Hank Wesselman, P.h.D.

The Beliefs and Values of the Transformationals.

AWarm greetings for the New Year! As we all gear up for another 12 month run, allow me to share some thoughts for your meditations and contemplation, thoughts that may contribute to the greater good.

In last month’s column (12/06), we began to talk about a new kind of spiritual complex that seems to be emerging in the Western World, one that may serve as the foundation on which a new religion may take form during the next cycle.

As an anthropologist, I stumbled across this new view of spirituality more than a decade ago when I started leading experiential, cross-cultural workshops designed to explore aspects of our collective human potential, specifically those that allow us to experience the expanded states of awareness familiar to indigenous shamans.

Within these groups, I quickly perceived that most of my participants tend to express a distinct character profile that I find deeply reassuring--one that the media finds puzzling at best or unworthy of serious news coverage at worst. Allow me to elaborate.

Our newspapers, magazines, and television news programs inundate us with negative information on a daily basis, creating the impression that violent crime and genocide, economic catastrophes and political mendacity are reaching unprecedented proportions.

While this may be true to some extent, it must also be remembered that all the atrocities and disasters, political corruption and corporate peccadilloes are being generated by only about 2% of the world's population.

98% of the world’s population is not directly involved in the practice of murder and mayhem!

Despite this, the media seems to believe that the negative polarity is what we want to hear about--that this is what makes news. This supposition is reinforced by polls and surveys created by demographers who serve the media.

The same could be said of the film industry, of course. There is no question that Hollywood knows the big money is to be made by appealing to the dark side of the human psyche.

Given this understanding, I was surprised to discover that most of the participants in my seminars and workshops lack the blade-runner mentality, as well as the cynicism it tends to generate. Instead, they tend to express a strong sense of social justice, and they seem to be deeply concerned about the quality of human life at all levels of society, both nationally and internationally.

They feel strong support for women's issues as well as those of minorities. They are concerned for the safety and well being of both children and the elderly. Human relationships are clearly seen as more important than material gain. Social tolerance, personal individualism, and spiritual freedom are highly valued ideals. The reweaving of the social fabric through the rebuilding of families, neighborhoods, and communities are major areas of concern.

This is what I mean by deeply reassuring.

In looking at these values, it quickly becomes apparent that they have little to do with being a liberal or a conservative, a Christian, Jew or Muslim, or even a patriot or 'good American'. They also have little to do with race and ethnicity. Yet they have everything to do with being a humanist, in the evolved sense of the word.

Although the Western world continues to be driven by greed and fueled by denial, motivated by fear and dominated by competition, those who are part of the transformational community are oriented toward democratic, humanistic ideals, and they tend to favor cooperative endeavors that benefit the many.

The importance of balance and harmony lies right at the core of their values, and they, like the indigenous peoples, have grasped that humans must strive to live their lives in ways that contribute to the greater good rather than living lifestyles and pursuing goals that create its opposite.

Accordingly, the value of simple, natural living is seen as a high ideal, and the monumental waste being generated by every level of the world capitalist system, is regarded with grave concern.

Another area of consideration involves healthcare.

Ever increasing members of the transformational community feel a genuine distance from Western allopathic medicine. While all are very much aware of Western medicine's miraculous achievements, more and more feel that it is failing on many fronts.

Elders who are terminally ill, for example, are often kept alive during the last year(s) of their lives by a medical system that is trying to do the right thing, but in the process, the physical suffering of the dying may be needlessly prolonged by therapies that render their last days miserable, while the escalating costs of treatment can virtually wipe out their family's financial resources.

In addition, all see quite clearly how the big business-oriented and profit-motivated Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO's) are affecting the quality of health care in an increasingly negative way as costs continue to be escalated beyond the imaginable.

The need for healthcare reform is clearly seen as paramount, and as a result, the majority of those within the transformational community express strong interests in preventative and alternative health care strategies, perceived as adjuncts to rather than as replacements for allopathic medicine.

The transformationals are also environmentally savvy.

Like the indigenous peoples, they feel an active, almost ritual respect for Nature and express a deep concern for the survival of the environment and, by association, the human species.

All are seriously committed to stopping corporate polluters, reversing greenhouse warming, and discovering the limits to short term growth so that we can achieve the long-term ecological sustainability upon which the future of humanity, as well as Western Civilization, depends.

The environmental concerns of the transformationals are reinforced by their understanding that everything, everywhere is connected to everything else—a concept familiar to indigenous shamans and zen monks on the one hand, as well as to scientists working in advanced theoretical physics and quantum mechanics on the other.

Among the scientists this omnipresent matrix of interconnection is known as the zero point field, within which elementary particles are constantly winking in and out of existence--an endless, beginningless energetic net or web that is alive... The Hawaiian kahunas also knew about it and called it the aka field.

Unlike many of the hardcore environmental activists of the last several decades however, members of this emerging social movement are deeply committed to achieving the direct, transpersonal experience of the sacred, and it is really this that reveals their mystical focus.

For example, a core belief among the transformationals concerns the existence of more than one reality. In addition to the everyday, objective physical world in which we all live and have families, friends, and careers in an ongoing basis, there are the nonordinary, subjective levels of the dream worlds or spirit worlds that are outside the time-space continuum.

This belief leads directly into another: the ability of some individuals to expand their conscious awareness and enter into these alternate realities to accomplish certain things on behalf of themselves and others--a conviction that reveals why the re-emergence of the primordial spirituality and the rediscovery of shamanism has become a major thrust within the movement.

The relative ease with which the shaman's time-tested methods for achieving mystical states can be learned and practiced, even by non-tribal Westerners, stands in stark contrast to the years of rigorous training often required in many of the contemplative disciplines like meditation and yoga before significant consciousness shifts are achieved.

Furthermore, this direct, transpersonal experience of the inner worlds allows practitioners to enter into relationship with spirit helpers and spirit teachers, ancient archetypal beings who may provide seekers with power and knowledge, protection and support, just as they did for our distant ancestors across tens of thousands of years.

Interestingly, despite their disaffection for and lack of affiliation with organized religions, most in the transformational community profess beliefs in some form of universal God-like consciousness, and Jesus of Nazareth is regarded as an important spiritual teacher, whether or not the seeker is psychologically Christian.

Another related belief concerns the existence of mystical power, perceived by virtually all as an impersonal, invisible vital force that is widely dispersed throughout the universe and which can be highly concentrated in certain objects, places, and living beings.

This power or energy is carried by the zero point field that underlies all of creation. Accordingly it is becoming generally understood within the movement that everyone can learn how to access this power, and that one's health, well-being, and success in life are all dependent on being able to maintain, and even increase, one's personal supply.

This awareness has given rise to the belief in the existence of a personal energy body--the aspect of the self that carries this power as life force and provides the etheric pattern around and within which the physical body is formed and maintained.

The ability of some transpersonal healers to manipulate the energy body in restoring and repairing the physical is a skill that many in the transformational community have personally experienced. It is understood that this personal energetic aspect can be perceived as an aura by those who have psychic awareness and that it can be enhanced utilizing the energy centers within it called chakras in Eastern thought.

The transformationals also perceive quite clearly that the world's problems are reaching critical mass and that our current leaders are failing to produce solutions to those problems.

Accordingly, ever-growing numbers of us are coming to the conclusion that the ultimate solutions to our problems may actually lie within ourselves. Many of us perceive that these solutions may best be achieved through the general spiritual reawakening that is currently taking place in the Western world, creating an expansion of our conscious awareness that is spreading ever outward, from the personal into the global.

Here’s something else that may be significant. More than half the participants in my workshop groups have children, something that many see as a very hopeful sign.

The beliefs and values outlined above represent a very different approach from the me-first competitive paradigm that most of us absorbed unconsciously from our parents, teachers, and friends. If our children are acquiring these altruistic, spiritually based beliefs within their families, they are already spreading rapidly throughout society, accelerating the shift.

Taken together, these beliefs and values can be considered as an emerging worldview that is being embraced by an ever-increasing number of people—a perspective that carries the potential to project humankind into entirely new realms of knowledge, awareness, and experience.

From my view as an anthropologist and an evolutionary biologist involved in the search for human origins, I suspect that the new worldview represents a major threshold in human consciousness, one that has the potential to change the direction of human evolution.

Although the current spiritual reawakening is most visible in North America and Europe, the invasive influence of Western Culture upon the rest of the world suggests that it may, in fact, extend deeply into the international community.

If so, the results will be felt at every level of society, in every country, and will, by association, determine much of the politics and individual lifeways of the 21st Century and beyond.

In Paul Ray's words "we should take heart, for we are traveling in the company of an enormous number of allies."

In a book called The Way Ahead, edited by Eddie and Debbie Shapiro, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has put it this way:

"Nowadays, whatever happens in one part of the world will eventually affect, through a chain reaction, people and places far away. Therefore, it is essential to treat each major problem (and social movement), right from (their) inception, as a global concern. It is no longer possible to emphasize, without destructive repercussions, the national, racial, or ideological barriers that differentiate us. Within the context of our new interdependence, self-interest clearly lies in considering the interest of others.”

His Holiness' insight confirms that the re-emergence of the primordial spirituality within the transformational community is of enormous import. It is the foundation stone that may alter the directions of history in much the same way that the appearance of Christianity utterly changed the Roman world, as well as the Western mind, at the onset of the current cycle of ages that began almost 2000 years ago.

There are no maybes here. The history of all the world's peoples will be profoundly changed by the spiritual awakening that is quietly going on in the Western world. As we observed last month, the individuals carrying the new view may well be the seed-people who will determine the shape of the world's spiritual orientation and practice for much of the next 2000 years.

As Black Elk foresaw more than 50 years ago, the re-emergence of the primordial spirituality may serve as the bridge, as well as our life-line, into the next cycle of ages, providing a new promise of hope for all human beings everywhere, as well as a firm guarantee of sweeping changes to come.

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