to ethnocentrism.” This prejudice transcends any notion of cultural relativity - the debate is about what is possible in our conscious experience. Those who may have been destined to be shamans are treated as mentality ill or at best weird in the West. We simply don’t have the language to deal with such ideas and experiences. The idea of cognicentrism can be illustrated in the attempt to explain the psychedelic experience to a person in the West who has never been influenced by such drugs. They dismiss such experiences as mere hallucinations and delusions. The great Terrance McKenna articulated:

Drugs is a word that has polluted the well of language. Part of the reason we have a drug problem [in the West] is because we don't have an intelligent language to talk about substances, plants, psychedelic [and] sedative states of mind, states of amphetamine excitation. We can't make sense of the problem and the opportunities offered by substances unless we clean up our language. Drugs is a word that's been used by governments to make it impossible to think creatively about the problem of substances and abuse and availability and so forth and so on. So it's a kind of a paradox isn't it? Drugs mean that which cures us and the greatest social problem of the generation.

Contemporary studies in neurochemistry have verified that “the human brain carries its own consciousness-altering drugs,” including dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the primary psychoactive ingredient in the ayahuasca brew. Ayahuasca combines a DMT containing plant with an enzyme inhibitor which facilitates DMT’s psychoactive effects when orally consumed. Ayahuasca has been used in shamanic healing and initiation rituals for thousands of years.

DMT is no rarity of nature. In fact, it has been found in the bodies of all mammals in which scientists have searched for its presence. DMT is present in an enormous number of plants from every ecosystem. DMT has been found in human urine and blood, and many speculate, based on precursors and enzymes among other reasons, that DMT has an endogenous connection with the brains pineal gland. One could soundly postulate this substance plays an intricate role in the working of nature and evolution.

The pineal gland, or third eye as it is known in various spiritual traditions, is an unpaired brain organ shaped like a pine cone. Its location is the direct center of the brain, right above the brow center. In various Eastern meditative traditions there is a chakra, a psychic center, which correlates to the physical location of the pineal gland. The third eye chakra is often equated with spiritual or intuitive vision. The spiritual significance of the pineal gland spans throughout world religious tradition, as pointed out in David Wilcock’s The 2012 Enigma documentary. As Wilcock shows us, even today people of the Hindu faith wear the pottu on their forehead indicating the pineal gland. It also interesting to note the large statue of a pine cone in the Vatican courtyard! It is well warranted to postulate the pineal gland and altered states of consciousness have played a large role in world religious and spiritual tradition.

Many speculate the pineal is allowed to excrete DMT based on the theory of resonance. Just as certain sound frequencies can shatter glass, certain “sacred words, chants, visual images and mental exercise” can generate specific fields, causing the brain to vibrate and pulse at certain frequencies. This is best illustrated in the shamanic context by the drum. The change of consciousness is illustrated by the “receiver of reality” brain model. Working with this model, Dr. Rick Strassman compares the brain to a TV receiver, which can turn to different channels of consciousness, such as those induced by DMT.

The effects of consumed DMT project the user into a profound rendering of the shamanic state of consciousness. Western television personality and psychedelic enthusiast Joe Rogan attempts to articulate such an experience:

Literally, you are transported into another dimension. I don’t mean like you feel you’re in another dimension, you’re in another dimension. There’s complex geometric patterns moving in synchronous order through the air all around you in three dimensional space. It’s like they’re arteries, but there isn’t blood pumping through them, there’s light, pulsating light with no boundaries. And there’s an alien communicating with me who looks sort of like a Tai Buddha, except he’s entirely made of energy and there’s no outline to him. He’s concentrating and telling me not to give into astonishment, relax and try and experience this.

In the 1980’s Dr. Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico received legal permission to study the effects of DMT. After inducing and recording over 60 clinical DMT sessions, Dr. Rick Strassman breaks the experiences into 3 different, yet overlapping categories. Joe Rogan’s would be considered an “invisible world” session, where users report “freestanding autonomous realities” coexisting with our own, often inhabited by aware and interactive alien beings. These aware beings are called spirits in the shamanic world system. “Personal” sessions were psychologically oriented and “yield deeper awareness and acceptance of personal issues.” Lastly are the “transpersonal” sessions, including mystical and near death experiences, which go “beyond the individual’s historical life experience.”

Author Graham Hancock hypothesizes that the discovery of psychoactive substances by human beings some 40,000 years ago would have “exploded like incendiary bombs in the dull, somnolent, utilitarian minds of the anatomically modern but behaviorally archaic humans… demolishing rigid mental structures… jumpstarting the intellectual and cultural evolution of our species”. Hancock also notes the statistical evidence that a small percentage, 1-2% of the human population, has the ability to spontaneous fall into trance and mystical states without the aid of “psychoactive plants or the physical methods of trance induction such as rhythmic dancing or drumming”. Such people were no doubt the first shamans.

The weight of such experiences would have had little influence on society, just as their medieval and more modern counterparts, fairies and alien abduction phenomenon respectively. Hancock postulates that although some humans were having such experiences for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, it wasn’t until altered states of consciousness went mainstream in the form of ingested and smoked plants that a profound shift in consciousness occurred. Similarly, the abundance of discovered shamanic cave art from Upper Paleolithic times causes many to theorize shamanism and its states of consciousnesses played a pivotal role in “cognitive and social evolution through production of analogical thought processes, visual symbolism, and group-bonding rituals that were central in managing the cognitive and social consequences of the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition.”
All cultures “have religious practices based in shamanistic healing, the use of the ASC for healing through contact with the spirit world.” In Tibet, the line between shamanism and Vajrayana Buddhism becomes very blurry. Central Asian shamanic spirit possession, much like the Khond, can be seen as analogous to “the identification of [the Buddhist] tantric meditator with a tutelary deity.” Meditation which involves the chanting of mantra or the ringing of bells takes the form of chants and drumming in the shamanic system. Tantric lamas act as the Tibetan shamans in their ability to perform rituals for “tantric blessings, long-life rituals, and the defeat of malevolent spirits.” Also, the Buddhist practitioner “like the shaman, has to undergo severe trials to attain [his] ability… and the death of the self involved in Buddhist attainment can be compared with the ritual death and rebirth involved in many forms of shamanic training.”

Both the tantric lama and the shaman “prepare for their vocations through arduous practice in solitude; are trained in developing alternate states of consciousness; must pass through an initiatory death; may have spontaneous vision of deities [spirits]; seek in invoke superhuman beings; and accomplish possession by the deity [spirit].” It is by “gaining access to the deity [spirit]“ that both the lama and shaman are able to bring “effects into the world” and “carry out their practice for the worldly benefit” of others. Although the two systems are not identical, one would have to go out if his way to not draw these parallels.

The shamans altered states, the soul flight and soul journey, “has direct homologies to modern out-of-body experiences [OBE] and astral projection, reflecting experiences of traveling to and encountering entities from the spiritual or supernatural world.” There are various tutorials in Western astral projection literature to achieve an OBE which all involve a similar process – namely allowing the body to fall into a trance state, where the body is asleep and the mind stays awake. This trance state can be spontaneously achieved after waking in the middle of the night, often in the form of sleep paralysis, and on the cusp of falling to sleep. Frequent out-of-body explorers report meetings with deceased relatives, angels, ETs, spirit guides and exploring other worlds. The similarities to the shamanic experience are unparalleled. It is apparent all of these spirits take the form of what is culturally appropriate for the shaman or out-of-body explorer to experience. OBE pioneer Robert Monroe developed a sound based interhemispheric synchronization program known as HEMISYNC, which could be seen as the contemporary Western equivalent of the shamans drum.

In the West, we are only beginning to understand and appreciate “the important impact the state of mind can have on what have previously been too often perceived as questions of a purely ‘physical’ capability.” For example, the Tibetan lama or Australian aborigine enters a SSC or trance state in emergency situations to run long distances at extreme speeds. It is a recent discovery that our greatest athletes utilize similar altered states when making their most profound achievements. Similarly, the West’s greatest thinkers are known to have come to their most profound discoveries and breakthroughs in dream and half-sleep states. The shaman, “using millennia of accumulated knowledge as well as his firsthand experience, knows when a change of consciousness is appropriate and even necessary.” In the shamanic worldview, the West’s sole identification with waking or ordinary consciousness is not only detrimental but ludicrous.

In our contemporary Western culture we are plagued with stress, anxiety and depression – just to name a few of the ailments. Recent studies suggest as much as 1 in 4 people deal with such illnesses on a daily basis. We have lost the millennia of accumulated knowledge which is still retained by various shamanic tribal societies and spiritual traditions – notably the meditative traditions. I believe incorporating altered states of consciousness into our Western paradigm could bring about a tremendous healing to our disconnected culture.

The ‘War on Drugs’ has utterly failed, focusing primarily on law enforcement, locking up harmless drug offenders, without much attention paid to proper education and treatment. In shamanic and various other spiritual contexts, the healing ability of various substances, such as ayahuasca, is quite apparent. A recent Johns Hopkins University studies suggest that psilocybin-containing mushrooms allow for “universal mystical experiences” which “prompt positive changes in behavior and attitude that last several months, at least.” The psychedelic African root, Iboga, is well noted for its ability to treat opiate addictions. In this case, the same substance which may act as a cure for highly addictive drugs is punishable under the same law! The healing and spiritual capacity of these sacred plants has for too long remained ignorant to the Western world.

There is a reason ayahuasca-tourists are flocking to the Amazon to be healed by shaman, and neo-shaman practitioners are popping up all over in the West. Our world is fragmented. As our materialistic Western way of life becomes increasingly unsustainable, we can look to indigenous cultures around the world for missing pieces. Jung believed our modern mind has taken the individual human out of the human experience. Our sense of scientific superiority has devalued individuals into mere statistics and parts of the mass political-societal machine. In this sense, the individual is dehumanized. I believe we have lost what Jung called numinosity – a relationship between other people, places, and things and the individual. Numinosity is the spiritual and emotion force which connects the individual to the world around him or her. The indigenous revered Mother Earth as just that, the mother and provider of all life on this planet. They have an emotional and spiritual attachment to what they believe is a living being, the creator spirit – Gaia. The shaman begs us to regain this connection to the world around us.

As the information age continues to progress, we are undergoing a transformation as a planet. Millennia of spiritual knowledge and ideas are available with the click of a mouse, literally at our fingertips. The left-brain and the right-brain of the world need to be reunited – the eagle and the condor. I believe it will be this symbiosis – between the heart of the indigenous, of the shaman, and the left-brain mind of the West, which will bring about a healing to our planet, ushering in a New Age on Earth.

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[I'm having trouble getting my footnotes to appear in the blog format. If interested in the 62 citations, let me know and I'll be happy to share a PDF of this]

Sources: (as they appear)
Michael Winkelman, “Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology,” Zygon 39.1 (March 2004)

Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1980)

Rebecca Basso, “Music, Possession and Shamanism Among Khond Tribes,” Culture and Religion 7.2 (July 2006)

Terrance McKenna, The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension, 1996, 10 May 2010
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Dr. Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (New York, NY: Parker Street, 2000)

David Wilcock, The 2012 Enigma, 10 March 2008, 10 May 2010
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Dr. Rick Strassman, et.al, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies (New York, NY: Parker Street, 2008)

Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan talks about DMT, 12 Sept. 2006, 10 May 2010
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Graham Hancock, Supernatural: Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind (Boston, MA: Disinformation Company, 2007)

Reginald A. Ray, “Tibetan Buddhism as Shamanism,” The Naropa Institute (1995)

“Hopkins Scientists Show Hallucinogen in Mushrooms Creates Universal “Mystical” Experience,”11 July 2006, 10 May 2010

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, (New York, NY: J.G. Ferguson, 1964)

Image: Spirit Wind by Martina Hoffman