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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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Thoughts from the Trail
Since most of my readership have been following my last several Meta Arts columns (2/09-5/09) about our recent trip to Egypt and the nonordinary experiences that we had there in 2008, this might be a favorable moment to reflect on the shaman’s path as well as what this path may reveal to us when and if we choose to walk it.
To begin I might say that it is currently impossible for Western science to consider the experiences I have shared with you, the reader, let alone investigate or even validate them. In the same breath, I could also observe that science has never been able to demonstrate that the way that shamans explain reality is wrong, nor has it been able to reveal that there is anything faulty or illogical about the shamans’ worldview.
In other words, science has been unable to invalidate the shamanic perspectives on the nature of reality—a worldview that is remarkably consistent, from culture to culture, and held by virtually all the peoples of the planet.
To the contrary, the primary investigators working in the field of quantum physics are actually pointing us in the same direction.
To further emphasize this, the writer Graham Hancock has observed in his seminal book “Supernatural” that the materialist paradigm, upon which all the progress and achievements of Western technology have been built, could very likely face catastrophic implosion if the shamans were ever proved to be right.
The researcher Dr. Rick Strassman has put it this way in his book “DMT: The Spirit Molecule”: ‘(The shaman’s) worlds are usually invisible to us and our instruments, and are not accessible using our normal state of consciousness. However, just as likely as the theory that these worlds exist ’only in our minds’ is that they are, in reality, outside us and freestanding. (This implies that) if we simply change our brain’s receiving abilities, we can comprehend them and interact with them.’
As one who has walked the shaman’s path for 27 years, it has been my experience that these separate, freestanding realities do indeed exist, and that they may be the parallel dimensions that quantum physics predicts. Like Hancock and many others who have had direct experiences of them, my feeling (like theirs’) is that these other worlds vibrate at a different frequency from our own and are thus invisible to us except in altered states of consciousness.
These dimensions are, were, and forever will be, the worlds of ‘things hidden’ of the shaman.
Furthermore, shamans all over the world proclaim with their considerable authority that these other realities are inhabited by intelligent beings who have had an active interest in us for a very long time, getting involved in human affairs most often as spirit helpers and teachers. These beings include the animal spirits, plant spirits, elementals, the faerie folk and more recently the aliens, the higher organizing intelligences including our own higher self or oversoul as well as what many call the angelic forces.
One of the key functions performed by these beings has traditionally been to provide humans with the experience of initiations of various kinds, some of which can be quite challenging. They have also been involved since our beginnings with the transference of knowledge to those spiritual seekers who are deemed ready to receive it.
We could also mention that given the importance of religious belief systems to virtually all people everywhere, the evidence from archeology and cultural anthropology suggests overwhelmingly that our religious beliefs rest upon a foundation of supernatural encounters that were experienced by powerful and charismatic prophets who were shamans who had the ability to communicate what they had learned to members of their communities.
Although such revelations crystallized quickly into religious dogmas as they were passed from generation to generation, it is clear (reading the Old Testament for example, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead) that these visionary experiences were not simply conjured up in someone’s creative imagination, nor were they arrived at through scholarly study or deliberately devised to assuage human needs.
These accounts of the spiritual worlds and the encounters with their inhabitants arose in every case from the attempts of these prophets and visionaries to describe and explain their nonordinary experiences, allowing us to perceive these gifted individuals as accomplished shamans in every sense of the word.
Furthermore there is no doubt that their experiences were enabled by altered states of consciousness that have been part of human history and prehistory stretching back to the dawn of human awareness—experiences often facilitated by hallucinogens, tantra, intense meditation in combination with drumming or rattling (as in our training workshops), and even trauma.
Despite this clear understanding, the original visionary experiences and revelations of the founders of our organized religious traditions (for example Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are now far back in the past. Since then, history has documented how the salaried and bureaucratized priesthoods took over these religions and then distorted, censored and rewrote the original teachings and revelations to suit their own political agendas.
In doing so, today’s priests and rabbis, mullahs and bishops now present themselves to us as the exclusive intermediaries between our communities and the supernatural, yet with rare exceptions, most possess no visionary abilities themselves. In fact, most of them are no more likely than the members of their communities to encounter the spirits and the transpersonal worlds.
Rather these priests rigidly adhere to and teach what they themselves have been taught by other non-visionaries who relied on scripture, and almost without exception, those who direct and control our organized religions today will never convey any new supernatural experiences of their own to enhance and refresh the original revelations of their religion’s founders.
Harsh words? Perhaps… and yet Graham Hancock has called this one of the great tragedies of the modern world—that the blind have for so long been allowed to mislead the blind about the very experiences and revelations that gave rise to our spiritual traditions in the first place.
Hancock adds that our so-called ‘paranormal’ abilities, used for so long by our indigenous ancestors with reverence and caution to explore and learn from nonordinary reality and its inhabitants, were intentionally diverted by our priestly bureaucrats into the various spiritual dead ends of the ‘ecclesia’ where everything is dogma, endlessly repeated, where almost no one has first hand experiences of the transpersonal realms any more, and where nothing new may be discovered and learned.
Yet the truth is always just there, waiting for us to encounter it on the other side of the mirror.
I wrote my first columns in 2004 for the Meta Arts, and since then, I have claimed repeatedly that this ability to have the direct transpersonal experience of the sacred realms that defines the shaman is one of our birthrights.
By equipping us with this birthright, evolution has offered us a truly great gift through which we may bypass all the fears and blocks inserted into us by our religious authorities at large, allowing us to access ‘the Dreaming’ once again for power and protection, for support and wisdom, for healing and problem solving.
There is no question today that by walking this path, each of us may have access to the full spectrum of human consciousness as well as to the multiple realities available to us within the realm of ‘things hidden.’
My wife Jill and I have just returned to our island home from offering several presentations and shamanic training workshops on the mainland, a series that began in Oregon and culminated at the well-known Esalen Institute on the central California coast of Big Sur. For those interested in our activities and ongoing insights about the reemergence of the primordial spirituality in our own time, we do have a free monthly e-newsletter that can be accessed by signing up on our website <www.sharedwisdom.com>
That said, until next month, 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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