How a Shaman Moves Between Ordinary and Non-ordinary Reality at Will, and Why That's the Opposite of Losing Your Grip on the World
Our perception of reality is determined by the state of consciousness we're in when we perceive it. Right now, reading this in your physical body, you're in what I call Flesh Reality (sometimes called ordinary reality), the world we move through in normal waking consciousness. Here, the laws of physics hold: drop your keys and they fall. Your spirit body can fly, but your physical body cannot.
There is another aspect of reality that is not bound by those constraints. Call it the Dreamtime, the Spirit World, or non-ordinary reality. There, we can fly, breathe underwater, move in ways the physical world doesn't allow. It is every bit as real as ordinary reality, simply a non-physical level of experience. And when you travel there in awareness, your physical body stays exactly where it is, the way it does when you lie down and dream.
Journeying Is Not Dreaming, and It Is Not Psychosis
Most of us have had the dream of flying, soaring over the land or carried on the back of a bird, and then we wake. Traveling in the Spirit World is like that, with one crucial difference: in a shamanic journey, we enter with clear intention and keep voluntary control of our actions, rather than slipping in by accident through sleep.
There are many ways to reach non-ordinary reality, and not all of them are healthy or sustainable. Intuition and dreams are gentle doorways. But hallucination and psychosis are doorways too, and they are very different. When someone who hasn't received the mental-health care they need is overwhelmed, perceiving things they can't manage and unable to function in daily life, that is not shamanism. That is psychosis: a person who has gone too far into the Spirit World and cannot find the way back, unable to close the door between the worlds.
This is the heart of the distinction. A shaman knows how to enter the Spirit World at will, and to return at will. The point is never to escape ordinary life, it's to enrich it. The experiences we have in the Spirit World are meant to complement and strengthen our day-to-day life in the physical world. That is what makes it empowering rather than destabilizing.
The Middle Road: Staying Grounded Between the Worlds
If we want to be genuinely effective, both in helping others and in caring for ourselves, we have to maintain the balance between flesh and spirit. Our well-being depends on staying grounded in daily life even as we open to the spiritual awareness available to us. We don't go to extremes. We take the middle road: opening, safely, while keeping both feet on the earth.
That balance is a skill, not an accident. It is the ability to shift between states of consciousness deliberately — to open the door, do the work, and close it again — and it is exactly what we train in Shamanic Spirit Medicine.
Why We Don't Rely on Substances
To be truly free — in command of our own dreaming — we cannot become dependent on ingesting substances to move between the worlds. We begin by learning to journey with the drum. And as we develop, many of us find we no longer even need the drum: we can drop in at will by entering that place of sacred silence within, relaxing and down-cycling our brainwaves into the Theta state, where the doorway between the worlds opens on its own.
This is how we expand our perception of reality in a way that is safe, sustainable, and entirely our own — grounded, drug-free, and under our own conscious control. I've written more about the brainwave states of shamanic journeying and how the drum guides us into Theta. And because we perceive the world through the agreements we carry, learning to move consciously between the worlds is also how we learn to command our own dreaming. -->
If you'd like to learn to journey this way — safely, at will, and without substances — that is exactly what we teach, beginning in Level 1.
— Scott Silverston