A shamanic journey is the practice of deliberately shifting consciousness beyond the realm of physical perception – in order to acquire knowledge, insight, or healing unavailable through the ordinary senses. It is one of the oldest and most widespread spiritual practices in human history, present independently on every continent and in every era. What differs between its forms across cultures is the ceremonial setting. What connects them – and constitutes its core – is the assumption of the non-local nature of consciousness: that the human mind is capable of transcending the boundaries of body and time.

This assumption, treated for millennia as the secret knowledge of shamans, was confirmed in laboratory conditions in the second half of the 20th century. And it is precisely this confirmation that opens the door to understanding what the modern shamanic journey is – and why Remote Viewing is its most rigorously documented form.

What Is a Shamanic Journey – Form or Mechanism?

When we think of a shamanic journey, we imagine a ritual fire, a drum, the smoke of herbs, a shaman in ceremonial attire. But this is merely the packaging – a cultural layer that changed depending on place and era.

The essence of a shamanic journey was never the drum. It was the state of mind.

Specifically: a state in which a person’s consciousness stops being confined to what is currently arriving through the physical senses, and gains access to information from beyond the reach of sight, hearing, and touch. Siberian shamans, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, African healers – all of them, operating through entirely different rituals, arrived at the same thing: a state of expanded perception in which it becomes possible to perceive what cannot be perceived in ordinary consciousness.

The drum, the dance, the herbs, fasting, sensory isolation – these were induction techniques. Ways of reaching that state. They were not the state itself.

So the question actually worth asking is: what is this state and how can it be reached today, without ceremony?

Why Is Every Experience Real?

Before answering that question, it is worth pausing at an assumption that lies at the foundation of the entire shamanic epistemology – and which is often overlooked in popular descriptions of this tradition.

Shamanism operates on a principle that sounds radically modern: every human experience is real. Without exception.

A dream, a vision, an intuitive insight, an inner experience – these are not events “less real” than physical ones. They happen. They leave a trace in consciousness, influence decisions, change the direction of life. From a shamanic perspective: if you genuinely experienced something, it is real – regardless of the channel through which it reached you.

This is a fundamental difference from most contemporary paradigms, which hierarchize experiences into “objective” (physical, measurable) and “subjective” (mental, emotional, spiritual), assigning the former a higher epistemic status. Shamanism does not recognize this hierarchy. And, interestingly, modern quantum physics is beginning to formulate similar intuitions, investigating the phenomenon of non-locality – the fact that particles can remain correlated regardless of distance, and the observer influences the observed system.

What Is the Hidden Technical Structure of Every Shamanic Journey?

Let’s return to the question of mechanism.

A shaman set out on a journey with a specific goal: to obtain an answer to a question, to perform a healing, to find a missing person, to predict the outcome of a decision for the community. For this they used several layers of preparation:

• Induction of the state – drum, herbs, dance, isolation, fasting. All of it had one purpose: to silence the analytical activity of the mind and allow entry into a state where non-local perception becomes accessible.
• Intention – the shaman did not enter a trance without a purpose. The journey had a specific task to accomplish.
• Navigation – the ability to move through the space of the vision: choosing a direction, asking questions, distinguishing between levels, interacting with the forces encountered.
• Interpretation – the most difficult element. Insight often arrived as symbols, metaphors, images that had to be read. A shaman without this skill was useless even after the deepest trance.

Notice what connects these four elements: all of them concern the relationship between the mind and information, not between a person and props.

The drum did not send the shaman into space. His own mind sent him there, once the drum helped him enter the right state. The herbs did not bring answers. His expanded field of perception brought them, once the herbs removed cognitive barriers. This distinction is key to understanding everything that follows.

What Is Non-Local Consciousness – and Why This Isn’t Metaphysics?

To be honest in this argument, it’s necessary to name directly what both traditions – shamanic and modern research – describe when explaining the mechanism of these phenomena.

It is the non-locality of consciousness.

In quantum physics, the term “non-locality” describes a phenomenon in which particles – once having interacted – remain correlated with each other regardless of distance. A change in the state of one immediately affects the other, even if billions of kilometers separate them. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance” and treated it as absurd. Today non-locality is one of the most experimentally confirmed facts in modern physics – confirmed notably by Aspect’s famous experiment in 1982.

Shamans did not use this language. But they described exactly the same reality, speaking of an energy-information field connecting everything – Mother Earth and Father Cosmos – as one unbreakable whole.

A human being, in this understanding, is not an isolated island of consciousness enclosed in a skull. It is a node in a network that extends beyond the boundaries of body, space, and time. A shamanic journey is simply the conscious use of this connection – moving attention through that network toward specific information.

How U.S. Military Intelligence Independently Discovered the Shamanic Journey Mechanism

In the 1970s, the CIA and Pentagon faced a strategic problem: Soviet intelligence services were funding large-scale research into psychotronic capabilities – the human ability to acquire information through extrasensory channels. The United States, fearing a strategic gap, launched its own research program at Stanford Research Institute.

This became the program that passed through several code names – SCANATE, GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME – and ultimately became known as STARGATE. It ran continuously for over 20 years, consumed more than $20 million, and its results were partially declassified in 1995.

The program had one specific goal: to determine whether the human mind is capable of receiving information about places, people, and events distant in time and space – without any physical communication channels.

The results were unambiguous: yes.

Moreover, the researchers – Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff – discovered something that sounds familiar from a shamanic perspective: time and space do not constitute a barrier to this form of perception. People trained in the Remote Viewing protocol described locations thousands of kilometers away with similar accuracy to those just a few kilometers away. They perceived present events and events from the past or future with similar effectiveness. The Targ and Puthoff research was published in the prestigious journal Nature in 1974 – one of the rare cases where this type of result reached mainstream scientific literature.

Military intelligence had discovered the non-locality of consciousness, not even knowing that shamans had known about it for thousands of years.

Why Remote Viewing Is a Modern Form of the Shamanic Journey – and Why This Comparison Isn’t a Stretch

Before making this argument strongly, it’s worth making it honestly.

Remote Viewing and the traditional shamanic journey are not the same thing. They have different forms, different descriptive languages, different cultural purposes, and different contexts of practice. Anyone claiming they are identical is simplifying reality to the point of uselessness.

But something connects them at a level deeper than form.

The traditional shamanic journey and Remote Viewing are two independently discovered methods of accessing the same ability: moving consciousness beyond the boundaries of body and time to acquire information unavailable through physical senses.

Both require the same fundamental preparation – silencing the analytical activity of the mind, clear intention, and the ability to distinguish between objectively received information and projections of one’s own imagination.

This last point is, in both traditions, the most difficult and most important. Shamans called it the ability to “see clearly” – to perceive what is actually there, not what is expected or desired. Remote Viewing calls it the elimination of “analytical overlay” – projections of one’s own knowledge and imagination that interfere with the clean signal of perception.

The difference between these two traditions is essentially a difference of language and setting – not of mechanism. Shamanism operates in spiritual language: spirits, forces, worlds. This is a language adapted to the specific cultures and eras in which it arose. Remote Viewing operates in the language of protocol and verification: identifier, session, data, signal. This is a language adapted to the scientific and intelligence requirements of the 20th century.

But when we ask what the practitioner in both cases is actually doing at the level of their own mind – the answer is the same: quieting the analytical filters and moving attention into an information space inaccessible through physical senses.

What Remote Viewing Adds That Traditional Shamanism Couldn’t

This is an important question, because an honest comparison requires seeing not only similarities but also real added value – in both directions.

Remote Viewing adds two things that traditional shamanism by its nature could not provide.

The first is verifiability. In traditional shamanism, assessment of a journey rested on the shaman’s authority, conformity with tradition, and the practitioner’s subjective feeling. Remote Viewing was designed from the outset with objective verification in mind: the perceiver doesn’t know what they’re looking for (blind test conditions), and the session results are evaluated by independent people who compare the description with reality. This is a profound difference – the ability to check whether anything actually works, without appealing to the authority of tradition.

The second is accessibility without cultural rootedness. Traditional shamanism, even when sincere and profound, is rooted in a specific symbolic system – the cosmology, mythology, and relationships with specific spirits and forces of a given culture. Someone from outside that culture, attempting to practice, operates in a borrowed language they may not believe deeply. Remote Viewing requires no cultural beliefs. It requires only the willingness to work with one’s own mind.

On the other hand, the shamanic tradition contributes something that Remote Viewing in its pure, protocol-based form often doesn’t encompass: the depth of understanding of the multidimensional nature of the reality we navigate. Shamanism is not just a technique – it is also a map of that space. And this map, enriched with the precision of Remote Viewing, gives a more complete picture than either approach alone.

Why the Shamanic Connection to Earth and Cosmos Doesn’t Require a Forest

There is one more element worth developing – one that the shamanic tradition understood more deeply than is usually assumed.

In shamanism, the human connection to Mother Earth and Father Cosmos is not a metaphor. It is a description of the structure of reality: a human being is a node in an energy-information field that encompasses all of Earth and all of the Cosmos. This connection is constant – it does not switch on when you enter a forest and off when you return to the city.

Many of us today live under conditions that from a traditional shamanic perspective would seem deeply unfavorable: large cities, work filling most of the day, rare contact with nature in its wild form. But this does not mean we are cut off from the field of which we are part.

We are cut off from the awareness of that connection. And that is the real problem – not the absence of ceremonial space, but the absence of the ability to use a connection that exists regardless of where we stand.

This is precisely what a practice combining the shamanic understanding of this connection with the protocolar precision of Remote Viewing offers: the ability to use that field consciously, verifiably, and from anywhere on Earth.

What Experience with People Shows

After years of working with people developing extrasensory perception, one pattern emerges that ancient shamanic cultures understood intuitively: the greatest barrier to non-local perception is not a lack of talent or appropriate conditions. It is the overactivity of the analytical mind.

The analytical mind is brilliant at what it does: it filters, categorizes, creates explanations. But the moment we attempt to receive information that hasn’t yet passed through the filters of known categories – that same mind becomes an obstacle. It fills the gap with what we expect, instead of allowing reception of what is actually there.

Shamanic induction techniques – drum, trance, plants – worked precisely because they effectively bypassed this filter. Remote Viewing solves the same problem through protocol: a session structure designed so that the analytical mind has limited ability to interfere with clean reception.

The result in both cases is the same: a person gains access to information that could not have reached them through any known physical channel – and can verify this by comparing the description with reality.

The beauty of this synthesis lies not in analogy. It lies in something deeper: the ancient knowledge of shamans and modern discoveries about the nature of consciousness are not merely similar to each other. They describe the same reality – they differ only in the language in which they do so.

Can Anyone Take a Modern Shamanic Journey?

Yes – with one qualification that applied equally to traditional shamanism.

Almost anyone can enter the state of expanded perception. It is an innate ability, not reserved for the few. The Stargate program research confirmed that with the right protocol, the effectiveness of extrasensory perception does not depend decisively on initial predispositions.

But simply entering the state is not enough – just as simply entering a forest doesn’t make one a shaman.

Two skills are needed: moving within the state of expanded perception (knowing how to direct attention, formulate intention, and explore the information space without getting lost in one’s own imaginings), and reading and interpretation (the ability to distinguish between what was received objectively and what the analytical mind produced). Without these two pillars, the practice remains a beautiful experience without practical value – exactly as a shamanic journey practiced without the years of preparation that tradition always required.

Sources and Literature

• Russell Targ, Hal Puthoff – Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding, Nature, 1974
• CIA – declassified STARGATE program documents: cia.gov/readingroom
• Dean Radin – The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena
• Mircea Eliade – Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy – academic comparative study of shamanism identifying trance as the common core of all traditions
• Alain Aspect, Jean Dalibard, Gérard Roger – experimental confirmation of quantum non-locality (1982), Physical Review Letters

FAQ

Is Remote Viewing really a form of shamanic journey? This is not a claim of formal identity, but of shared mechanism. Both practices rest on the same ability: non-local perception, in which human consciousness gains access to information beyond the boundaries of physical senses. They differ in language, setting, and verification methodology. What connects them is what matters most: the actual operation the mind performs – and the fields of reality in which it moves.

How does a shamanic journey differ from meditation? Meditation is typically a state of mental calming and observation of one’s own inner processes – directed inward. A shamanic journey is active and directed outward: it involves deliberately moving consciousness toward a specific external goal with the intention of gathering objective information. Remote Viewing is the precise, protocolar realization of this second approach.

Is Remote Viewing the same as clairvoyance? No. Clairvoyance is an informal ability, difficult to verify, operating mainly under conditions of strong emotional motivation. Remote Viewing is a standardized protocol designed to eliminate subjective factors and enable objective verification of results. It can be learned independently of one’s initial intuitive abilities.

Do I need spiritual beliefs to practice Remote Viewing? No. The Stargate program was run by military analysts interested solely in intelligence effectiveness. Remote Viewing works regardless of worldview. Understanding the practice through a shamanic lens – as using the connection to the field of Earth and Cosmos – is a layer of meaning that gives it deeper significance, but it is not a prerequisite for it to work.

How do I start developing this practice? The key is systematic training with a protocol that provides a structure eliminating the influence of the analytical mind, the ability to verify results, and gradual development of the skill of distinguishing clean perception from projection. Attempting this independently without such structure rarely yields verifiable results – and this is consistent with what the shamanic tradition always said about the necessity of preparation before any journey.

Jakub Qba Niegowski – Extrasensory Awareness Development Specialist