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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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More Thoughts from the Trail—about The Christos.
In our last column (06/09) we opened up an area of depth—a nefarious region where most spiritual seekers… and even theologians… fear to tread.
In doing so, I made an observation… that the original visionary revelations that were experienced directly by the founders of our mainstream organized religions in the Western world today (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are now so far back in the past that we cannot even perceive them accurately, let alone understand them from reading, listening to and adhering to scripture.
Since those days, thousands of years in the past now, history has documented how the salaried and bureaucratized priesthoods reorganized their emerging and ever-changing religions to suit themselves as well as the times in which they lived. History also reveals how these priests intentionally distorted, censored and rewrote the original teachings and revelations of their founders to support and reinforce their own political and ideological agendas.
The end result is that today’s priests and rabbis, mullahs and bishops now have the extraordinary presumption to present themselves to us as the exclusive intermediaries between ourselves, as well as our communities, and the supernatural realms that they claim to know so much about.
Yet as we have observed, with rare exceptions, most of these worthies possess no visionary abilities themselves. In fact, most of them are no more likely than the members of their communities to encounter the transpersonal forces that the traditional people call spirits, nor have most of them even had a glimpse of the transpersonal worlds that these forces inhabit.
Despite this… our religious specialists, in all their assumed importance, rigidly adhere to and teach what they themselves have been taught by other non-visionaries who relied on scripture themselves. And so almost without exception, those priests will never convey any new visionary experiences of their own to enhance and refresh the original revelations of their religions’ founders.
Many writers and theologians have called this one of the truly great tragedies of the modern world—that the spiritually blind have for so long been allowed to mislead and misguide the spiritually blind about the very experiences and revelations that gave rise to our religious traditions in the first place.
And this is precisely why these religions are destined to fail us—and to be relegated to the dustbin of history…
The writer Graham Hancock adds (in his seminal book Supernatural) 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, have been intentionally and continually 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… and where nothing new may be discovered and learned.
Yet the truth is always just there, waiting for us to encounter it just on the other side of the mirror. For this is the epicenter of the shaman’s path—the direct, transpersonal and transformative experience of the sacred realms that defines the visionary.
Let us now say a bit more about this, not so much to bash the authorities of our organized religions although many of them certainly deserve it, but rather to give my readers permission to open the doorway into an experience of spiritual freedom and growth that has not existed in the Western world for almost 2000 years.
It is in this way that we may raise our personal and collective anchor, lifting it out of the negative polarity and replanting it into the positive. And this is long overdue…
The question now arises: Are you, the reader, ready to do this??
Many may say that they are, but in my ongoing workshops with members of the transformational community, I perceive that many are not. The requirement is that you become an adventurer and be ready to jump ship, abandon everything that you have counted upon as real and meaningful, and engage in an adventurous quest into the unknown.
This is about change, and the Law of Evolution states that everything changes. No escape, no denial, no religious doctrine or dogma or social drama will reverse this law. Everything changes, and you, the reader, are changing even as you read this column.
But what does this mean for all of us here in the world of illusion, trapped in the world of entertainment and television and endless, meaningless sporting events whose sole purpose is to distract us. As long as we are so distracted, most of us will never find out who we are, what we are doing here and what this whole thing is all about?
And THAT is a question worth considering. But are you, the reader, willing to do this? Are you willing to relinquish all that Western culture has handed out to you as valuable and branded as worthy, even desirable, and embark on the spiritual quest?
Here for our consideration is a testimonial to one such hero. In 2004, a Canadian Anglican theologian and priest named Tom Harpur published a book titled The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. It became an instant best-seller in Canada.
In this exceptional book, Harpur reveals, with extensive notes as well as exceptional and intensive scholarship that extends back to the First Century AD, that the central Christos myth, which in its many different forms lies at the heart of every religion, both ancient and modern, firmly establishes that the single theme (in fact the central teaching) of all religion is the incarnation of the divine into the human.
Furthermore, while the sun is the source (and thus the literal creator) of all that is in our solar system, it is also by its light alone that we are able to know and see everything that exists. Therefore, it was a natural symbol in antiquity for the ultimate being… for God.
Thus the radiant figure of the Sun God, who represented at the same time both the divine and also humanity divinitized, was at the core of the Christ mythos in ancient times, from Hercules in Greece to Horus in Egypt, and of course Jesus of Nazareth. Through these symbolic archetypes, humanity could see pictured their own history, their destiny, and their eventual conversion into gods—into beings of light.
And the myth? Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess and archetypal symbolic manifestation of love, had another name four thousand years ago—the name ‘Mery’… that means ‘beloved.’ And her son Horus who was and is the pagan Christ… his other name was Iusa (Yesua)… In fact, Horus was and is the archetype, the pagan Christ who is the source of the Christos myth in Christianity.
Harpur reiterates a fact well known to mythologists everywhere—that a myth is a fictional story that was never intended to be mistaken as fact, and yet within every myth are stories that embody timeless truths that are real. Even children can understand this.
In his book, Harpur reveals how the Christos myth that permeates the often error filled accounts of the apostles was borrowed part and parcel from the Egyptian mystery teachings of 2000 years before the time that the historical Jesus was purported to have lived. History’s analysis of Paul’s ‘story,’ for example, reveals it to be so riddled with factual and geographic errors that it is doubtful he was ever in the Holy Land.
Harpur, backed up by relentless scholarship, presents the evidence that the theologians of the early church took the central story of the Christos, what was always supposed to be understood as a myth, and created a figurative flesh and blood Jesus—an embodied hybrid god-human on Earth for the common people to believe in as a messiah.
Harpur also describes this political act as ‘the shadow of the Third Century,’ and once the church had adopted the Christ myth from the Egyptians, they did everything they could to stamp out any evidence of their mythos’ pagan roots including the extensive works of the Second Century theologian Origen that were burned in their entirety.
Tom Harpur has done all our researching for us—revealing the entire amazing account for us to marvel at and absorb. Of course, part of the conclusions of his book that some readers may find disturbing is that it is highly doubtful that a flesh and blood Jesus ever lived. The entire story of Jesus, from his immaculate conception, his birth in the manger, the reverence of the three kings right up to his sacrifice at the end, was and is a reworking of the myth of Horus of Egypt.
But the myth itself, correctly understood, reveals that the Christos is the name given to the incarnate presence of God within us, and that the Christos, known by many names in many cultures, is present within all humanity as its common spiritual property…
Understanding this and accepting it is the key that will open the doorway in our hearts and release the potential power of the Christos that resides there within each one of us. By doing so, everyone will realize their innate divine nature and their own spiritual power.
It is through our personal awareness of this extraordinary fact that the Christos, the Christ force may be unleashed to spiritualize our own nature. By doing so, each of us becomes a fragment of ‘God’ with the divine potential to eventually become gods ourselves.
Unfortunately none of our monotheistic traditions—Judaism, Christianity in the Western tradition, nor Islam affirms this progression, although the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition does. (Please see my column for 6/08 on Deity Mysticism in the Meta Arts Archives.)
At the risk of descending into prophesy, allow me to observe that this is why a new religion is taking form in our time—a new mystical tradition that embodies a more expanded level of awareness that, in turn, is generating a new perception of our ‘self’, as well as a new sense of how reality is put together, providing us with a new upgraded perception of who we are, what we are doing here, and what our destiny as souls traveling across eternity will be.
The fact is that each one of us in every culture, in every religion, and at every level of society, embodies the Christos—the seed of light that was planted within us by our god-self—our oversoul or spiritual higher self--when we drew our first breath. And it will remain within us until we release our last breath at life’s end.
Perhaps the time has come for us to begin to accept this and to think thoughts, feel feelings, say words, engage in relationships and live our lives as though we are embodied ‘gods in training.’
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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