SHAMANIC WORLDS

Shamanism is one of the oldest healing modalities known. Essentially it means to travel or work in “other realities” to affect healing change in this reality. For example, much disease is modeled as missing soul parts; the shaman travels into other dimensions to find the missing soul part and restore it. The patient recovers.

It is customary to scoff at what is often called “witch doctoring.” The typical Hollywood cliché is that of a grotesque fraud, splashing blood and chicken feathers, waving bones or a club, and chanting ugly incantations. Of course, in these stories the hero always has some penicillin to hand, the chief’s daughter recovers and the witch doctor is exposed
as a fake. Well, that’s the Hollywood version. Of course there are incompetent shamans, much as there are incompetent MDs. The focus is on the model. And it is my stated opinion that shamanic healing takes place far more often and far more successfully than in the drug-based modality. It’s been around a long, long time and that alone ought to accord it some
respect. Maybe it’s placebo effect. Who said there was anything wrong with placebo? It’s a curse if you are trying to conduct a scientific experiment to prove your drug is superior to a null treatment. But otherwise there is nothing wrong with getting well because you believe in the practitioner. Ask any successfully treated patient!

But I believe shamanic healing is more real and defensible than just a placebo effect and will share with you knowledge that I have and refer you to others. Make of it what you will…

A SHAMANIC COSMOLOGY
In the shamanic paradigm, we commonly encounter three different “worlds”, or realities. These are remarkably consistent everywhere on Earth. Each level contains within it a certain vibrational quality that holds specific wisdom and healing that is accessible to the shaman by entering a non-ordinary or altered state of consciousness.

Highest is “Upper World,” an ethereal place which may have made some people think of a heaven. Often we find teachers here, with important messages for the seeker or sick individual. Maybe it’s mythic, but I have been there, met a beautiful old man with flowing silver hair and saw my first wife running through the forest, her hair flowing free, and I was told, “All is well. She will be safe.” At the time, it meant a great deal to me.

“Middle World” is much closer to our everyday reality. It’s as if this dimension was just beyond a curtain, right here next to us. Just draw aside the curtain and there it is. In Middle World, we are closest to our own selves; a copy self; a mirror phantom, working or struggling with some issue. The reality we see is similar to our own life on Earth in present time, but there is always a subtle, detectable tone that’s different. It feels like a dream.

“Lower World” is the big one! It is situated down beneath us and probably gives rise to notions of Hell. Whereas lower world is not a Hell, it’s beautiful, it is certainly strange, shape-shifting, and at times scary. There we expect to meet unfamiliar and powerful creatures and must be on our guard not to be trapped or contaminated.

Nevertheless, lower world is where we meet our most profound mentors and have the most transformative insights. This is all put biographically, by the way, because I have explored this model and am satisfied with the truth or at least the workability of what I found. I consider it the duty of any decent self-respecting healer to look at other models and try them, even to integrate them into a modern clinical practice. I am not going to say anything here about the process of induction, except to say that I have never taken any mind altering substance and used only drumming rhythms.

I’m fairly open-minded, as you should have realized by this stage, but lest you think I’m crazy, let me introduce you to the work of US anthropologist Michael Harner. As a card-carrying academic scientist, he could be expected to hold to the view that the only reality is this one, the physical, and that any belief in other realities was merely a hallucination or a construct of primitive, superstitious minds.

But Harner’s experiences led him to a different conclusion. While studying the Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, he agreed to try taking ayahuasca, the so-called “death juice” (anyone with the guts to swallow a substance so named has my admiration). In his book, The Way of the Shaman, Harner describes vividly what happened shortly after swallowing the deadly concoction.

Lying down outside a primitive hut, gradually his physical body began to go numb and seemed to turn solid, like concrete. Breathing became difficult and speech impossible. There came the most beautiful singing he ever heard and it was associated with a ship, floating above him, manned by strange creatures with bird-like heads and human bodies (reminiscent of the Egyptian god Horus).

The ship was drawing up his life force, out of his body. Harner was absolutely convinced he was going to die and a “voice” told him as much. He would be shown secrets, the voice said, which are only revealed to the dead and dying.

A vision of Earth appeared, as it was in the remote past, an ocean, barren land, and a bright blue sky. Suddenly a host of strange creatures appeared, black, wriggling, and dragon-like. They explained to Harner, in a kind of thought language, that they had come to Earth to escape from their enemies and they lived in hiding within the multitudinous forms of life on Earth, including humans. These creatures, if that’s what they were, called themselves “Masters of Humanity and The Entire Planet.”