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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 Hero… and the Master Game
In last month’s column (10/07), we presented some thoughts about the various kinds of life games that people choose to play during their ‘walkabout’ for 70 or 80 years or more here on the physical plane.
On the one hand, we have the ‘object games’ that are played for fun, entertainment and distraction, and for acquiring and mastering the things of the outer world—primarily money, power, sex and status. On the other, we have the ‘meta games’ played for intangibles such as beauty, truth, wisdom, and the salvation of the soul.
We also mentioned that the object games tend to be the primary focus for young souls, while the meta games tend to be played by mature and older souls.
My great Hawaiian friend Chief Makua (an exalted soul) was fond of observing that baby souls and young souls tend to say “Do it my way”; mature souls say “Do what you want, just don’t do it here”; and old souls: “You do what you want, I’ll do what I want...”
The Master Game
At the apex of all the life games stands the Master Game. This is the great game that has been played across time by the shamans and mystics, saints and sages of all spiritual traditions.
The Master Game is played entirely in the inner worlds. The stakes are high as are its goals--enlightenment, self-realization, personal transformation, and ultimately liberation.
‘Liberation from what?’ you might ask. It’s about getting off the wheel of attachment and delusion, pain and suffering. It’s about graduation from this level of reality, awareness and experience to the next. When we play the Master Game, we can then move progressively forward and through the direct experience of nature mysticism and into the practice of deity mysticism until we can literally become gods.
The Master Game reveals what is waiting for each one of us as we pass through the trials of initiation in each life and then ascend toward the luminous horizon of our personal and collective destiny.
However, as many sages have observed, you can’t become a butterfly until you are done with being a catterpillar. And you cannot rip away catterpillarness through zeal or through endless periods of meditation! It’s always and forever about readiness.
We are in this for the long haul and I sense that the real work is not going to be done in the Zendo or the monastery or the temple, although it can happen there. I sense that the real work is going to happen out there in the social and cultural market place—in restaurants and offices, businesses and schools, bakeries and institutes, and in those quiet moments when we are alone with ourselves.
And the Great Game? It can be practiced by Zen Masters on the one hand and by old souls wrapping up their karma and flipping burgers at McDonald’s on the other.
But when exactly did The Game take form? As we said last month we don’t know, but it is likely that the shamans of antiquity were the initial players, those first brave pioneers who began to investigate the capabilities of the human body-mind-soul-spirit complex during the Stone Age.
It was through their courageous acts of exploration within the inner worlds that they may have unknowingly propelled the human species into the next stage of our evolution—the evolution of consciousness.
This reveals that the game began tens of thousands of years before the rise of our state level societies and our stratified organized religions. We have good evidence for human mortuary practices and reverence for the dead during the Middle Stone Age period at 160,000 years ago in the deserts of what is today Ethiopia—the same country in which the authentic Ark of the Covenant is being cared for and protected.
From my own experience as a player, allow me to observe that when you become involved in the Master Game, it becomes the only game in town worth playing, and I suspect that it is being played by considerably more people today than it was in the past.
We concluded last month’s essay by referring to these players as true heroes, and so it would be good to make some observations, in a general way, about “the hero” and about how the great game usually begins…
The Monomyth
When I was still involved in academic teaching at the college and university level, I taught an Anthropology course called Magic, Witchcraft and Religion that was a huge best seller. These classes were consistently overenrolled with rapt students sitting in the aisles, drinking in every word and image.
It was in the second week of this course that I talked about the important role that religious ideology plays in our lives. I revealed metaphorical stories to the class (such as those in the Bible or in The Lord of the Rings) and we discussed how such symbolic stories help us to understand who we are, what we’re doing here and what this world is all about.
This brings up the subject of mythology. No discussion of mythology, however brief, is complete without acknowledging Joseph Campbell, one of the great sages and teachers of our time whose primary contribution was his revelation of the monomyth.
The monomyth is the single great story found in all of our cultural myths and literature, from the Iliad and the Odyssey, through Dickens and Hemingway to all of our pulp novels, television soap operas and mini-series, and even our children’s anime adventures and cartoon shows.
The monomyth is the story of the hero’s journey.
Campbell’s first book was called Hero of a Thousand Faces, and in it, he laid out a magnificent cross-cultural analysis of the various stages through which the hero’s journey passes. And it is with reference to this immortal and enduring cultural template that we can consider how the Master Game begins.
When we think of heroes, we tend to think mythologically—King Arthur or Odysseus in the ancient world… JFK, Martin Luther King, or Mohandas Gandhi in our own time. In the feminine, we could name Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitane or Elizabeth the first.
This short list reveals that we tend to remember the warrior Kings or Queens, the ones who ‘made history’. It also reveals that there are many kinds of heroes and not all heroes are players of the Master Game.
Those players tend to form a very small club whose members include Prince Gautama the Buddha and LaoTsu, Jesus of Nazareth and Moses, Hildegarde of Bingen and Meister Eckhart, the Dalai Lama and Kahu Hale Makua.
In addition, there have always been, and will always be, countless numbers of unsung heroes whose names we will never know and never see on the evening news. This reveals, in turn, that the hero can be an everyday average person with jobs to do, bills to pay, families to support, mouths to feed, friends to relate to… in other words, someone just like you, someone just like me.
The hero is someone deeply immersed in the web of life, a person who has good days and bad days and who is doing the best they can. The hero is a person who knows how to listen as well as when to listen…
This ability to listen is important because one day, one night, something strange and unexpected happens. Joseph Campbell designated this as the first stage of the hero’s journey (and the Great Game as well). He labeled it “The Call.”
The Call to Adventure
In a traditional society, this event might come in the form of a dream or visionary epiphany in which the spirit of an ancestor or a deity comes to the dreamer and informs them that the time has come for them to step into the next stage of their life, and that they have a job to do.
This ‘summons’ can be psychologically challenging to say the least, and my book Spiritwalker is a testament as to just how mind blowing it can really be.
In our society today, The Call might also come as a crisis of some sort, like losing your job or having your primary relationship (and family) disintegrate before your unwilling eyes. It could also be a healthcare crisis…
Or it might take the form of moving to a new location or beginning a new relationship… or being offered a new position that will draw you in entirely new directions, or even a miraculous recovery from a serious illness.
Whatever form it takes, The Call is an open invitation to leave the relative safety and security of the known and embark on an adventurous and uncertain quest into the unknown.
It’s like that wonderful poem by Robert Frost that all of us read in High School—the one about the two paths in the woods. One path is well traveled, safe and secure… and this is the one that we all walk on. And then, somewhere along that well-trodden way, we stumble across this other path going off into the forest, overgrown and dark and gnarly, one that could be dangerous with lions and tigers and bears. And as we all know, because Frost chose that other path less traveled, he became a world-class poet instead of just another hack in the business world.
That other path is the call to adventure. And the hero is the woman, the man, who picks up on it, recognizes it for what it is with all its perils and unknowns… and decides to go for it.
Now… society will always give you every reason not to. Give up your 60 hour a week job? And those benefits? That two week vacation once a year? Give up your medical insurance? Give up your church? Give up your communities’ and family’s approval?
Society at large does not want you to be an adventurer or player of the Master Game. Society wants to be a good citizen and to unquestioningly accept its laws as valid and its limits as real.
Society wants you to be a good drone, to faithfully vote in its elections and believe that your vote could be pivotal. Society wants you to embrace its values and to not rock the boat--ever. Society wants you to sit down and be quiet, to do what you’re told and pay your taxes… and to maintain the status quo at all costs.
Society wants you… Uncle Sam wants you… Sound familiar?
We were all conditioned to think this way through growing up in our families and communing with our friends, and through absorbing our communities’ expectations of us though that cultural institution called “school.”
Through these experiences, we were all taught to accept and to embrace what society wants us to be. Anthropologists call this universal phenomenon ‘the tyranny of culture’, or more softly, ‘cultural determinism’.
The hero is the one who recognizes the shape of all of this and yearns for freedom, whether conscious or subconscious. The hero is the one who decides to take that other path… to accept the call to adventure, to reject society’s constraints and embrace the unknown whatever it may bring, and it is then that the great game really begins.
The hero is the daughter, the son, who hears the siren’s song, and who quietly slips away in search of the mystery.
The Stage of Initiation
When we accept the call to adventure, we are precipitated immediately into the next stage of the journey—the stage of initiation. The kahuna Makua was fond of calling this ‘the school of hard knocks’ for this is the period in which our lives can unravel in truly spectacular ways and often in a very short chunk of time.
The stage of initiation is a time of tests, trials and tribulations—and this is where we learn our lessons.
The hero’s job is to persevere and to keep getting up every time they get knocked down. And what is the singular great lesson that is learned in the school of hard knocks? In Makua’s words, “this is where we learn how to lose gracefully.”
And somewhere along this formidable path, while we are being biffed and baffed, pillaged and plundered from every corner, we learn that we are not alone after all. We become aware that we are being monitored 24/7 by the unseen world that is all around us, and all the time. Makua called this the world of the ancestors. Modern mystics often refer to it as “The Field.”
With this discovery, we begin to unfold spiritually, and when we turn our attention toward the direct experience of those compassionate forces in that unseen world who have been watching us with concern the whole time, the game changes.
We are not talking about praying to the official Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of GOD here. Nor are we talking about embracing one of the many accepted cultural constructs of Jesus as your savior. Those concepts are mythic belief complexes that were spoon fed to us by our organized religious systems before we had developed our powers of discernment.
And as we said in a previous essay, belief systems can be greatly sustaining in the short term, but not much changes in the long term.
What we are talking about here is connection with the real transpersonal beings… and through direct experience of them, we discover that first and foremost among them is our own oversoul or higher self.
This immortal (and transpersonal) aspect of ourselves is and will forever be the real “god in heaven” who loves us unconditionally, listens to our prayers, works in mysterious ways and who sends messengers to Earth (ourselves) who usually get treated very badly.
The oversoul is who we are there in the worlds of things hidden, that same spiritual mosaic that my friend Frank DeMarco likes to call TGU—the guys upstairs. And this spiritual complex is in connection with us all the time, throughout our entire lives.
Every thought that we think, every emotion we feel, every word that we say, every relationship we engage in, every act that we make is being monitored by our personal oversoul in the unseen world. And although this can be greatly reassuring on the one hand, it can also be somewhat disquieting on the other because this fact reveals that privacy is truly an illusion.
Think about that one.
One of the interesting things that we learn when we come into connection with these transpersonal forces, sometimes through intention, sometimes by accident, is that they are constrained by protocol… and there is a spiritual protocol.
In a sentence, they are not allowed to interfere with our personal lives and our destiny… until we become aware of them once again and we ask them to step in and help us. And when “the Field” is favorable, good things happen.
This awareness always reminds me of the writer Annie Lamotte’s two favorite prayers: “Help me, help me, help me…” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
When we turn our attention to the real spiritual archetypes, the ones who are willing to be of service to us, the whole game changes, and it is at this point, and only at this point, that the emerging hero experiences authentic initiation.
The hero then passes the tests, trials, and tribulations with the support of their helping spirits, whoever they might be. And it is then, precisely then, that they achieve the goal of their quest, whatever that might be.
And let me put in once again that the Path of the Shaman, whose centerpiece is an ancient method for experiencing the transpersonal worlds directly, is one of the most easily learned and practiced ways to get there.
The Return of the Hero
When we experience authentic initiation, this is the point at which we all realize who we are as well as where we are. And it is then, precisely then, that our destiny beckons to us in a completely new and expanded way.
It is then that we move into the next stage of the journey, for it is then that we must return to where we began, like Frodo, the archetypal hero in the Lord of the Rings. But when we come back to the place where we started, we return as masters of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. We return as authentically initiated heroes… and as such, we carry a new level of potential as well as new levels of responsibility.
It is at this point that we may be of service as world redeemers.
Another of Joseph Campbell’s great gifts to us was his revelation that each one of has the potential to become the hero in our own journey. That’s what we are really here for—to accept the call, plod through the stage of initiation, and return as fully initiated heroes—as accomplished as well as enlightened individuals for who the name of the game is ethical intention as well as ethical action.
In other words, as world redeemers.
Now there are different kinds of world redeemers just as there are different kinds of heroes. This would be a good topic for another month’s column.
Until then, allow me to invoke the spirit of Hale 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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