As an animist in the modern day, I view my world as being full of living entities, many of which are easy to experience, such as humans, plants, and animals. Others are more difficult to experience, such as inorganic beings- those beings we often call "spirits".
I believe that all beings, organic and inorganic, and all powers, whether animate or inanimate, are tied together by a sacred web of relationship and interaction. I happen to be the sort of animist who couples this animistic worldview with focused practices by which I seek to produce altered states of awareness, states that allow me to become conscious of what I call "extra-sensory reality".
I often find myself trying to balance the experiences I have in these extraordinary states of awareness with my own need to explain them- to explain how they come about, and what they truly are. I have been developing a criteria and a lexicon of sorts, that I can use to shed some light on the inner workings of "shamanic" or mystical endeavors as I have known them. I understood long ago that the experience of what we call "the mystical" cannot be captured in words at all, but this doesn't mean that a coherent explanation of the path or technology of consciousness-alteration for the purposes of shamanic insight cannot be attempted.
Before I set to work, I have to clear up one common point of contention on the part of many people who deal with esoteric aspects of the animistic path. This contention is tied into the language used to describe animistic belief systems, and the spiritual technologies that exist alongside nearly all of them, and it all comes back to the term "Shaman".
It is true that the term "Shaman" originally only referred to the tribal mystics of one particular people in Siberia. It is equally as true that today, the word "shaman" has come to be used by academicians to refer to all of the specialists in consciousness and non-ordinary cognition found among the animistic people on earth, whether historical or modern.
Tom Cowan, in his book "Shamanism as a Spiritual Practice for Everyday Life" writes regarding the shaman:
"Shaman is a Tungus word from Central Asia referring to a person who uses a state of spiritual excitement to enter the normally imperceptible realities of the spirit world to get help for himself or herself or others. But students of language disagree over the exact etymology of the word. Where does it come from? What was its original meaning? What ancient practices or rituals inspired this mysterious word shaman? Among the early root words from which shaman may have been derived are words for "knowledge" and "heat"- two ideas that capture fully the rich traditions of classic shamanism and its modern counterparts. The shaman is someone on fire with certain kinds of knowledge that come from the spirit world. In any era, the practice of shamanism puts one on the path that leads to a growing awareness of the spiritual mysteries of the universe."
Without disrespect intended to the historical Siberian peoples who gave us the term "shaman", I will use that word to refer to a person of any culture who specializes in inducing altered states of consciousness by which extra-sensory reality is accessed. Shamans usually do this on behalf of a community, and for the purposes of healing people, gaining guidance for them on some subject, and the like.
While it is true that all primal peoples have their own name for people who perform such acts, such as the Wicasa Wakan of the Sioux people, anthropologists understand Wicasa Wakans to be "shamans", pursuant to the universal meaning that the word "shaman" has achieved. Wicasa Wakans may not perform their operations of shamanic power in any manner resembling what the original historical Siberian shamans may have, but it is agreed that there are many "common denominators" to be found that cut across all cultures.
There is, for instance, a general agreement, across time and location, that there are many "worlds" both below this world and above it, in which spiritual powers dwell, and to whom the shaman or mystic can "journey" while in various states of trance. Shamans in any culture utilize sonic devices like drums, chants, rattles, and the like, for the purpose of bringing about altered states of consciousness. Nearly every culture's shamanic workers have utilized pharmacological methods for consciousness-alteration, in the form of ingesting entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants.
Beginning with the work of Dr. Michael Harner, these universal shamanic models and practices have come to be called "core shamanism", and many people have tried to use them as a sort of "language and technology" for exploring their own inner-worlds, as well as extra-sensory reality.
