Hank Wesselman, P.h.D.

Shamanic Initiation,
Part 3

In our past several columns (6/06, 7/06 in the Meta Arts Archives) we have been focused upon the nature of authentic shamanic initiation, and in doing so, we have brought up something that is destined to generate controversy in neo-shamanic circles.

First and foremost among the shamanic initiate’s experiences is the direct transformative encounter with the spirit of Death.

This will be considered controversial because many who believe themselves to be “highly trained” as well as “authentic” shamanic practitioners and teachers have not had this experience.

Yet there is no way to get around this. This ego-shattering encounter occurs at the beginning of the initiate’s induction into the shaman’s world. This is the “death and resurrection” experience so well documented in the ethnographic literature about shamans—the dismemberment of the shaman’s old personality and its reformation into an entirely new form.

The encounter with the dark guardian is the invitation.

During this soul-shaking experience, the Angel of Death sees straight through our house of cards, for nothing can be hidden from this formidable being. And all is revealed in how the shamanic initiate reacts to its presence.

If the aspirant recoils in terror, perceiving the spirit as a demon, the inner doorway into what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called “the zone of magnified power” remains closed—and no amount of studying or praying or begging or bargaining is likely to reopen it.

If however, the initiate responds with awe, curiosity, and even reverence, the master of death perceives that they are ready to experience what lies beyond the gateway. And since this being also serves as the guardian of that threshold, it lies within its power to grant the initiate access.

Images of this spirit can be seen on the walls of caves and rock shelters all over the world, and once you have seen it, there is no mistaking it. For those interested, page 85 of my book Spiritwalker includes some of my drawings of it copied from rock art in Horseshoe Canyon in Utah.

Once the shaman to be has passed the first test, the next stage in their initiation then begins—a time of further tests, trials, and tribulations in which the individual is brought face to face with their fears as well as the shape of their own character.

There is light within each of us, and there is also darkness. We’re not talking here about Judeo-Christian concepts of guilt and sin. We’re talking about the more evolved and the less evolved aspects of our selves, and especially those parts of our personality that may be attracted to the negative polarity—to the dark side of the force.

Stop for a moment and consider your own dark secrets. There is no denying their existence. They are there within us all to varying degrees. The psychologist C.G. Jung referred to them as our shadow aspects, and try as we may to stash them away where no one will see them, they are there, always there...

These less than savory parts of ourselves are the ground where we are brought face to face with our lessons—the ones that we chose to resolve when we came into this life. The goal for each of us is to acknowledge them—to accept their reality and their power, and then to say to ourselves “ah—so this is what I came to work on.”

And it is then, precisely then, that the whole life game changes.

As we begin to examine the flaws in our character, we are brought into deeper understanding of our own self-nature… and it is on this path that we are led inexorably toward self-realization and ultimately liberation.

To deny our shadow aspects is always an option, of course, for the law of free will is always honored by the unseen forces that monitor our lives. But this is a poor choice in the end because the further we progress along the path of power and knowledge, the more vulnerable we become to those flaws in our own character.

Consider for a moment the state of our world as it is today. Many have observed (correctly in my opinion) that what we have on our hands is a crisis of leadership, and it is happening at every level of the world’s operating systems—political, economic, social, military, and even in our organized religious hierarchies.

This unprecedented level of crisis is being generated by the character flaws of those individuals who are allegedly serving us as leaders.

The underlying central issue for them, as well as for all of us, is the issue of initiation. If our political rulers, military leadership, corporate executives, and religious leaders had experienced authentic initiation, they would be functioning from a place of integrity, honesty, transparency and honor, rather than their opposites—deviousness, mendacity, secrecy, and dishonor.

Interestingly, from the shaman’s perspective, we as individuals “inherit” many of our character flaws directly from our mothers or fathers lineages. These are distortions or damaged soul aspects that are often transmitted from generation to generation within families across time.

We acquire these ancestral imprints the moment we are born because they came with the physical body that we currently inhabit. They are recorded in the energetic matrix of our Body Soul, and they represent some of our life lessons. As such, they ultimately serve us as aspects of our initiatory experience.

Conversely, we may also bring these negative self-aspects into this world with us as distortions from our own ancestral oversoul field—perhaps as soul wounds that were still unresolved when we made transition from previous lives.

(For a review of the Three Souls of man, see column 6/05 in the Meta Arts Archives or chapters 2-5 of my book Spirit Medicine).

As we pass through life, we become aware of these distortions within ourselves through our experiencing of them. In response, we may be amused or shocked, thrilled or appalled at something we have said or done (or thought).

But each time we are brought face to face with these unsavory twists in our own character, we are given the opportunity to choose. When we choose wisely, we step back from the darkness within ourselves and toward the light. And that is what the whole game is all about.

The foreword in my second autobiographical book Medicinemaker bears these thoughts:

When heaven is about to confer

A great office upon a man,

It first exercises his mind with suffering,

And his sinews and bones with toil:
It exposes him to poverty

And confounds all his undertakings.

Then it is seen if he is ready.

--Moshi

These words describe what took place in the second part of my own initiation—a time in which I was subjected to my own unique form of “shamanic illness.” It was during this period in which I lost just about everything except my wife and children, and that was touch and go for awhile.

And what sort of shamanic illness did I endure? It took the form of an ongoing continuum of vivid dreams and visions, extraordinary spontaneous paranormal experiences that further shattered my conceptions of what is real--direct experiences that more that once brought me to the edge of madness.

In response to them, my carefully constructed scientific paradigm of reality began to disintegrate, and in those early days, I had nothing with which to replace it. It was indeed a time of tests, trials and tribulations, and as all authentic shamans know, this comes with the territory.

Allow me to give you a sense of what happened.

Crossing the threshold

It was on a night in March of 1986, while we were living on our farm in south Kona on the island of Hawai’i, that the dreams began.

It was the dark of the moon and the night was very still. Something awakened me just before dawn. I lay quietly beside my sleeping wife, listening to the sounds of the night. I heard nothing out of the ordinary. I got up and checked the house. Our small daughter was asleep in her crib and all was in order. So what had awakened me?

I eased back into bed and turned to embrace Jill. I let my breathing follow hers and was just slipping down into dream when something alerted me once again. Suddenly, I felt the sensations! More than two years had elapsed since my last spontaneous altered state, and I grew excited as I felt the familiar feelings of power expand within me.

I had been waiting for this!

I managed to gently disengage from Jill and turn onto my back… whereupon my entire body became rigid as a stick of wood. As before, my discomfort from the paralysis was more than compensated by the sensations, which were simply marvelous.

I gasped, fighting for breath, trying to regain some degree of control over my body as the pressure seized me in its invisible fist. My conscious mind, fully awake, registered curious designs made of light on my visual field--dots and zigzags and suites of parallel lines that changed and shifted, flickering in the darkness against my closed eyelids. A rushing, buzzing noise filled my ears once again.

Abruptly, I remembered something about the Huichol Indians, who live in the Sierra Madre Mountains of central Mexico. They are well known for their shamans, and they have a name for that elusive doorway or portal into the spirit worlds—the same threshold that is attended by the dark guardian. They call it the nierika.

With that thought, I felt myself expanding and moving outward. The lines of light shimmered, becoming serpentine patterns that shifted to become more angular and chevron-like. As my astonished gaze took all this in, my heart was beating furiously and a curious arc of light appeared, looking somewhat like the new moon.

An irregular grid of intersecting lines seemed to take form like a web that coalesced around the arc, stretching into an unimaginable distance. Although I didn’t know it then, I was observing the web of time, the energetic matrix known to the kahuna mystics of Polynesia as the aka field.

I approached the shimmering arc along one of these lines at considerable speed, and when impact seemed imminent, it suddenly disappeared. The buzzing in my ears stopped as well. There was a brief period of total, absolute silence, and the pressure that had enfolded me lessened.

It was as though I had momentarily blacked out… and when my conscious awareness switched on again, I heard a sound, a strange click, followed by another. Startled, I opened my eyes—and discovered I was there…

…When this “dream” ended at dawn, the transition was abrupt, like changing channels on a television. My eyes blinked rapidly as the rush of sensation diminished in slowly fading surges. The exquisite paralysis retreated from my body and finally disappeared.

I lay still for some time, reviewing the imagery, impressions, and feelings of the dream. I ran it through quickly, in segments. Unlike my ordinary dreams, I could recall it all and in great detail. It was though I had been there, and I mean really there.

It was then that realization dawned… that this had not been a dream at all. As I understood what this meant, I began to panic, for in this spontaneous altered state, I had found myself in someone else’s body looking out through his eyes at a world I had never seen before.

This episode is described in detail in my book Spiritwalker, so there is no need to repeat it here. Suffice to say that this was the first of an ongoing continuum of spontaneous shamanic experiences in which my conscious mind was brought into connection with that of another man who lives in a different slice of time.

To be more precise, he lives approximately 5000 years after the collapse of what we call Western Civilization. He thinks of our time as the Great Age--a period in the “mythic” past as remote from him as the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia is from ourselves.

Now the question arises—why would this experience be considered as a form of shamanic illness? This answer lies in understanding that this first episode, as well as those that followed, threw me into a psychological crisis. If I had not had some knowledge of who the shaman is and what they are able to do, I might very well have turned myself over to the psychiatrists.

In my mind’s eye, I could see the hand hovering above the prescription pad… I could see the word “schizophrenic” appearing in neon… and if I had chosen this route, I’m sure in retrospect that none of the rest would have happened.

As I reviewed this first episode again and again, I wondered if it could have been a lucid dream—that dramatic state in which the dreamer knows that he or she is dreaming and can act in and, to some extent, direct the flow of the dream. In the end, I had to conclude that it was not a dream at all. But if not, what was it?

During the episode, I had felt as though I was inside this man’s body, seeing through his eyes, hearing what he was hearing. I had “listened” to his thoughts and felt his feelings. I had even managed to probe his memories—and they were not my memories.

I had learned a lot about him and his world through his memories. I had seen his world visually through his eyes and cognitively through his perceptions, judgments, interpretations and opinions.

His thoughts and feelings had had an alien quality, a foreignness that was very distracting at first, but I came to understand with repeated experience that it was due to the profoundly different cognitive shape of his mind, determined largely by his experiences since birth in his own slice of reality, within his own culture in time.

I concluded that I was eavesdropping into another man’s mind, a mind quite different from my own. And at the same time, I felt an odd sense of familiarity, as though I knew him very well. While I was merged with this man, it was as though I was him. Yet while the two of us existed simultaneously within one physical body, his personality remained distinctly separate from mine, and he had seemed completely unaware of my presence within him.

In short, I had had a look at the future—a profoundly different future from the Star Trek (or Star Wars) scenario that many today assume is on the way.

So how does one write about such information without sounding like a candidate for certification in a mental institution. My book Spiritwalker offers the account of what happened by describing what was seen as well as how I perceived it.

As I wrote and rewrote what I had experienced in this first episode, I often wondered if my creative imagination was involved, filling in details, making the account more interesting. In the end, I came to understand that it was involved to some degree for I had to create a framework in which to tell this extraordinary story. Yet there is no fiction here. Everything that happened is reported accurately, and all that occurred was experienced as real.

No sooner had I completed my handwritten notes about that first extraordinary encounter, when I had another, and then another after that, and always, I connected with the mind of this same man. This was part of my initiation into the shaman’s world—a world about which we will continue to share more in columns to come.

Until that time, allow me to draw on the spirit of my great Hawaiian friend, the Kahuna Nui Hale Kealohalani Makua, and leave you all in the Light and the Love of the Ancestors, the Source of Life, rejoicing in the Power and the Peace, braided with the cords of Patience, revealing the tapestry of the most powerful force in the Universe—your Aloha.

With warm thoughts—Dr Hank