S HAMANISM arguably denotes a set of practices (e.g. auditory driving, ingesting plant hallucinogens) that purportedly enable its practitioners to produce alterations in consciousness for the purpose of obtaining information intended to benefit the members of their community (Krippner, 2000, 2002; Walsh, 1995, 2007). Ostensible altered states of consciousness (ASCs) produced in a shamanic context are typically referred to as ‘shamanic states of consciousness’ (Harner, 1990), and often involve so-called ‘soul-flight’ (i.e. ‘shamanic journeying’: Krippner, 2002). However, in a series of recent papers (e.g. Rock & Krippner, 2007a, 2007b) we have argued that the concept of ‘shamanic states of consciousness’ is underpinned by falla- cious reasoning and advocated the use of the term ‘shamanic patterns of phenomenal properties’ instead. A key element of shamanic patterns of phenomenal proper- ties is ‘enhanced visual mental imagery’ referred to as shamanic journeying imagery (Houran, Lange & Crist-Houran, 1997; Noll, 1985, p.45; Peters, 1990). This variant of visual mental imagery is, characteristically, consistent with the shaman’s cultural cosmology (Krippner, 1990; Walsh, 1993, 1995, 2007), which tends to be of a universe with a tripartite structure (i.e. ‘upper world,’ ‘middle or terrestrial world,’ and ‘lower world’: Ellwood, 1987). Walsh (1990b, p.89) has argued that ‘[a]s metaphysicians, shamans tend to be realists,’ in the sense that the content of journeying imagery is conceptualized as real, objective, and independent of the percipient’s mind- body state(s) (i.e. ‘the entire set of mental and physiological aspects of a person’s moment-to-moment experience’: Combs & Krippner, 2003, p.50). Indeed, Peters and Price-Williams (1980, p.405) asserted that ‘[w]hereas Western psychiatry explains the visions as symbolic of internal processes, the shaman sees them as objective events.’ Furthermore, in a survey of the ethno- graphic literature, Noll (1985) stated that during a North American Indian vision quest, ‘a vision was taken to be a real percep- tion: an encounter with an order of reality independent of the perceiver’ (p.446). Simi- larly, Harner (1987) suggested that the shaman’s cosmos is not a mental projection, Transpersonal Psychology Review, Volume 12, No. 2, 2008 23 © The British Psychological Society ● ISSN 1366–6991 Is a realist interpretation of Shamanic ‘non-physical’ worlds logically incoherent? Adam J. Rock & Stanley Krippner Previous research concerning the relationship between the shaman’s conscious experiences and the ‘spirit world’ suggests that shamans are realists in the sense that they conceptualize their multi-layered universe (e.g., upper, middle and lower world) as real, objective and independent of the perceiver. However, these studies have neglected to analyze the logical coherence of a realist interpretation of these shamanic ‘non- physical’ worlds (NPWs). We address this lacuna first by determining which variant of realism is most consistent with the shaman’s purported views concerning the ontological status of the aforementioned NPWs. Subsequently, we consider shamanic journeying imagery with regards to the key definitional elements of the term ‘mental image.’ Finally, we formulate three premises pertaining to shamanic journeying imagery and NPWs with the aim of assessing the logical coherence of the shaman’s realist ontology. We conclude that if shamanic journeying images constitute mental images, then this does not necessarily preclude shamanic NPWs from existing independently of the percipient’s mindbody state(s).