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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 Year’s Summary… and a Prediction
Seasoned greetings!
As we approach the end of this year 2007, I look back across the columns that I have offered to you over the past twelve months with some satisfaction. The writing of these essays has encouraged me to step deeply into my memory banks to bring forth a large cache of stored knowledge that I have had to reconsider, as well as upgrade, in order to share it with you.
This process of deep introspection, once begun, has fostered my own inner growth and ongoing spiritual unfolding considerably, and for that, I offer you the reader, my gratitude.
Allow me to summarize where we’ve been during the past 12 months.
The Summary
In November 2006, we began with a consideration of the well-known fact that we appear to be coming to the end of a cycle of ages—quite possibly in December of 2012, only five years away now.
We surveyed some of the perspectives on what this may mean, then we discussed the shape of an emerging and important subculture in the Western World—the transformational community—and how their closely held beliefs and values are quietly yet definitively shifting the social norms of Western culture at large.
According to an important survey by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson (The Cultural Creatives), there are between 50-70 million of us in the US alone with another 90-100 million in Europe. These are not small numbers and they appear to be growing.
The fact is that we are traveling in the company of an enormous number of allies.
We also discussed how the beliefs and values of these ‘transformationals’ are contributing toward the genesis of a new religion and how the emergence of this new ‘spiritual complex’ is in alignment with a prophecy made by the Oglala shaman and medicine man Black Elk just before his passing almost 60 years ago.
In the beginning of Black Elk’s second book The Sacred Pipe, he conveyed the Sioux perception that with the closing of this current cycle of ages, the primordial spirituality will reemerge… and the next cycle of ages will be built upon that foundation.
This extraordinary statement creates perspective on the growing interest in indigenous wisdom and shamanism in the Western world. The primordial spirituality is the shaman’s path, and at its heart can be found the transpersonal journey into the inner worlds where all the mysteries, great and small, may become known.
The Mazatec shaman and medicine woman Maria Sabina once said this: “There is a world beyond ours—a world that is nearby, yet invisible. This is where God lives. This is where the spirits live. This is where the dead live. This world is alive and this world talks.”
The direct experience of this inner world lies at the center of the new spiritual complex, and in response, increasing numbers of well-informed, well educated and well-connected people are returning from this inner journey with a new perceptions of how reality is put together, as well as new perceptions of themselves and who we are becoming in our own time.
In response a new cultural mythos is coming into being.
For newcomers to this column, my small book The Journey to the Sacred Garden provides a user-friendly guide to shamanic journeywork. It reveals as well that each one of us has the potential, as well as the ability, to become our own priest or priestess, our own prophet, our own guru, receiving our revelations directly, ourselves, without the need for any religious hierarchy or priesthood or spiritual teacher to be standing between us and our experience of the hidden worlds.
I then offered my readers an example of what becomes possible when we learn to access the transcendent realms directly through the practice of deity mysticism. In a column titled The Sermon in the Airport, I described how the transpersonal connection with the spiritual “field” can happen anywhere, and at any time, even in an airport.
There followed four columns about how I was drawn into connection in 1996 with a Hawaiian kahuna elder, a great wisdomkeeper who began to convey an extraordinary body of knowledge to me and my wife over an eight-year period. This ‘encounter on the shaman’s path’ was shared in response to my family’s relocation back to our small farm on the Kona Coast of the Island of Hawai’i where we now reside once again—the same locale where Spiritwalker took place.
We then considered the four primary stages through which authentic spiritual unfolding takes place, bringing us through 1) magical and mythic belief systems into 2) faith… and then beyond faith into 3) the direct experience of the spiritual realms… a life-changing encounter that ultimately brings us into the irreversible vortex of 4) personal transformation.
This column led me to reconsider the life games that people choose to play, the object games played to master and acquire the things in the outer world and the meta games played for intangibles found in the inner worlds.
We also considered the Master Game, the great game that stands at the apex of all the life games—the game played by shamans and mystics, saints and sages across time—the one that brings us into the awareness of the true nature of all that is, resulting in our personal enlightenment and ultimately liberation.
In last month’s column (11/07), we presented some thoughts about the monomyth, the single great story of the heroes’ journey found in all our myths, our literature and our films and television shows—the story so well articulated by the mythologist Joseph Campbell in his books and lectures.
We discussed the stages of the heroes journey in accord with Campbell’s clear message to us—that each one of has the potential to become the hero in our own journey through this lifetime… but first we must accept the call to adventure, slog through the stage of initiation with all of its tests, trials and tribulations, achieve the goal of our quest with the assistance of our helping spirits, and finally return as the hero who is ready to be of service to our community and to humanity at large.
When we have experienced authentic initiation, we return to where we began like Odysseus or Frodo, but we return as masters of the two worlds, the outer as well as the inner realms. And it is at this point that we discover something totally mind-blowing.
We now embody the potential to be of service to the greater good as a world redeemer.
This, in the long term, is what we all have signed up for… we’re all going in that direction. And we will all get there in our own time.
(For my essays over the past 12 months, see the Meta Arts Archives.)
The Prediction
Here are the givens:
#1: With the closing of this 2000 year cycle, we are faced with the same debacle that the Romans had on their hands with the closing of the last—a crisis of leadership at virtually all levels of our society.
#2: In response, our society is changing and we are changing right along with it. In fact, the world is now changing at a rate that has never been seen before in all of human history… and prehistory. This shift is being enabled by a high technology and a world-wide communication system that is unparalleled as well as unprecedented.
#3: Our collective and personal psyches are changing at lightning speed right along with this greater societal shift, even as we read this essay. And by the way, the word ‘evolution’ means ‘change’, and the law of evolution is that everything changes. This means that the human species as a whole is evolving, like it or not.
#4: Our mainstream religions will simply have to follow suit and join the party. They too must change and evolve or they will cease to compel us and simply be discarded.
And with these observations, here is the prediction:
Many of us, like the Romans before us, are still holding onto archaic and outdated belief systems in a last ditch attempt to shore up our unraveling cultural complexes—political, economic, social and even religious.
Yet there is no escape. Everything is changing.
The new spiritual complex is emerging in response to this societal shift, revealing the ever-increasing need for an overall upgrade of our conservative (read ‘archaic’) beliefs in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of a monotheistic creator ‘God’, ‘his’ angels, and ‘his’ adversaries.
This upgrade is already well under way—a process that is in complete alignment with the history of the Western World over the past 11,0000 years, a long period in which several “cycles of ages” have taken form, flourished and then passed on, with a new religion (or spiritual complex) appearing at the closure of each cycle and the beginning of the next.
This means that the emergence of ‘the next religion’ is right on schedule in our own time, and it’s coming into being will not be denied. In response, most, if not all, of our official state religions will become cultural relics within a generation or two.
Is this statement provocative? Blasphemous? Revolutionary? From my perspective as an anthropologist, I would suggest the terms progressive, futuristic, and ultimately… realistic.
Our current major religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are going to be replaced by regional and cultural variations of the new religious complex that is coming into being. This phenomenon is already picking up speed as more and more of us turn toward the timeless and effective practices of the mystics for connecting with the sacred realms.
The great mystics like Ramana Maharshi, Jesus of Nazareth, the Platonic Socrates, the Vedanta Master Shankara, and even Black Elk himself ask us to take nothing on faith. All of them, and others as well, have laid out the parameters of a grand experiment in which we can participate and find out the ultimate answers for ourselves.
And when we take up their challenge, we discover that the new religious complex will no longer about belief and faith, ceremony and prayer. It will be about the direct transpersonal experience with the real archetypal forces—the ones waiting for us to discover them just there on the other side of the mirror. And once in connection, our world, including ourselves, will be transformed.
Members of the transformational community know that the ability to have such transcendent experiences is one of our birthrights. They know that this is what is waiting for us out there on the trail, and they want it.
Given this, here are a couple of questions worth pondering.
With the ending of this cycle of ages and the coming of the next, is the time of the barbarian finally over? Or… do we have another 2000 years of barbarism to look forward to?
And in this regard, what do we really want for our grandchildren… and for the next seven generations? War or peace? Truth or deception? A world determined by love or a world dominated by fear? It’s that simple… and the choice is ours.
We are talking here about the questionable (some would say criminal) machinations of our military-industrialist complex and the trans-national corporations enabled and supported by our political leadership. These cultural matrices have created a privately run world economy in which they are responsible to no one but themselves. And they are quite literally packed with barbarians who are utterly lacking in compassion or ethics, and whose main activity (and preoccupation) seems to be pillage and plunder.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s an old story and it’s been going on since the rise of our first political and religious hierarchies 6000 years ago. How much longer before we graduate through lower, middle and upper barbarism into the beginning levels of authentic civilization?
And what about the old guard? What about our elders who have been going to the same church, temple or mosque for the last 70 years or so, the ones who are still holding on with their back teeth to the belief systems that have sustained them for a lifetime… what about them, their prejudices and fears, and their limiting values?
Speaking realistically, they are simply going to pass over… and with their passing, the next generation will experience a new level of spiritual freedom, as well as a new level of excitement that comes with accepting the call to adventure, wallowing around in the stage of initiation for a decade or two, and then discovering that spiritual pot of mystic gold that has been awaiting them all along.
But it’s not at the end of the rainbow nor is it in some sacred scripture or teaching or ceremony. Nor can it be found in a boxy building with tall narrow windows and a steeple (or dome) on top.
The pot of gold has been within ourselves all this time, waiting for us to wake up and discover it and claim it as our own.
The new religion coming into being is ultimately about ourselves becoming heroes—about us as souls traveling across eternity, reveling in the great mystery, enjoying our lives, and growing, evolving and becoming more than we were in the beauty of Nature on our wonderful planet…
The new religion is about remembering our divine origin and rediscovering our own true nature through the experience of love for one another.
The new spiritual complex will be built upon the positive polarity of compassion rather than upon the negative polarity of zeal. From Kahu Makua’s perspective, the next religion will be about intentionally shifting our anchor from the negative polarity into the positive… and leaving it there.
This will be about loving all that we see with humility, about living all that we feel with reverence, and about knowing all that we possess with discipline.
These thoughts come from my heart (and his heart) to yours. Please consider them until our next trail crossing in 2008, and have a joy-filled holiday season with those you love.
Allow me to invoke the spirit of Chief Makua, my great Hawaiian friend… and with his blessing (and his words), 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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