Time as a measure of change in the multi-level model of the world of Siberian shamanism

Time is a significant category of being and consciousness, which defines different ways of experiencing self-presence in the world by a human. The content of this category is, to a great extent, determined by its emotional load. The rational pursuit to objectify the flow of time does not exclude various ways of time speeding up or slowing down depending on the states of our consciousness. The sense of time, like the sense of space, came into the world along with consciousness. This is why, according to the primal world view, time had not existed before the Creation. The creation of the world is a number of some changes made to the pre-existing order, namely, the separation of light from darkness, firm ground from water, land from sky, etc. The realization of the world being a live pulsating organism - changing and unalterable at once - provoked the early sense of time. The period of the mythological consciousness dominance clearly defined the direction of human cognitive activities. It is possible that there is some correlation between different types of cognition, their orientation in time and activity of the two brain hemispheres. Specifically, the right hemisphere of our brain is responsible for imaginary and visual cognition and is retrospectively oriented. The primal thinking was in fact pre-notional and imaginary, which determined the dominant activity of the right hemisphere and, thus, appeal to the past. The archaic sense of time can be envisaged as an oscillatory model that is some kind of swinging between life and death, day and night. In the following, there is a transition to the cycle model taking place where the present and the future are nothing but a repetition of the mythical past. Next, the cycle model develops into the spiral time model. And here, the biological and the cosmic measures of time were closely interconnected to the extent of their equitation or reproduction of the cosmic within the biological. Certain time spans had different emotional load and were associated with different degrees of sacrality. The split of the world into a sacred and a profane part led to these two spheres having not only different characteristics of space but also different flows of time. Time in the sacred sphere is much slower than it is in the human world; it tends to zero, to a minimum change or even a complete lack of such. The mythological consciousness assumes the possibility of time not only slowing down, speeding up or standing still but also of reverse flow of it. Thus, in the Shaman tradition of Siberian peoples, one can presume the presence of the idea of reverse time flow in the Lower World and of the dead coming back into life again up to the idea of reincarnation. Many studies in psychology demonstrate the fact that the mythological consciousness was not strictly linked to the Ego or the individual consciousness. This used to define many characteristics of the perception of reality. Only at a certain stage of development, a human starts to identify himself/herself with his/her psycho-somatic organism existing in space and time. Before that, the space-and-time composition of reality was vague enough, with moving boundaries and mythical characteristics. Outlining the distinctions between religion and mythology some scientists put an emphasis on distinguishing the temporal orientation of the two. Mythology draws human attention to the remote past where patterns of today's life are taken from. It was in the remote past that a human came out of eternity and a myth allows him/her to remember it. Religion makes a human look toward the future offering prospects for overcoming time and getting victory over it, thus, attaining eternity. This is why the path of humanity, possibly, is a cyclic movement from unity to multitude and from multitude to unity.

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