Hank Wesselman, P.h.D.

Shamanic Time Traveling

Our previous several columns (6/06-9/06) have been focused upon the events that accompany authentic shamanic initiation and include accounts of the beginnings of my own initiatory experiences, revealing part of the story of how I was drawn onto the shaman’s path.

Last month, I presented an abridged version of what happened to me during my “shamanic illness”—an ego-shattering series of visionary connections with the mind and soul of a man who may be one of my descendants. This is an individual of Hawaiian ancestry named Nainoa who lives somewhere on the western coast of North America in a slice of time almost 5000 years in the future.

Now—I’ve mentioned more than once that I’m a mainstream scientist who functions at the highest levels of international research in my chosen field of investigation—paleoanthropology, so this is an unorthodox claim for someone like me to make, to say the least. In fact, most of my esteemed scientific colleagues would go to great lengths not to reveal such heresy about themselves (their perspective) were they lucky enough to have such experiences (my perspective.)

And yet as I say this, I must admit that in the beginning, these experiences often brought me to the edge of genuine crisis. More than once I seriously considered that I might be losing my grasp on what we call reality—that I might be skirting the awesome dark abyss of “insanity” or mental illness.

And… as my disciplined inner scientist drew me back from that gaping chasm, I perceived that something quite extraordinary was actually going on.

You see… if I’ve got this right, and I believe I do, I’ve been given a look at the future. But why? …and why me? And how is such a phenomenon even possible?

Over the years, I have learned that the question why is always, of necessity, elusive, yet in my ‘anthropological’ search for meaning, I found something interesting.

In many spiritual traditions, it is said with considerable authority that the future belongs to the spirits and only they can reveal it to the shaman or the prophet, and then only under extraordinary circumstances.

And what might those circumstances be, you might ask? This is part of what is explored in depth in my Spiritwalker trilogy… but allow me to share something with you here.

Many who have read my books have asked me a singular question across the years: “If you have seen the future, does that mean that that future is cast in stone and that nothing can be done about it?”

I usually respond by observing that in my humble opinion, there are limitless numbers of potential futures available to us and that all may become “the one we will experience” based upon the decisions that each/all of us are making in the here/now.

But I also add that if what I have seen is real, and I fully believe that it is, it represents the future that we are walking straight into if we continue to do “business as usual”—a future in which everything we take so much for granted, from supermarkets to Starbucks to SUVs is totally and inexorably gone.

At the same time… I usually say that there is something else that I have been given to know with great certainty: When the Gods reveal the future to the shaman or the prophet, they do so for one reason only--so that that future can be changed.

This leads me to inquire (once again) how many of my readers have seen Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth? And how many have read my Spiritwalker Trilogy? If you haven’t (in both cases) you should because your understanding of what is coming up in the next decade will be enhanced… enormously.

This is because we are coming to the end of our current cycle, and quickly. Our transition into the next cycle, as well as our survival as a culture, will be determined by how well we, as individuals, are informed. We will discuss the end of the cycle and what this may mean in more detail next month.

But to back track a bit, the question of how such a phenomenon as time travel is even possible is one to which I have given a great deal of thought.

The expanded view of the Hawaiian kahunas offers important clues, especially as regards how the self and reality are put together and how they interface—issues we have explored in previous columns.

If we briefly revisit this perspective here, the Polynesians understand that each of us is composed of three souls or self-aspects associated with a physical body that, in turn is enlivened by an energy body that carries our life force.

The understanding of this is one of the keys to the great mystery of existence. If we were to summarize and simplify this view, the physical body exists on the physical objective level of everyday existence—a level of action on which everything is separate from everything else, everything has a beginning and an ending (because on this level time is linear), and on which every effect has a cause. We could call this physical world Level One.

Level Two is the subjective level of thought, emotion and feeling, as well as the level of energy and all psychic experience. Each of us possesses an energy body on Level Two—the energetic field that surrounds and interpenetrates the physical body and contains all of our ancestral imprints from our mother’s and father’s lineages.

This energetic matrix also carries our spiritual oversoul seed that took up residence within us with our first breath. It carries as well our Body Soul which holds all the evolutionary software that determines our humanness and which was inherited from Mom and Dad and our lineages of ancestors long before them.

The Body Soul is where our memories are stored; it is the source of all our emotions and feelings, as well as all habitual and genetically programmed behavior; and it is responsible for the operation as well as the repair and restoration of the physical body, and much more.

The energy body also carries our Mental Soul, the egoic ‘self’ we develop in each lifetime in response to our life experiences on the physical plane of Level One. The Mental Soul is the aspect of ourselves that thinks, analyzes, discerns, integrates, and makes decisions. It represents the totality of our intellect, our inner chief or CEO, and as such, it is the source of our intentionality, our volition and our creativity.

This reveals that our three souls form a cluster on the subjective Level Two, and this cluster expresses specific functions that collectively determine and create what we think of as our Self.

On Level Two, everything is connected to everything else, there are no beginnings and endings only cycles and transitions, and all time is now. This last assumption implies that everything that happened in the ‘past’, everything that is going on in the present, and everything that will happen in the ‘future,’ is all going on at once, in some sort of vast cosmic ‘now.’

Because Second Level is the level of energy, it is also the level of the Aka Field, the Web of Time, the vast energetic matrix or net through which everything is connected to everything else, everywhere and everywhen… that curious grid-like filamentous-like field that mystics and shamans see in visions and that is found in rock art and cave art all over the world.

The next level—the Third Level of Reality--is the level of the spirit world or the dreamtime—the level of the archetypes in which the shaman journeys to connect with the spirits, and through them, with the vast power that the spirits possess and can convey to us upon request.

The Third Level is where we may find the classic three layered world system composed of the shamanic Lower Worlds (the dreaming of Nature), the Middle Worlds (the dreaming of humans and the Bardo realms of the dead), and the Upper Worlds (the dreaming of the gods, goddesses, ascended masters, and the compassionate angelic forces, including those spirits who are beyond planetary and solar development.)

In the Spirit World of Level Three, everything is symbolic, everything is part of a pattern and exists in relationship to everything else (through which meaning is determined), and everything means what you think it means, implying that each of us is literally a god in training, acquiring the necessary skills and abilities to become one through learning our life lessons here on the physical plane.

The oversoul, our immortal source-self or god-self that grows, increases and becomes more as it travels across time, lives in the spirit worlds on Level Three. To be specific, it resides in a particular dimension of the Upper Worlds, in those archetypal realms that are called Heaven in Judeo-Christianity and Paradise in the Islamic tradition.

Now, there are actually twelve different levels of reality, awareness, and experience in the kahuna perspective, but the outline offered here of the first three levels presents us with a format in which to understand how real time travel is accomplished.

At life’s end, when the physical body dies, the oversoul seed within us, now part of the soul cluster that includes our Mental Soul and our Body Soul, detaches when we release our last breath, ultimately returning to remerge with its Oversoul source in the Upper Worlds. In response, our immortal soul grows, increases and becomes more in response to the ‘gifts’ of everything we have done and become during the life just lived, all of which are incorporated into it.

In this way, our immortal overself serves as our personal museum, in which everything we have done and experienced in countless past lives is recorded. It is also the source self that enlivens our future lives as well, and since it lives outside of time, it serves as the Grand Central Station between us and our past lives as well as our future lives, linked through the energetic Aka Field on Level Two.

It is through this linked pattern of relationships across time that time travel is accomplished.

Now--it took me years to figure all this out because being a scientist, I’m a trained skeptic by nature and thus a slow learner (or maybe I should say a slow accepter). But once I understood the totality of it, I was literally mind-blown.

You will recall my experience of paralysis and my perception of a vast grid or web of light and the onset of my spontaneous shamanic episodes. This was my direct experience of the Aka Field of Level Two. To get from the physical world into to the spirit world, we have to transition through the Aka Field on Level Two (the same level we go through when our physical body dies at the end of life), but once through, we have access to our immortal self, our oversoul in Level Three.

When I connect with Nainoa in his own level of time space in the future (on Level One), I am drawn through the grid in Level Two into direct connection with my Oversoul in Level Three (Grand Central.) Then I am drawn back through Level Two to make connection with my once and future self, Nainoa, living in his own slice of time on Level One. This is how it is done.

And what caused the initial connection to occur? If Nainoa is my future self, he is my spiritual descendant, and possibly my biological descendant as well although that may not be a necessary requirement.

This reveals that the foundation stone for the reincarnational cycle is the oversoul whose energy was seeded in each of us at the beginning of life—energy that is always in connection to its oversoul source.

The link between Nainoa and me is energy. Part of his energy body is derived from mine. In this sense, my energy body is connected to his through that part of his energetic matrix that is derived from me through our shared oversoul source. That is how the circuit exists—the same connection I traverse when I merge with him… or he with me.

This is how all of our past and future lives are linked to us. In order to travel across time, we simply have to activate these connecting links. And once activated, our Body Soul retains the memory of the frequency vibration of the past or future self like a bookmark, making the connection easier and easier to access with practice.

As Captain Jack might ask—“Savvy?”

Spiritwalker is about my connections across time with my future self, and having now discussed the how-to-do it aspects of the experience in this column, some of you out there may decide to try it. So how do you initiate your own attempts in time traveling?

Simply accepting that it’s possible to do it is the necessary first step. Whereas a scientist might say “some things have to be seen to be believed,” a shaman might expand this perspective considerably by observing that “some things have to be believed to be seen.”

If you have not had any formal training in the shamanic method, you might find my small book The Journey to the Sacred Garden useful in getting started… and you can probably read and absorb it in two hours. It has a CD of shamanic drumming and rattling, two 30 minute tracks, for journeywork.

My two small volumes—Sacred Garden and Spirit Medicine—were written because of repeated requests from our students across the years to create them. They will provide you with much… and they will get you started in the right direction. Then there are the workshops…

In that vein, allow me to alert you to the Sixth International Conference on Shamanism to be held January 19-23, 2007 at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The line up of speakers will be extraordinary, and Jill and I will be offering a keynote talk, a spirit medicine workshop, and an evening shamanic healing ceremony on Sunday the 21st. Call 505-474-0998 for information or go to www.bizspirit.com

Events like this provide rare opportunities to directly encounter the mainstream speakers and teachers in the transformational community and to acquire new skills and insights. Conferences and workshops also provide a format in which to meet and network with others of similar orientation and practice. It’s about creating community, and Santa Fe is really nice at this time of year.

As I finish writing this month’s column, I will share that I have just received yet another email from someone who began reading Spiritwalker assuming it was fantasy or fiction, then discovering that it was not… and then suddenly, this woman (now 50 years old) remembered having an extraordinarily vivid dream-like experience when she was just beginning to go through puberty.

In this episode, she was dreaming and then she suddenly “woke up” in her dream and found herself in the body of another self in another time and place, with access to a completely foreign language and worldview. While there, she witnessed something quite traumatic happening to her immediate family.

Interestingly, this other “self” had no knowledge of her present life in her present embodiment—a direct parallel to what I experienced the first time I connected with Nainoa, yet upon returning from the “journey’, she found that for a time, she was unable to remember her English, her own language now, or even who she is. For several hours, she was wonderstruck at everything around her (window panes for example) revealing that the other self was now dreaming her. Then the whole experience faded, to be largely forgotten until she stumbled across my book…

More to come next month. Until then, allow me to invoke the spirit of my great Hawaiian friend, the Kahuna Nui Hale Kealohalani Makua, and with his blessing I extend to each of you 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 strongest force in the Universe, your Aloha.

With warm thoughts—Dr Hank