Hank Wesselman, P.h.D.

Becoming a Spiritwalker

Our previous several columns (6/06-8/06) have been focused upon the events that determine 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.

It is worth noting that when these mind-bending episodes began spontaneously, I had no particular interest in shamans, nor did I feel any attraction for shamanic experience or practice. I had heard about telepathy and clairvoyance, of course, as well as channeling and trance-mediumship, but my reaction to these psychic phenomena had been one of amused skepticism.

I was a highly trained anthropologist in my early 40s then, with a doctorate from UC Berkeley. In my field research, I was (and still am) involved with an international team of scientists, investigating the ancient eroded landforms of Eastern Africa’s Great Rift Valley, in search of answers to the mystery of human origins.

Given this perspective, one might conclude that my scientific background and training should have pre-programmed me against having such visionary experiences. Yet they happened anyway, and when my first encounter with the Angel of Death occurred that morning at dawn in August, 1983, it was almost as though some mysterious program was set into motion within me, one of which I had no previous knowledge—one that was definitely not covered in all those books and papers I had read in graduate school.

There is nothing that can compare with direct experiential knowing however, and when I, the scientist, began to experience the awesome jolt of the real thing myself, everything changed. To say I was surprised would be an understatement of considerable proportions. I was stunned.

Once begun, the visionary experiences continued, and as I struggled to put the pieces together over the months and years that followed, I was led inevitably toward understanding. In the process, I moved inexorably into a mindset that my fellow scientists would likely label as heretical.

For example, I came to suspect that what had happened to me might be an expression of some ancient genetic pattern that had developed within my family lineages in the distant past, but to be frank, in those days I had no clear perception of what this meant.

In addition, I began to accept the existence of transpersonal levels of myself, as well as what we call reality, and this certainly put me at odds with mainstream science in a way from which there was no return.

In our last column (8/06) I mentioned that shamanic initiates almost always endure some form of “shamanic illness,” and I briefly outlined the form that my own initiation crisis took--an ongoing continuum of spontaneous, transpersonal visionary connections with the mind and soul of a man who lives in the future.

Now this is an unorthodox claim for a scientist to make, to say the least, including as it does the issue of time travel, so allow me to say a bit more about the form my initiatory experiences took, as well as what was learned in the process. We will then deal with the fine points of authentic shamanic time travel in a future column.

Those who have read my book Spiritwalker will recall that when I first connected with the man called Nainoa, I automatically tried to control his movements. In response, his body responded with confusion to two separate sets of mental commands. Somehow, in the midst of my utter astonishment and total confusion, I managed to figure out the problem and become completely passive.

Perhaps my limited experience with meditation was what served me in those moments, as I was able to discipline myself to become completely still, yet fully watchful. I merely “sat within him” and observed, yet in the process, I discovered that if I wished to look at something, Nainoa would shortly walk over and look at it. If I wanted to know something, it would obligingly appear in his mind… and in my own.

This brings up the issue of communication. Although Nainoa’s language is different from any spoken today (my assumption), I was able to receive the jist of the meaning of his words and thoughts as the shape of his knowing was translated into mine, a process I still do not understand fully, even after 20 years.

At the same time, these were not dream-like experiences that quickly evaporate upon awakening. What I was experiencing was equally as real as what you, the reader, are experiencing now, wherever you are. Take a look around at everything that surrounds you. Study the details. Speak briefly to anyone near you and understand their response. Think about all that has happened to you in the past half hour or over the day just passed.

As you review all that has just taken place, understand that this is much like the depth of the realness that I experienced while I was merged with Nainoa. The detail was staggering. Although my physical body was lying inert in bed next to my wife in Hawai’i, my conscious awareness had relocated itself into Nainoa’s body in his world and timeframe.

I was fully awake during these episodes-- thinking, analyzing, integrating, and assigning meaning to all that I was perceiving through him. Yet this experience was not at all like watching television or a movie. I was in this movie as the major player, and the action was happening all around me… as well as within me.

I had never heard of such a thing happening to anyone, although I should add that I now have a small file of letters from a scattering of others who have read my books and who have had similar experiences—usually individuals who wish to remain anonymous due to their elevated community role or professional standing within our social hierarchies.

Not surprisingly, it was in response to these amazing experiences that my carefully constructed scientific paradigm of reality began to disintegrate, and at that time, I had nothing with which to replace it.

Although I didn’t know it then, I was in the throes of a classic initiation crisis, a mental and spiritual crossroads well known to the mystics and shamans of the traditional peoples. But unlike the tribal shaman or contemporary spiritual seeker, I was not psychologically prepared for such a life-changing event, nor did I have a wise elder shaman to whom to turn for advice as to how to proceed.

Yet within my expanded-state connections with this man Nainoa, a most amazing story began to unfold.

In the initial episode, I discerned that Nainoa was in his late 20s, maybe early 30s, and that he was a clerk in the service of the director of his community. I learned that his people are the descendants of Hawaiians who reached the North American coast in a fleet of double-hulled transoceanic voyaging canoes about 130 years before my contact with him and that upon their arrival, the voyagers had found no people, no cities, and no evidence of the once great American civilization described in their myths and stories.

They subsequently established a chain of settlements around the western edge of an inland sea, presumably a marine inundation of California’s central valley—the result of higher sea levels (my guess). Like traditional Polynesian settlements of the past, these villages appeared to be large self-sufficient slices of landscape, thousands of acres in extent, with a fishing community on the coast and a farming community inland.

From Nainoa’s memories, I was able to learn that the settlers’ society is stratified by rank and privilege, much like that of the pre-contact Hawaiians of the past, with political leadership derived largely from a ruling class, with various ranks of commoners below them--farmers, fishermen, laborers, stockmen, artisans, servants and so forth.

If, in fact, I was seeing a slice of the future, it seemed as if the destiny of humanity lay not in a democratic state-level society, but rather in a chiefdom based upon a system of balanced feudalism.

But how did I know with certainty that this was happening in the future and not in the past? The answer lay in Nainoa’s mind. He knows that he lives approximately 247 generations after the end of what his society calls the “Great Age.” As a budding historian, he understands that this period corresponds to what we call Western Civilization, and if we assume a generation to be 20 years, 247 generations represents 4940 years…

So what would you do if you were put in my position, subjected to spontaneous visionary experiences that you could neither induce nor control—vivid connections across time with the mind and heart of a man who lives 5000 years in the future?

I watched, enthralled, fascinated, and at times frightened as something right out of our mythology or science fiction books unfolded like a flower in my mind. I also took notes and Spiritwalker is the result—a non fictional account of all that happened.

It’s really about a quest—a classic hero’s journey in which both Nainoa and myself sought and found answers about many things, including the demise of our civilization.

On that first day that I was merged with Nainoa in his slice of reality and time, he was in the process of leaving his community to engage in a long walkabout—a journey of geographic investigation into the largely unknown interior of the “lost continent of America.”

But where were the oak-studded grasslands, pines and evergreens of the California I knew so well. The land I saw was covered with tropical rainforest with monkeys, parrots, boas, crocodiles, and jaguars, and the climate was definitely tropical and wet. If this was indeed California, (and Nainoa’s memories revealed that it was) a dramatic climatic shift had occurred during the time that separates his world from ours, possibly on a planetary scale, bearing out contemporary science’s worst case predictions associated with our current trends of global greenhouse warming.

And how many of my readers, I wonder, have seen Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth? Spiritwalker was published 11 years ago, and all the predictions that the former vice President makes in his film are born out by what I have observed over the last 20 years through Nainoa.

This extraordinary adventure deepened through these serial connections, and throughout their duration, I was an unseen guest within Nainoa during his solitary trek as he crossed the inland sea and the great tropical forests surrounding it, then ascended into today’s Sierra Nevada mountains, heading ever east into unknown regions.

In the process he stumbled across a ruined city in the forest… one of ours, and it was during the night that he spent there that he began to have his own initiatory experiences at the hands of the spirits, including his first encounter with the dark guardian. A pattern was revealing itself to me by degrees, yet at the beginning, I had no frame of reference in which to place it.

It was also during his long walk that Nainoa began to experience the “time shift phenomenon” (if I may call it that), but it happened to him in reverse. He found himself journeying into the past during vivid dream-like episodes in which he suddenly found his conscious awareness merged with my own in my level of reality and time.

His reaction was to theorize that I must be his ancestor—that he had somehow made contact with the spirit of one of his ancestors. This insight threw the whole affair into an entirely new light. If I was his ancestor and he my descendant, this might provide a partial explanation for the connection between us, as well as part of the causality for the experience itself.

You see… always in back of my mind lurked a gnawing question—why me? Why had these incredible experiences begun to happen to me… and why now?

In time, I would learn that why is not a question that we can ask about fate. Fate simply is. Yet as an invisible participant-observer to these incredible events, my own investigations began to extend far beyond the ordinary nature of reality into the inner realms of the human mind and spirit.

This is how I became a shamanic practitioner and eventually a shamanic teacher, or as Nainoa would say, a spiritwalker.

The details of all that was perceived are recorded in the Spiritwalker trilogy, but for those who have not yet read it, I will share that upon reaching the comparatively drier wooded grasslands beyond the mountains, Nainoa encountered a group of people of possible mixed Inuit-French-Canadian descent called the Ennu and spent most of a year living with them. During this interval, he became involved with a woman named Kenojelak, whose father, William, functioned as a shaman for his people when the need arose.

I will also share that toward the end of my time in Hawai’i, Nainoa’s growing awareness of me and his wish to make contact, was facilitated by William, who began to instruct him (and through him, me) in the ways of the traditional shaman. The two men then visited a place of great power called the spirit hills where Nainoa and I were able to connect and to converse directly for the first time.

It was also in this place that we were taken on a visionary journey into the heart of the great mystery of existence by an immensely powerful spirit known to the Ennu as a dorajuadiok. Allow me to say with all humility that what was seen during this experience, as well as my descriptions of how it was perceived, may be unique in the annals of visionary literature as I have been unable to find anyone else (in 20 years) who has had a direct experience of this particular spirit.

The dorajuadiok is an immensely powerful and utterly alien being. It is not an organic life form, and in order to comprehend it, I had to go outside of the life sciences and turn to the fields of non-linear dynamics, fractal geometry, and quantum physics, providing me with a partial explanation of this creature’s beingness—information that may be found in the third chapter of Visionseeker, the third volume in the trilogy.

Spiritwalker also contains relevant details of my own life during the four years I lived in Hawai’i, documenting my search for meaning and causality behind these extraordinary experiences. During this time, I found myself drawn into a relationship with an animal spirit I call “the leopard man,” an entity that I had known in my childhood as an imaginary friend. (see the Meta Arts archives for my 4/05 column on the leopard man.)

Much to my surprise, this spirit reappeared in my visionary experiences as a classic shamanic spirithelper, giving rise to the possibility that “he” was also serving my descendant in the same capacity, providing another line of connection between us, one that may have served to bring us together.

Yet another avenue of connection was an object of great power that I first observed in Nainoa’s time and place and which I subsequently found awash in the waves of Kealakekua Bay more than a year later—an object that I have written about and called “the spirit stone.”

This was the nature of my shamanic illness—one that served to draw me ever deeper into the spiritual dimensions so familiar to the shamans of the traditional peoples.

We will continue our discussion 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