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Encounters on
the Shaman's Path
with anthropologist Dr. Hank Wesselman, PhD.
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by Dr.Hank Wesselman, P.h.D. |
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The Sermon in the Airport
Our last several columns (11/06-3/07) have provided an overview of the general spiritual reawakening that is going on within an important subculture emerging in the Western world—a group that could be thought of as the Transformational Community. We have also considered the beliefs and values that the transformationals hold dear, including their perception that the time has come to upgrade the archetypes.
We have discussed as well how these many of these archetypes, including the Father-God embraced by the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, represent culturally-determined forces that were and are projections of our own multi-leveled psycho-spiritual complex, revealing that they are self-determined as well as self-limited.
This is not to say that all the discarnate beings that are so well known to traditional shamans were created by humans. Quite the contrary. The hierarchy of spiritual beings includes elementals, nature spirits (sometimes called faeries), and animal and plant spirits all of whom have been here far longer than ourselves, as well as the spirits of ancestors and all those higher spirits already evolved beyond planetary and solar development.
These ‘higher’ transpersonal beings include those compassionate forces poised just beyond the physical world to help us in various ways and usually anthropomorphized as winged super-humans called ‘angels.’
Among these wise beings is our personal ‘angelic’ self or higher self aspect, our oversoul who breathes life into us at the beginning of each incarnation and who receives our soul complex back into itself at the end of life, growing and increasing and becoming more in response what we have done and become here on the earthly plane of physical existence. The oversoul is the actual ‘god-self’ who listens to our prayers, works in mysterious ways, and offers us unconditional love. And each one of us has one.
All the oversouls together form a collective field in the shamanic upper worlds, called Heaven in Judeo-Christianity and Paradise in Islam. The kahuna mystics of Hawaii called it ka po’e aumakua, the great gathering of ancestral oversouls, and it is among them that the spiritual ‘fields’ of the great ascended masters are located—oversoul fields that can be accessed.
Allow me to provide you the reader with an actual ‘encounter’ with one such oversoul field from my own life experience, one that was quite spontaneous as well as quite unexpected—one that did not happen in a church or a zendo or any other ‘holy place.’ It happened in an airport.
As most of my readers are already aware, I’m an anthropologist, a college professor, a researcher and a writer, as well as a shamanic teacher and healer, and I spend a good deal of time in airports waiting for flights that will take me to faraway places.
Early one morning, I was waiting for my flight and as usual, I was watching the constant stream of my fellow travelers parading by, all, like me, on their way to somewhere. Some looked worried, preoccupied, or depressed while others appeared alert, determined, or excited. Many seemed tired, as though they were carrying burdens.
I glanced at the woman sitting next to me in the long row of seats near my boarding gate. She was dressed in a black pantsuit and red blouse with black low-heeled shoes, and she was wearing subdued, yet expensive gold jewelry and a Patek-Phillipe watch. Her coifed and frosted hair was cut short, controlled yet chic, and she was completely oblivious to my presence.
She was scanning that day’s copy of the Wall Street Journal with professional intensity through minature folding reading glasses—the kind that slip into a tube. Her carry-ons consisted of a laptop, an attaché case and a small purse, suggesting that she was an attorney or businesswoman perhaps. She was dressed for success and conveyed the impression that she was a woman of power and influence in her world. Around her neck was a small cross on a gold chain.
By comparison, I’m a professorial type and on that day I was wearing a black turtle-neck pullover, wrinkled khaki slacks, a dark olive green corduroy coat and comfortable slip-on shoes. My hair under my soft tan safari-type hat is thinning on top but long and curly in the back and I was sporting a drooping Zapata moustache connected to a graying goatee.
I was wearing Johnny Depp-type glasses and my jewelry consisted of my simple gold wedding bands and my father’s gold signet ring. Around one wrist I also wear a brass tribal bracelet that was given to me by an indigenous tribal man in the early 70s in Ethiopia and a metal Swiss Army watch with a black dial around the other. Around my neck was an old Maasai ivory bead on a black leather thong that came to me in down in the Rift Valley on a blazing afternoon in Kenya more than 30 years ago—a power object with strong memories attached.
My carry-on was a weathered shoulder bag stuffed with books and papers, chocolate bars and a cell phone I rarely use, with a collapsible umbrella stuck in a sleeve on one end and a water bottle in the sleeve on the other.
I did a quick scan of the businesswoman’s newspaper over her shoulder. The column headliners revealed that we live in a time of extremes. On the one hand, we have the overarching embrace of Western Civilization with all its glittering gadgets and its staggering achievements, enabled by a high technology and a worldwide communication system unlike anything ever seen before. On the other, we have the poor and the disenfranchised, all those human beings who are outside the system, including most of the ‘Third World’ where three billion people live in conditions of abysmal poverty and lack even the basic amenities of food and water, shelter and safety.
As an anthropologist, I know this world well as I’ve lived and worked in it for much of my life. I glanced again at the woman next to me and wondered if she had ever seen it up close and personal.
On this particular morning, I was considering these two opposing polarities as I sipped my Starbucks soy latte--unprecedented abundance on the one hand and abject need on the other--and something completely unexpected appeared in my mind—the words of Jesus of Nazareth, taken from one of his sermons:
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth…”
I considered this revolutionary statement, completely and utterly at odds with Western economic theory, and I was very much aware that the meek are not doing well… not well at all. I was also aware that many in the international community consider us Americans to be the Romans of our time…
I glanced again at the woman-professional next to me and directed a brief but intense surge of focused attention toward her. No contact. She couldn’t feel it, or if she could, she was purposefully ignoring me.
My thoughts returned to the words of Jesus, and on impulse, I took a couple of deep breaths and intentionally relaxed my body, slipping into a light meditative trance state--a learned skill that improves with practice. As I felt my being settle into the familiar tranquility, I created a thought-form within my mind of Jesus of Nazareth, producing a culturally-determined image of a tall Semitic man with long tied-back shaggy hair and a scraggly beard, dressed in period clothing with scuffed, worn sandals on his bare brown feet.
As I held my focused attention on the mental image, something quite startling occurred. A brilliant line of light appeared in the air before me about six feet above the carpeted floor, a shimmering golden crescent shaped arc somewhat like the new moon. Amazed, I watched it widen and open so that light began to spill out of it almost like a waterfall.
I risked a glance to my right and to my left. Apparently nobody but me could see it. I refocused on the brilliant field and held my breath, enthralled, as a large bubble of light separated from that curtain of radiance. I directed all of my concentration on this rather oblong bubble and watched as it darkened and took on density until it had transformed into a human shape, fleshed out with those details I had conjured up based on my knowledge of the classical world.
I have to confess that my mind was reeling. Part of me was aware that I was practicing what the Tibetan peoples call deity yoga, a discipline in which I had mentally created a thoughtform of this great spiritual teacher and healer and then projected it outward. But as the image continued to darken and solidify, surrounded by that shimmering golden curtain, I wasn’t sure if I had created it or if I had summoned it…
Without claiming anything, I sensed with growing certainty that I had been able to use my own mind and body as a bridge to access the oversoul field of this great being to bring him through into our world from the other side. To say I was in awe would be an understatement of vast proportions. I was literally mind-blown.
For long moments, Jesus simply stood still and took in his surroundings. Then he turned and observed me thoughtfully, locking his eyes with mine and holding my attention with his gaze. Those who have read my book Visionseeker will remember that we had made contact before, and as the sense of recognition grew between us, a smile appeared upon his face and he opened his hands, turning his palms toward me in greeting.
In response, my body became warm and a sound appeared in my inner ears. The light that he was (and is) was flowing into me like water poured into a bottle, and in response, my blood began to sparkle, producing a hissing sound like rushing water in my head. I felt my heart opening as the vibration of absolute and unconditional love began to permeate my being.
During this moment of immanence and connection, I watched, intrigued, as his smile deepened, crinkling the edges of his dark eyes under his tangled mop of hair. I knew then that that he could feel my opened heart. He looked so real to me in those moments of vision that I could almost smell him.
As my mind reeled, part of me wondered idly if anyone else would notice him. In response to my thoughts perhaps, he turned his head and glanced at the crowds flowing by us like a river. As my own gaze followed his, I wondered if anyone would be receptive to a sermon from the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth right here, right now in the airport.
Not very likely, I concluded. Anyone who could see him clothed in what appeared to be several layers of long white, homespun bathrobes would immediately wonder how this striking yet decidedly ungroomed figure ever got by airport security. He continued to scan the crowd, his attention resting on the restless multitudes surging by, and nobody noticed him. Nobody.
Abruptly his attention was drawn toward a tired mother dealing with an upset child, pulling my own focus in her direction as well. My heart was overflowing with love in those moments, so I extended my feelings of compassion toward the mother and her child. Amazingly, the little girl stopped crying, allowing herself to be comforted by her mother. The tall man glanced back at me and nodded with… with what? Satisfaction? Approval?
I was still half in shock from the presence of this apparition, then my thinking mind slowly began to recover and to operate once again. As my sense of self re-stabilized, thoughts appeared. Where were we all going, I wondered? And what was our destiny, our purpose for being here… especially now with the closure of a world age advancing upon us?
I returned my attention to the great bodhisattva standing before me, and he simply smiled at me once more. Then his image slowly became more and more transparent until all that remained was the large, shimmering bubble of light tinged by a deep bluish purple and surrounded by a radiant outline of light.
Then the bubble faded from my sight as it merged back into that curtain of light that was now flowing back up into the brilliant arc. Then it too disappeared as though someone had zipped it closed from the other side. I was left with the resonance of his smile and the warmth of his eyes. That, for me, was his sermon, his message from the field of goodness.
As I reviewed what had just happened, I glanced at the woman next to me. She was still studying the stock market page and had noticed nothing. I wondered if she knew anything about shamans. 20 years ago, I would have said probably not. Today, I could not be sure.
The practice of deity yoga is a shamanic technique that comes from the Vajrayana tradition in Tibet, a religious complex that reflects a blend of traditional Indian Buddhism from the south and the Bon Po shamanistic practices of the Himalayas to the north
In the practice of deity yoga, the yogi first creates a thought-form of a benevolent god-like figure, one than embodies all the qualities of endless compassion, boundless wisdom, unconditional love, and unquestionable virtue, and then the yogi projects it outward. The yogi then steps forward and merges with the deity, spending the rest of their day (or the rest of their life) acting, speaking, thinking, and behaving as if they are the deity. In this sense, they become one with their projected thoughtform, and through this practice, they become the deity embodied.
Regarded as one of the most powerful among their vast array of spiritual practices, Tibetans believe that one can become a Buddha in a single lifetime through the practice of deity yoga. His Holiness the Dalai Lama practices it daily, becoming one with the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the Himalayan deity of mercy and compassion known as Kwan Yin in China and Kwannon in Japan.
When you meet this revered Tibetan spiritual teacher and elder, you are in the presence of that deity, a great archetype willing to offer unconditional love, even to the barbarians who stole his homeland and who are in the process of conducting the deliberate cultural genocide of the Tibetan peoples.
As my thoughts turned back to what had just occurred, I was aware that the difference between a shaman and a yogi lay in the yogi’s conviction that the deity was simply a thoughtform and thus an illusion created by their own mind. A shaman on the other hand would be equally as convinced that the image was indeed a spirit with its own separate agenda and being-hood, quite distinct from the one who perceived it.
As all this ran through my mind in the airport, I was aware that I had not presumed to step forward and merge with the exhalted being who had literally spiritwalked through the gateway created by my mind, but I was also aware that I could have…
I continued to sit in my airport seat and I marveled at the wonder of it, then the moment passed as my flight was announced and I rose from my seat to shuffle onto the plane with the others. I noted in passing that the businesswoman was in first class. I was flying coach. I stowed my gear in the overhead compartment above my seat and dug out a book to read while we rode on the winds to our distant destination.
This “encounter on the shaman’s path” confirms something I now know with absolute certainty. The spiritual hierarchy of beings who exist in the transpersonal levels of reality may come into relationship with us if we invite them to do so, even acting within and through us as archetypal forces.
Our last column included a good working definition of an archetype from the work of Edward Edinger, one of Jung’s followers who described an archetype as “a primordial psychic pattern of the collective unconscious that is at the same time a dynamic agency with intentionality.”
The writer Daniel Pinchbeck has added: “the archetypes hover (just) outside or offstage our human drama, awaiting their moment to ‘constellate’ in the individual and collective psyche, catalyzing processes of transformation with far-reaching consequences.”
Whether we define these forces as archetypes or spirits or gods, the shaman’s technology of transcendence, practiced across tens of millennia, has been devoted largely to dealing with them, bringing them into alignment with humanity so they may be of service to us, and we to them.
The shamanic practitioners job is to essentially use their own bodies and minds as bridges between our physical world and the transpersonal realms of spirit. And as the indigenous peoples know well, when those bridges are formed, miracles happen, something that increasing numbers in the transformational community have personally experienced.
We will talk more about all this 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
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Dr. Hank Wesselman, P.h.D
Anthropologist, Shamanic Teacher, Healer, & Author
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Dr Hank Wesselman PhD., holds advanced degrees in anthropology and zoology from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Since 1971, he's conducted research with an international group of scientists, exploring eastern Africa's Great Rift Valley in search of answers to the mystery of human origins--fieldwork that has allowed him to spend much of his life living and working with traditional peoples, rarely, if ever, visited by outsiders.
During this time, he has worked with many notables including Prof F. Clark Howell, Dr Don Johanson, "Lucy's" discoverer, as well as members of the famous Leakey family.
He is currently engaged in fieldwork in northern Ethiopia with the Middle Awash Research Project headed by Prof Tim White, where he is reconstructing the paleoenvironments of sites dated between four and six million years old that have yielded the fossilized remains of humanity's earliest ancestors.
Dr Wesselman has taught anthropology for the University of California at San Diego; the University of Hawai'i at Hilo's West Hawai'i campus at Kealakekua; California State University at Sacramento; American River College and Sierra College in northern California; and Kiriji Memorial College and Adeola Odutola College in Western Nigeria, where he first became interested in indigenous spiritual traditions while living among people of the Yoruba Tribe as a US Peace Corps Volunteer during the 1960s.
Dr Hank (as his students call him) is also a shaman in training, now in the 23rd year of his apprenticeship. His autobiographical trilogy Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker, and Visionseeker describes an ongoing continuum of visionary experiences that began spontaneously out in the bush of southern Ethiopia in the 1970s, resumed in Hawai'i in the 1980s, and continue to the present day.
Combining the sober objectivity of a trained scientist with a mystic's passionate search for deeper understanding, Hank's books and teachings contain revelations about the nature of reality, the self, as well as the shaman's spiritual worlds.
Since 1994, he has offered seminars and training workshops at many internationally-recognized centers such as the Esalen Institute in California, the Omega Institute near New York, and the New Millennium Institute in Hawai'i.
Hank's newest books include the Journey to the Sacred Garden: A Guide to Traveling in the Spiritual Realms, and Spirit Medicine: Healing in the Sacred Realms (co-authored with transpersonal medical practitioner and soul retrieval specialist Jill Kuykendall).
He currently serves on the advisory board of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners, is a member of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, and is featured in Traveling Between the Worlds: Conversations with Contemporary Shamans by Hillary S Webb.
In addition to his scientific publications, he is at work on a book about his expeditionary field experiences in Africa.
He has also written a small book for children: Little Ruth Reddingford and the Wolf.
Contact info and workshop schedule:
www.sharedwisdom.
com
email:
hw@sharedwisdom.com
Notes & Updates
from Dr.Hank
Descriptions of the workshops and presentations offered by Hank Wesselman and his wife Jill Kuykendall, as well as the website links to the centers where they will be held in 2007, are now taking form on their web site:
www.sharedwisdom.
com
Soul Catchers
I discovered, quite by accident almost 15 years ago, that I am married to a great soul catcher. My wife Jill Kuykendall was trained in the Western medical paradigm and has worked as a physiotherapist in acute care rehabilitation in hospital as well as home health settings for more than 25 years.
Today, Jill works primarily in transpersonal medicine and has a private practice devoted to soul retrieval. Clients come to her from all over the country, as well as from abroad and she is usually booked up months in advance.
Interestingly, the transpersonal nature of this work means that it is “nonlocal’ and is just as effective when done long-distance, revealing that Jill can still do the work on behalf of those who cannot travel to meet with her in her office.
Jill is the co-author with me of Spirit Medicine and wrote the chapters on soul loss, soul retrieval and more. As you may be aware, we have a website <www.sharedwisdom.
com> where Jill has a page describing the nature of her work in soul retrieval.
For those interested, there are also two hour-long interviews with me posted on the Broadband Learning Channel <www.bblc.tv>, one of which is focused upon health, illness and healing the soul in the indigenous perspective.
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