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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 Life Games
OIn last month’s column (9/07), we presented an outline of the phenomenon of spiritual unfolding, a uniquely human experience that typically passes through four distinct stages: 1) belief, 2) faith, 3) direct experience, and 4) personal transformation.
We began by discussing belief systems and among them, we specifically mentioned those magical beliefs that include the notion that we can dramatically affect the physical world around us, as well as other people, through the power of our ego—in other words, through intention.
If your belief is strong enough, whatever you want will magically appear, and through our focused intentionality (and the ‘law of attraction’ a la The Secret), we can manifest wealth, real estate, the perfect relationship, and BMW’s.
Those who have read the first chapter in Visionseeker, the third book in my Spiritwalker Trilogy, will recognize these ‘desirables’ as manifestations of the ‘physical foursome’— money, power, sex and status. These are the prime objectives that motivate the young souls who are here to play the life games and to acquire (and master) the things of the physical world.
Dr. Michael Newton’s seminal books Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls (required reading in my opinion) reveal that the majority of souls who are embodying on this planet at this time fall into this category. Newton is a master hypnotherapist who has discerned through thousands of case studies and past life regressions that roughly 42% of the souls here now are “beginners” or “young souls” with another 31% being “young-intermediates.” This means that roughly 73% of the souls here on this Earth at this time in history are here to play (which explains a great deal of what is going on in our world today)… and what they want is money, power, sex and status.
Now… let’s talk a bit about the various life games that people choose to play as well as what these games reveal about the players.
Dr. Roger Walsh, a professor of psychology at the University of Irvine in California, uses the word game with deliberation in his book The Spirit of Shamanism, distinguishing between trivial or frivolous games played for amusement, distraction, and entertainment (a la Paris Hilton) from those serious and significant life games that present us with challenges and objectives that contribute to our personal growth as well as to the greater good of the society in which we live (a la Bill Moyers, may he continue to inform and inspire us.)
It is in response to these life games that our constellation of survival skills and abilities is formed and sharpened, allowing each of us to succeed in becoming who and what we are. Without such “games worth playing,” life becomes filled with joyless striving and superficial repetition, giving rise to an ever-growing sense of existential meaninglessness, angst, and despair.
Walsh mentions an important book written in the 1960s by Robert De Ropp called The Master Game in which the author divides the life games that people play into two basic types: object games and meta games.
The object games are those played to master and acquire the things of the outer world. This is the arena of the young souls—those in search of distraction and fun as well as the physical foursome.
Conversely, the meta games are those played by more advanced souls, those interested in mastering the things of the inner worlds, intangibles such as knowledge, beauty, truth and the salvation of the soul.
De Ropp points out that the different games we choose to play are indicators of the type of individuals that we are… and also provide signs of our level of inner development.
The life games chosen by young souls are about creating karma. Older souls are more interested in wrapping up their karma.
De Ropp ranks the “object games” as hierarchically lower and describes them as more or less pathological in that the players who win emerge with little that they can truly call their own.
For example, the business man or woman playing the Money Game may emerge as rich as Donald Trump, only to find themselves embittered, unhappy, and empty, at a loss to know what to do with all their wealth.
Those who play the Fame Game with the goal of becoming celebrities realize sooner or later that their fame is an illusion, a mere shadow designed to inflate their ego and keep it inflated, and that their public image ultimately has no relationship to the person that they really are…
De Ropp portrays the Military Game as the deadliest of all the object games in that it is played (in his words) by various grades of trained killers who are programmed to regard their craft as acceptable, even admirable, if those they kill believe in a different god or political system and can thus be collectively be referred to as the enemy.
Patriotism aside, history reveals that players of the Military Game can kill men, women, and children with boundless enthusiasm, destroying whole cities and devastating entire countries, in the process sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of young people for the glittering dream of glory or victory, now more generally termed as “defense.”
So great is their power, exerted through various forms of political coercion and black mail, that the thousands and thousands of young people involved make little or no protest as they go to their deaths. This fact has led De Ropp to conclude that there is a criminal element infusing most object games because they harm both the players, as well as the society of which the players are a part.
De Ropp places the biological game on which the human species depends— the Householder Game—in a sort of neutral zone between the object games and the meta games. The aim of the Householder Game is simply to raise a family and provide it with security and the necessities of life.
Also found in this intermediate level are those non-players who are unable to find any game worth playing, often becoming outsiders who are alienated from society, many of whom become antisocial loners with criminal tendencies.
De Ropp ranks the meta games as hierarchically higher in that they are played for intangibles and tend to be more subtle, yet even these life games tend to project a positive and a negative polarity.
Those who play the Art Game, for example, are ideally searching for some inner awareness that can be defined and expressed as beauty. Yet many artists have no inner awareness at all and may only be proficient at imitating those who do have it.
In the same manner, those who play the Science Game are ideally searching for knowledge and meaning and truth, yet many of the players are little more than technicians with advanced degrees who are primarily interested in status and fame. In addition, all who play the Science Game realize sooner or later that research projects that are truly original tend to be excluded by the array of committees that stand between the scientist and their funding.
The Religion Game is a meta game that is ideally played for the salvation and nurturing of the soul. This life game had fairly well-defined rules in the past that were determined by a paid priesthood who made their livelihood by serving as intermediaries between the populace and various alternately benign or wrathful deities that they, or their predecessors, had invented.
Unfortunately, some of the players began to insist that their god was the only god, their truths the only truths. So eager were these priests to keep the game entirely in their own hands, that they did not hesitate to torture and kill all whom they viewed as outsiders, exhorting their followers to slaughter unbelievers as a sure way to gain supernatural favor and guarantee entry into a hypothetical blissful afterlife state called “heaven” or “paradise.”
Fortunately, there was, and is, another, quite different element to the Religion Game, and it is here, precisely here, that we may find salvation.
In De Ropp’s words:
All the great religions offer examples of saints and mystics who did not play the game for material gain, whose indifference to personal comfort, to wealth and to fame was so complete as to arouse our wonder and admiration… They played the game by entirely different rules and for entirely different aims from those priestly con men who sold trips to Heaven for hard cash and insisted on payment in advance…
These worthies were (and are) players of the Master Game—the one that De Ropp places at the apex of all the meta games.
The Master Game is the great game that has been played throughout time by the shamans and mystics, the saints and sages of all the world’s cultures—the ones who explored and mastered the inner worlds through the vehicle of their own mind and consciousness.
The Master Game involves the quest for spiritual awakening, enlightenment, and liberation. The goal: to discover one’s own true nature and to know from direct, empirical experience that this nature is sacred as well as immortal.
Note that the emphasis here is on direct experience. The Master Game is decidedly not about embracing magical or mythic belief systems in various culturally determined gods or goddesses or winged super humans called angels, nor is it about having faith… although belief and faith can be greatly sustaining in the short term.
In last month’s column we explored these issues. We also discussed the nature of true deity mysticism through the direct experience of our spiritual aspect—our own god-self or oversoul.
Roger Walsh writes:
Different traditions express this (game) in different ways, but the message is clearly the same. Christianity tells us that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” or in the words of Saint Clement, “He who knows himself knows God”; Buddhism says “Look within. Thou art Buddha”; in Siddha Yoga the message is, “God dwells within you as you”; and in Islam, “He who knows himself knows his Lord.”
The Hawaiian elder Hale Makua was fond of observing that ‘you will never find a better teacher than yourself, and the discovery of your own true nature is the key that opens that inner doorway to transcendence.’
In De Ropp’s eloquent words:
The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of the personal ego.
To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates. Among the Moslems, this teaching was promulgated by the Sufis, who praised in their poems the delights of reunion with the Friend.
To all these players, it was obvious that the Religion Game as played by the paid priests, with its shabby confidence tricks, promises, threats, persecutions and killings, was merely a hideous travesty of the real game…
The Master Game… remains the most demanding and difficult of games, and in our society, there are few who play. Contemporary man, hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgets, has little contact with his inner world, concerns himself with outer, not inner space.
But the Master Game is played entirely in the inner worlds, a vast and complex territory about which men know very little. The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man.
The game can only be played by people whose observations of themselves and others have led them to a certain conclusion, namely: That man’s ordinary state of consciousness, his so-called waking state, is not the highest level of consciousness of which he is capable. In fact, this state is so far from real awakening that it could appropriately be called a form of somnambulism, a condition of waking sleep.
Now, given this, allow me to observe that through my own spontaneous mystical experiences recorded in the Spiritwalker Trilogy, I became a player—a living link in a long line of players that stretches back across time to when the Master Game first appeared long before the rise of our state level societies more that 5000 years ago.
My Hawaiian friend Hale Makua was also a player, and this was part of the dynamic that brought us together.
And when exactly did this great game take form? 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. It is also possible that through their courageous acts of exploration and discovery within the inner worlds, they may have propelled the human species into the next stage of our evolution—the evolution of consciousness.
The Master Game is still with us, and I suspect that it is being played by considerably more people today that when De Ropp wrote his book in the 1960s and Walsh wrote his in the late 1980s.
Many of my Meta Arts columns have been focused upon the general spiritual reawakening currently going on in the West, one in which increasing numbers of thoughtful individualists are seeking the direct, transformative experience that defines the shaman/mystic.
Due to the relative ease with which the time-tested techniques of the shaman can be learned and practiced, even by non-tribal urbanites, there is a resurgence of interest in the ancient shamanic methods for entering mystical states of consciousness.
And through the use of this ‘technology of transcendence,’ more and more contemporary Westerners are learning how to access the ordinarily hidden dimensions of reality where it becomes possible to make contact with the inner sources of knowledge and energy that are available to us there to facilitate healing and problem-solving.
In the midst of a world still obsessed with money, sex, power and status, these heroes are quietly rediscovering the Master Game.
I use the word hero here with deliberation. Next month, we will talk a bit about the nature of the dynamic in which these heroes often find themselves.
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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