Hank Wesselman, P.h.D.

Upgrading the Archetypes.

Our last several columns (11/06-1/07) have provided a working outline 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.

In these columns, we have observed that this awakening may be at least partially due to the fact that we are coming to the end of a 2000 year cycle of ages in the Western world. We have mentioned the possibility that the transition into the next cycle may occur on December 21st of the year 2012--the date predicted by many indigenous groups such as the Maya who saw it as the end of their long count calendar of 5,126.36 years to be precise.

We have also revealed that one of the hallmarks of this shift from one cycle to the next will involve the re-emergence of the primordial spirituality, and we have provided an overview of how this may be contributing toward the formation of a new religion—a new kind of religion really, one that may determine the nature of spiritual focus for much of the next 2000 year cycle.

This shift in our spiritual orientation and practice does not necessitate a deconstruction of our contemporary religions, and yet there is no doubt that these traditions will certainly change. This is because the transition into what is quietly coming into being will involve an upgrading of our religious archetypes.

Many have made similar observations, but what exactly will this mean?

We don’t really know the answer at this time, yet one of the singular distinguishing features of the new religion coming into being is that experiential centerpiece found within the primordial spirituality--the awareness that each of us may achieve the direct, transpersonal contact with the sacred realms that defines the shaman/mystic.

The ancient methodology for achieving expanded states actually constitutes a form of technology—a technology of transcendence that is found in various forms and expressions all over the world. These methods may include sonic percussion combined with focused intentionality achieved through rhythmic stimulation, through drumming and rattling for example, or they may involve the ritual use of hallucinogens or the practices of vision questing or meditation, or event trauma.

These methods, collectively and singularly, are being reworked in our time into something entirely new, reflecting who we are today and who we are becoming… hence the need to upgrade. And it is here that we find something curious.

In one of my recent ‘reads,’ a book by Jeremy Narby called Intelligence in Nature, I found a reference to a paper by Graham Townsley that appeared several years ago in a journal called Shamanism published by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (Townsley’s paper is titled Kamaroa: a shamanic revival in the Western Amazon, (2001 Shamanism 14(2): 49-52).

Townsley’s narrative includes a lament—an observation that the central momentum of the last few hundred years of history has been away from indigenous communities and their worldviews, a trend that has resulted in the waning of the shamanic method among the indigenous peoples. And anyone who has done time with them in the remoter parts of the world has seen how they are rushing to join what they perceive as the exciting new world of the future.

For the indigenous peoples, shamanism begins to look increasingly like old fashioned hocus pocus, a view instilled in them and fostered by Christian missionaries. In addition, the arrival of modernity with all its glittering gadgets is usually the death knell of their ancient animist beliefs.

And yet… just as these ‘primitive’ worldviews appear to be dying out in the hinterlands of the new global system, paradoxically they are taking root once again at its center.

To our urbanized Western populations, saturated with modern paraphernalia and bored with a world that has been bled of meaning, shamans and their mystical practices of seeking connection with the spiritual realms suddenly seem very interesting, even appealing.

Townsley comments on this interesting historical crisscross. To the so-called primitive, marginalized and usually powerless, the promise of the modern is things, ease, and security. To the so-called modern person, the promise of the primitive is the one thing he or she lacks—a sense of meaning and mystery.

The primitive rush for the modern and the modern rush for the primitive is emerging as a feature of our current cultural landscape, and many in the transformational community are quietly, yet definitively reconsidering their personal belief systems, as well as their priorities, as they engage in spiritual explorations beyond the carefully patrolled borders of our mainstream Western religious traditions.

This phenomenon is precisely what we have been exploring in these columns for the Meta Arts since their inception in November of 2004.

Within these monthly essays, I have described how I stumbled into the awareness of all this more than 30 years ago as a result of some spontaneous epiphanies that happened out in the arid, whispering lands of southwestern Ethiopia while I was on a scientific expedition. I have also revealed an outline of those extraordinary spontaneous altered states that happened to me on my farm in Hawai’i in the 1980s—those documented in my books Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker and Visionseeker.

Having spent much of my life exploring the remote regions of Africa in search of fossils, it was at this point that I then began to explore the inner worlds. And in the process, I discovered that they were equally as fascinating as it was there that I started to encounter those transpersonal beings called spirits or gods by our ancestors.

I experienced them in my own way of course. Some were clearly the group oversouls of animal and plant species that are so familiar to indigenous shamans (see my column on the Leopard Man for instance in the Meta Arts Archives). Some were the spirits of my ancestors, while others could be classified as those angelic beings known as spirit teachers and guardians. In addition, there were some that were clearly beyond planetary and solar evolution.

What was and is of more than just passing interest to me, however, is that I have yet to encounter that alternately beneficent or wrathful creator god that is known to us from our monotheistic traditions—the one variously called Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, or simply God.

Now I am well aware that some folks don’t like it when you trespass into their spiritual belief systems, so let me say right now that I have no intention of trying to get inside people’s heads to try and move the pieces around. I am not, nor will I ever be, a missionary (or counter-missionary) trying to convert people toward the new religion that is coming into being.

The thoughts that follow are not intended to cast doubt and sow the seeds of dissent, nor are they meant to be blasphemous. They simply reflect my own explorations of the inner worlds, a mystical search for meaning and transcendence that has led me to some interesting conclusions.

For example, I have mentioned in a previous column or two that Western civilization seems to have developed in cycles that have repeated themselves every several thousand years or so—and that at the end of each cycle, a new religion emerged, one that reflected the new view we had developed of our world and ourselves.

As our societies became more stratified and more centralized, so did our way of perceiving the supernatural worlds. In other words, the way in which we perceive the spirits/gods and the hidden realities where they reside reflects the way in which we perceive ourselves.

As the writer Anais Nin has observed: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

This insight, also recorded in the Talmud, reveals definitively that we were not created by God or by the Gods in the literal Biblical/Talmudic/Koranic sense. It was actually quite the reverse: the God/gods came into being through us and our changing belief systems. In a nutshell, we created them.

And the god-like being who breathes life into us at the beginning of life? This is actually our personal immortal god-self, our oversoul.

You see, this realization, this deep insight understood and held by increasing millions of spiritual seekers like ourselves, is part of the upgrade of the archetype of ‘the creator.’

Being a scholar, when I stumbled into this realization, I felt the immediate need to search for confirmation, for validation, but considering the mountain of theological literature available for study, this was a somewhat daunting prospect.

Fortunately, early on in my quest I found a book published back in the 1960s called The Birth of the Gods written by Guy Swanson. In this tome, Swanson describes how our spiritual belief systems reflect the ways in which societies are organized.

For example, the animist worldview in which everything is vested with its own personal supernatural essence or soul is found among the least complex types of societies—among hunter-gatherers like the Kalahari Bushmen of southern Africa and among most of the tribal peoples of Native America in the recent past.

Such societies lacked the centralized authority systems as well as the social and political hierarchies that we Westerners take for granted. Traditionally, they had no concept of a stratified spiritual hierarchy with high gods or goddesses, nor did they have belief systems that included the awareness of a creator.

In fact, virtually no Native American peoples had ever heard of a “Great Spirit” or ‘creator’ before the 1850s.

What Native American Indians or First Nation peoples today call ‘the Creator’ or ‘the Great Spirit’ was actually a concept introduced by the Jesuit missionaries to the Algonkian peoples in the Great Lakes region of North America in the 1600s, where the Christian priests equated it with their tribal awareness of a remote, unapproachable, unknowable universal power or force generally known as Gitchi Manitou.

Although the percept of Gitchi Manitou among the native peoples was clearly identified with an energy highly dispersed throughout the Universe and densely concentrated within stars or within living beings as life force, the Christian view of the fatherly mono god-as-creator prevailed, gestating among the Algonkians for nearly 200 years before it spread laterally into the other belief systems in Native America--a classic example of what anthropologists call cultural diffusion.

Swanson reveals how ancestral spirit reverence tends to be found in agricultural societies with the beginnings of social ranking systems and in chiefdoms. Such societies typically have extended families with many generations living together under the same roof or in the same village compound.

In such societies, the spirits of deceased ancestors are simply extended family members who are on the other side of the mirror so to speak, and they hold the belief that these spirits still play an active role in their kin group’s best interests, serving as advisers or protectors who may also punish those who behave badly or fail to live up to their tribal and familial responsibilities.

Swanson further describes how theistic beliefs—the belief in many high gods and goddesses (polytheism) or in a singular creator god (monotheism)—are found only in highly complex state level societies, revealing quite clearly that as our perceptions of ourselves become more stratified and centralized, so do our belief systems about the supernatural realms. In such societies (such as our own), our bureaucratized and politicized priesthoods claim privileged access and create religious monopolies that stand between us and our experience of the sacred realms.

However, in our own time, as increasing numbers of people in the transformational community are beginning to personally experience those inner regions that Jung often referred to as the archetypal realms of the psyche, many are beginning to reconsider the true nature of the “Father-God archetype” that we inherited from our Old Testament precursors.

For spiritual questers and inner adventurers who are exploring the sacred worlds, the archetype of God the Father in Heaven is becoming increasingly outdated as we begin to see it for what it is, or rather for what it was. And this is precisely why, with the ending of our current cycle of ages and the beginning of the next, we must upgrade this archetype to reflect who we are now, as well as who we are becoming.

Even the location of the sacred realms themselves has shifted dramatically.

For example, as far back as 1964, the sociologist Robert Bellah published a seminal paper titled Religious Evolution in a journal called The American Ecological Review—a scholarly essay in which Bellah reviewed the way in which the supernatural realms are perceived in different societies.

In so-called primitive societies with animist belief systems, for example, the supernatural worlds are right here, right now. They are the hidden, transpersonal realms that are all around us, all the time. The trick lies in learning how to perceive them—an ability that falls within the expertise of the shaman.

In archaic religions, the Old Testament of the Bible and the Talmud for example, we begin to get a separation between the natural and the supernatural worlds. When Moses meets with the spirit that calls itself “I AM”, he doesn’t have the meeting in camp. He separates himself from his peers and meets with this powerful spirit up on the mountain. We’re not too sure where the supernatural realms are, but they are not “here” any longer.

In historic religions like Roman Catholicism, this separation becomes the rule. The sacred realms of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell are not here; they are definitely somewhere else, and salvation is achieved by separating oneself from the secular world. This is why priests and nuns live a monastic life and do not marry or have families and children.

Bellah’s paper reveals that this separation of the sacred and the profane worlds is furthered and emphasized in the early modern religions like Protestantism, Presbyterianism, and Methodism, yet salvation among these faiths is achieved not by separation, but by serving our fellow man through the service organizations like the Shriner’s or the Kiwannis Club, working for the Cancer Fund, Meals on Wheels, or raising money for worthy causes like the Boy Scouts or selling cookies for the soccer team.

Interestingly, in the Modern Religions like Zen Buddhism or Unitarianism, the supernatural-natural dichotomy disappears, and once again, this is it, right here, right now, with the hidden worlds all around us (although my own experience with Zen revealed a classic prejudice against the validity of visionary experience which Zen Buddhists call makyo and regard as delusions. See Spiritwalker.)

With the upcoming shift of ages and the accompanying re-emergence of the primordial spirituality, Westerners appear to be turning their attention once again toward the great mystery of existence and its interface with the mystery of the self, and as they do, the necessity of a transcendent authoritarian father figure who has good days and bad days is becoming increasingly obsolete.

As we engage once again in the ancient adventure of exploring the nature of ourselves and the nature of the sacred inner realms, we become aware of an immanent, omnipresent mystical force or vital presence that exists everywhere, in everything.

This is not some super-human remote father being demanding our deference, subservience and worship. It is none other than the Life Force itself, a universal creative impulse that is life-giving, life-supporting, and life-sustaining, found right at the center of the natural world all around us—in every weed and tree, every butterfly and squirrel and bird.

Once again, we are becoming aware that Nature in all its complexity and beauty is God, and we realize then with great certainty that all it requires from us is our respect, our reverence, and our love.

And the practice? The practice is not about worship; it’s about relationship. We are in relationship with Nature, and through Nature with the Universal Force that infuses it and us with Life.

And as we become aware of the extraordinary nature of what it means to be alive on this beautiful world—this awareness leads us inexorably into the experience of reverence.

And that is really what is required—reverence, an active respect for everyone and everything around us. This is also the foundation stone of indigenous mind.

We will talk more about 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