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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Hank Wesselman. Hank is a paleoanthropologist and a shamanic practitioner whose expeditions have been featured in several Time Magazine cover stories. Since 1971, Hank has 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.
Previously, he has authored a series of books chronicling the tales of altered state experiences that began spontaneously out in the bush of Africa. His most recent work with Sounds True is called The Re-Enchantment: A Shamanic Path to A Life of Wonder which is Hank’s offering for us to find a way to reclaim the wonder and hope that will give meaning to our lives.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Hank and I spoke about the personal over-soul and how we, each in his experience, have three distinct souls, including an immortal aspect of ourselves that reports in, if you will, to our personal over-soul. We talked about Hank’s experiences with Sophia, what he refers to as the world soul and how this word soul communicates with him.
Hank also shared why he places so much emphasis in his book The Re-Enchantment on connecting with nature and how he believes the depth and reverence we have for nature is actually a critical factor in our survival as a species. Finally, for anyone interested in following the shamanic path, Hank shares three qualities that he looks for in a shamanic teacher. Here’s my conversation with Hank Wesselman.
Hank, you’ve written a new book called The Re-Enchantment. To begin with, I’d love to just talk about that title. It implies that we were once enchanted, but then we lost it, and now we have a chance to become re-enchanted. Tell me what you mean by that.
Hank Wesselman: Well, when I was a little boy, my parents and I lived in an apartment along the Upper East Side of New York City and we used to go to the park, my mother and I, on a daily basis. I remember when I was about three or four years old looking up at the trees in Central Park and having this deep insight that the trees were living beings like myself, but they were different.
Then I looked down at the pigeons that were mobbing each other on the sidewalks for the bread crumbs my mother was spreading out for them and I realized that they were living beings like myself, but they were different. Then there was the squirrel. It was just your average everyday grey squirrel, but the squirrel, I remember coming down and leaping onto the side of my stroller, and looking deeply into my eyes with that black liquid eye for one very long moment, and my mother gave me a peanut. Being naïve, I held out the peanut in my trembling little fingers and the squirrel snatched the peanut and fled up the tree where it shredded the peanut and then returned for more.
This was like being enchanted and being enchanted by none other than Mother Nature herself through a rather hyper furry ambassador, the squirrel. Of course, then there was the zoo. There’s a zoo in Central Park and my mother took me there on a regular basis and the imagery from my childhood still remains to me to this day. The seals cavorting in their outside pond always accompanied by the odor of raw fish.
Then there was the hippopotamus and the crocodile, and the birds in their aviaries. Then one day I saw this animal of incomparable beauty. It was a leopard and it was in a cage. As the leopard paced in ever-tightening circles, I was aware of the fact that within this beautiful spotted body there was a great will that lay imprisoned. Now of course, I didn’t understand what that meant, but something happened in those moments. As my mind drifted into the daydream, I found myself in a place of blueness.
I’ve written about this in The Re-Enchantment, a place of blueness where there were no bars and I was there with the leopard, and for one very long moment the leopard looked into my soul with his green gaze, and something happened. Now in retrospect, I reach for it but I can’t grasp it. Something happened and I cannot remember it, but it was like I had been enchanted once again by my connection with the animal world. With the natural world. The leopard became like my imaginary friend. Kind of like Calvin and Hobbes.
I remember this wonderful cartoon strip, Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin was the little boy and he had a stuffed animal named Hobbes, but for Calvin, Hobbes was a real being. They would have adventures and do things together. It was kind of like that. I realized when I was a little boy that these connections with the natural world enchanted me and then of course as I grew up, the enchantment withdrew, but the mystery remained. When I was out in nature, when I was on the university campus, when I was at the beach, I had a job as a life guard on the South Shore of Long Island in the Hamptons, when I was looking at the moon over the ocean.
I was aware of the fact that there was something. I came to think of it as the mystery and I didn’t really know how to describe it, but I was aware of the fact that it was aware of me, whatever it is. It’s elusive because I think that’s the nature of the mystery to remain elusive and it always remained just out there where we couldn’t quite grasp it. In retrospect and today my feeling is that it’s the nature of the mystery to draw us forward toward our destiny—towards the path on which we walk. To become that which we’re destined to become.
Then in Africa, that’s when the re-enchantment began. As you know and my readership knows, I’m a paleoanthropologist who was educated in the zoology department initially at the University of Colorado Boulder and then I did my research and my doctoral work at Berkeley and I was drawn into connection with an expedition working in East Africa with the Leaky family. The famous Leaky family and Don Johanson, the guy who would find Lucy, and so forth and so on. I would be in a safari camp for three or four months at a time living in a tent out in these surreal desert landscapes excavating fossils, doing survey work, doing geology work, and I began to have these very strange experiences.
I had recorded some of these in The Re-Enchantment. These were experiences that happened while I was very much awake—during the daytime. I remember one particular experience. I was excavating a site with three African men. Two of them were Yoruba tribesman from Kenya and one was a Daasanach tribal man from Southwestern Ethiopia. From the Omo Valley named Otoko. People had told me that he was a shaman. In those days being an anthropologist, I had some idea of what shamans are. People told me that he was a crocodile whisperer.
He could communicate with the great crocodiles that lived in the Omo River and could swim across the river and they wouldn’t eat him. Now this was quite something because these crocodiles were as big as dinosaurs. Well one day I was out in these desert landscapes excavating a site where there were fossils—proto-humans, and bovids, and lagomorphs, and gazelles, and crocodiles, and fish, and turtles, and all sorts of things. I’d begun to have this ongoing feeling that I was being observed by something.
Now this is a kind of creepy feeling because often we would be hundreds of yards from where the car was parked and there were leopards, and lions, and hyenas, and buffalo there—all of which are dangerous. There’s this feeling that you’re being watched by something is concern-making to say the least. Well one day we were just about to go back to camp for lunch and this feeling came over me very strongly.
I stood up very carefully and began to look around under my bush hat. The Yoruba men were loading up the equipment into the Land Rover to go back to camp for lunch, but Otoko the shaman was looking at something off to my left. Very slowly I slid my eyes in that direction and I saw something. It was big. It was as big as I am and it was about six feet off the ground.
As I looked directly at it, it was as though whatever it was stepped through a tear in the fabric of the air and then zipped it closed from the other side, leaving a momentary wrinkle that straightened out and was gone. Now, I’m looking at this and thinking, “Maybe it’s time to go back to Nairobi and have a milkshake and a hamburger.” I realized that I’d been out in the bush for several months and these strange experiences were going on for me on an ongoing basis.
I looked at the shaman and he was watching me. In Swahili, I could speak some Swahili by this time, I looked at him and said, “Otoko, quanini?” What is that? He gave me this long measuring look and then he smiled and he pointed at exactly the place where it had been and said a single word in Swahili. He said the word Shetani. That’s the Swahili word for spirit.
Now in those days I worshiped solely at the altar of science. I wasn’t the least bit interested in the soul. I was not the least bit interested in Buddhism, or meditation. That would all come later. I wasn’t sure I believed in spirits, but that experience and others that I had which I also recorded in The Re-Enchantment., these experiences haunted me for years.
Then about ten years later, I was in Berkeley finishing up my doctoral work in anthropology on my research projects, and a friend of mine called me up and said, “Listen, there’s this anthropologist coming in and he’s going to do a workshop in shamanism. His name is Michael Harner. You’re going to love it. It’s your type of thing.” Well, I’d never heard of Michael Harner before, but there was something about those experiences in Africa that nagged me so I decided to go to the workshop and there I was in this workshop with the great Michael Harner himself beating his drum.
We’re all lying on our backs in this high school gymnasium in the dark supposedly making shamanic journeys into the other world to connect with spirits. As part of the weekend, Harner had us team up with somebody who we didn’t already know. The goal was for each of us to find a helping spirit for the other. I found myself teamed up with this very attractive slender young woman with long dark hair and dark eyes named Sandra Ingerman.
Sandra Ingerman, at that time, was a graduate student and counselling psychology at the CIIS in San Francisco, so she agreed to do a shamanic journey on my behalf. There I am lying on my back in the dark next to this strange woman listening to Harner beating his drum—and there’s a side of me which is just skeptical to the max. I’m thinking, “This is all new age woo-woo,” and then suddenly Sandy sits up next to me in the dark, looks down at me with this intense look.
You know Sandra Ingerman. You know how she can look intense. She leans over and places her mouth on my chest and blows into my heart—not once but several times. Something happened. Something elusive happened. I could feel it. Then she sat me up and blew into the top of my head. Then after waiting for the drumming to stop, she turned to me and she told me the story of how her conscious awareness had journeyed into the lower world of the dreaming of nature and there she had found a being who claimed it was one of my old friends and it wanted to come back into my life once again.
Then, much to my astonishment, she described the leopard—who I thought of as the leopard man because sometimes he’d stand up on his hind legs like a human being. I was just stunned because there was no way that she could have known about my childhood imaginary friend. In fact, I hadn’t thought about this friend in maybe over 20 years. That was also the beginning of my re-enchantment.
The rest of my story, my strange story, began to unfold by degrees. It was shortly after that that I moved to Kona with my wife and our children in the early 1980’s and I recorded what happened to me in my spiritual trilogy of these spontaneous visions in which I was drawn into connection with a man who lives in the future. That’s what makes it really sticky.
If I’d got this right, and I believe I do, this man lives approximately 5,000 years after the collapse of Western civilization and he, in all likelihood, may in fact be one of my descendants. One of my descendant selves, which would be part of the causality for the connection between us. Between the two of us, over the next 20 years or so, these extraordinary books Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker, and Visionseeker emerged. They’ve been very widely read. Spiritwalker has been translated into 14 languages abroad.
TS: OK, Hank. Now I have to ask you something here. I have to interrupt for a moment. Here you are, you’re talking to a figure in these spontaneous visions who is potentially a descendant of yours 5,000 years in the future after the collapse of Western civilization. Does this exist as a potentiality in your mind? It’s a potential, or since you had this experience, we’re sure Western civilization will collapse and these visions are an accurate reflection of how it’s going to be 5,000 years from now.
HW: Well, this is a very good question. Of course, there are no guarantees. My sense is that this man and I, if he is actually a descendant self, I believe that these visions, these experiences, reveal something interesting about the two of us as incarnating souls. I believe that, let’s say part of the contract, each one of us has a contract that’s like a cosmic contract when we come into life.
What’s written on that contract is held by a council of wise elder spirits who debrief us when we come out of life and will brief us once again when we come back into life. I believe that the contract that this man and I share is that we would come into life, me in my slice of time, him in his slice of time, and create a timeline between the two of us.
What that means is that if our world, as it exists today, goes to hell in a handbasket, and it could because it’s known that virtually all civilizations states eventually collapsed, it means that his slice of time already exists. It’s already out there. This is a kind of guarantee, isn’t it, that we will go on and life will continue. Our travels across eternity will continue to draw us forward toward that which we’re destined to become.
It’s a very strange story, the Spiritwalker story. People have asked me if this future time is assured and whether our civilization will collapse and my answer tends to be, “Look, if we continue to do business as usual, and we seem to be doing that, the world that we’re walking straight into is the world that I’ve described in the Spiritwalker books.”
People like this. They like the world that I’ve described. In fact, they perceive it as preferable to the one in which we live today. Yet everything that we take so much for granted, our high technology, our BMWs, Starbucks, our cities, our freeways, it’s all gone. The people in that time live in a kind of neolithic future in which there is no technology. In which they’ve gone back to the ancient life way of being merged with the land. Of being farmers, and fisher-people—marine communities on the coast, farming communities inland.
It’s a time of balance. It’s a time of harmony. Interestingly, Tami, these people in the future live somewhere on the Western coast of North America. They’re of Hawaiian ancestry who arrived roughly seven generations before this man whose name is Nainoa, before he was born. Although they are Hawaiian by ancestry, they’re actually living somewhere around the edge of what they call the Inland Sea.
The inland sea appears to be a marine inundation in the central valley of California. California itself doesn’t look anything like it does today. It looks more like Costa Rica or the Amazon with tremendous rain-forests, and jaguars, and iguanas, and crocodiles, and parrots, and monkeys, and so forth. How do I know it’s California? Well, that’s revealed in this strange story.
I haven’t really talked about that story in The Re-Enchantment, but The Re-Enchantment has allowed me to get into my field notes. When I was in the field in Ethiopia, and Kenya, and Tanzania working as an anthropologist, I always kept a field journal in which I would makes notes on a daily basis of my experiences. A lot of the experiences in The Re-Enchantment record unpublished accounts of some of the very odd things that have happened. Some of the visionary experiences that have happened.
Are there any of these that particularly appeal to you just out of curiosity?
TS: Well, to be honest, what I’m really interested in is the picture, if you will, the architecture of the unseen world that your visionary experiences seem to point to and that’s what I’d like to focus some of our conversation on if that’s OK.
I think some of the intense visionary experiences will come to light in that conversation. For example, you talk about something called the personal over-soul. That we each have a personal over-soul and I wanted to understand more what you mean by that and what your inner experiences are that give you confidence that we have a personal over-soul.
HW: This is a very interesting question. I’m aware of the fact having been involved with the Zen Buddhist tradition for maybe 15 years that the self is perceived to be an illusion in Buddhism. Through my experiences with the shamanic tradition, this has been revealed to me to be a very interesting theory. Unfortunately it’s an error. There is indeed a self.
In fact, there are two selves. There’s our physically embodied self here and our spiritual over-self there—that lives forever in the dream. Through my connection with the kahuna, Hale Makua, he was the kahuna [unknown word 00:23:07] here on the islands and my last book with you guys, The Bowl of Light was about my relationship with him.
We talked about the fact that each one of us is a complex made up of three distinct souls. There’s the physical soul, our embodied soul which we receive from our mother and our father through the gametes—through the sex cells that come from the mother and the father which includes all ancestral imprints. In the same way that there’s a genetic complex that comes from the mother and from the father that comes together to create a new pattern, there’s also a psychic/energetic complex that comes from the mother and the father.
It’s understood in many societies, and I’ve talked about this before, that when we come into life, each one of us is sourced from the dream into this world by our over-soul, the immortal aspect of our self that does not die. The over-soul divides itself, sends in a seed of its light, which is kind of like a hologram in the sense that it contains within itself everything which is recorded in the over-soul field.
As we emerge from our mother’s body and take our first breath, we are ensouled by this spiritual essence that comes into us. Now this spiritual essence, the first thing that it discovers is that there is another soul already in place. This is the physical soul that we already got from our mother and our father. The first goal of this spiritual over-soul is to achieve a successful relationship with this physical soul.
Then between the two of them, the physical soul and the spiritual soul, the third soul comes into being in response to life as we live it and this is our egoic mental soul. The aspect of our self that thinks, analyzes, integrates, makes decisions, practices discernment. It’s the source of our intentionality. It’s the source of our creative imagination and, in a sense, it’s the aspect of our self that tells the physical soul what needs to be done.
The physical soul is like the enabler—the source of our emotions and feelings. The operator of the physical body. The inner healer that people talk about. The interface between our self and the other. The other being, the other world. That gateway into the other world exists within the physical soul. There has to be a right relationship between the mental soul and the physical soul for things to work well.
The over-soul maintains its connection with us during life and it serves us as the source of our intuition—inspiration. It communicates with us best by sending us dreams, and visions, and ideas, and slips of the tongue in response to our need to know. This is explored in some detailed in the book The Bowl of Light—the over-soul.
The over-soul is our Heavenly spiritual self there and the embodied soul is our physically embodied self here and they’re in a co-creative relationship because at the end of life, if I’ve got this right, and I believe I do, when the physical body dies, the entire soul complex, consisting of the three souls and the energy body, detaches when we release our last breath.
It goes through the energetic/psychic level into the dream where it spends time in the bardo, which Buddhists know a great deal about, until it releases its connections to this world here and it ascends to return home whereupon everything that we have done, felt, and endured in life is archived into our over-soul field, which grows, increases, and becomes more in response to what we’ve done and become. This is what I mean by the co-creative relationship.
The ego is particularly interesting to me in this regard because, I think it was Robert Monroe who observed in his book, Journeys Out of the Body, that this whole New Age preoccupation with getting rid of your ego or dropping your ego is a tremendous error. He said we actually embody to develop an ego. The ego is our chooser. It’s our decision-maker. It’s our creative ability.
By developing an egoic self here, we take those qualities and abilities back into our over-soul there at the end of life which is the process of becoming a creator being. This is something we explored in The Re-Enchantment. I think I have a little chapter on the over-soul and its relationship with its own teacher that could be called the spirit guide.
TS: Here’s one of the questions I have for you just to make this very real for people, Hank. You say, in The Re-Enchantment, again and again what’s important is direct revelation. What’s important is your own experience, not hearing teachings like this and saying, “I believe them,” but knowing in your experience what’s true. How did you come to see the personal over-soul in your own life? Was there some initiatory experience for you?
HW: Let me say that I’m aware of it all the time. I sometimes ask students in my training workshops, “How many of your guys talk to yourselves in the shower?” About half the room will put up their hands. “How many of you talk to yourselves when you’re driving alone in the car?” More than half the room will put up their hands. I’ll look at them and say, “Who are you talking to?”
They say, “Well, we’re talking to ourselves.” I’ll say, “Of course you are, but which self are you talking to? Your physically embodied self here or your spiritual self there?” You see, this seed of light that resides within us, if I’ve got this right, and I believe I do, it resides within our hearts.
This is why the Buddhists call the heart the Gateless Gate. This is the gateway into the other world and because of that seed of light that resides within our heart, it’s like an open microphone to this complex field that I think of as they guys upstairs. I think of it as the guys upstairs because archived into my over-soul field are all of my former selves, all of my former lives. They’re all very much aware of me. They all have a very vested interest in my well-being.
In my shamanic journey work, when I connect with my over-soul field, I will invite my over-soul to send in a representative into a particular place of vision which I created for myself in the middle world of dream. Inevitably, it’s one of my former selves who is walking on a path very similar to the one I’m walking right now who comes to advise me and we have these extraordinary conversations, many of which are recorded.
The over-soul is an aspect of the direct revelatory experience which I simply stumbled into. As I pointed out in The Re-Enchantment, I’m not one of those people who sat for decades at the knees of the wisdom masters hoping for visions and transcendent experiences practicing meditation and yoga. It just happened for me and this is in alignment with the fact that this ability to access, to expand my conscious awareness, and connect with the other world, it appears to run in my family.
This is something I have talked about in my other books. Specifically in the Spiritwalker trilogy. What really defines the shaman and the shaman’s path of direct revelation. There’s a lot of confusion in the Western world between the kind of work that shamans do and the kind of work that medicine people do. This confusion exists, in my opinion, because every shaman is a medicine person, but not all medicine people are shamans.
In fact, it’s been my experience, living with indigenous people in Africa and experiencing American Indian people in North America, and Central America, and South America, it’s been my experience that most of the medicine people I’ve encountered are not shamans, but they fulfill social roles more like those of priests or priestesses. What do I mean by this? It means that they serve their communities as ceremonial ritual leaders and they do their main work here in this world.
They may also have a great deal of knowledge about the healing arts. The plant medicines, massage, physical medicine, but they do their main work here. The shaman is an individual who discovers, sometimes in childhood like myself, or sometimes in adulthood like myself when I stumbled back into it again, that they have the ability to go into trance very easily. In this respect, trance is not an unconscious experience. It’s more of a super-conscious experience.
In that trance experience, they’re able to re-geography. They’re able to remove their conscious awareness into the dream world. Into this other world that the indigenous people call the spirit world and there they make an extraordinary discovery. This dream world is inhabited. It’s inhabited by trans-personal forces that the traditional people call spirits. There are different kinds of spirits.
There are elemental spirits who are earth-bound. There are nature spirits, animal spirits, and plant spirits. There are the spirits of ancestors. The spirits of the dead. There are the higher organizing intelligences, some of which are called the angelic forces. These spiritual dimensions appear to be organized in very much the same way from the perspective of shamans all over the world.
The shaman is a universal figure found in some form in every culture in the world and the interesting thing Tami is that all of these shamans see the other world in very much the same way. They see it as organized into three great cosmic regions. There are the worlds below this one, which they call the lower worlds, which are the dreaming of nature.
There are the worlds all around us all the time which could be called the middle world of dream, which is also where the bardo worlds are, where we go when we make transition. Then there are the upper worlds above us where the higher organizing intelligences reside, some of whom serve humanity as teachers and advisors.
The over-soul is one of those higher in our organizing intelligences. In fact, it’s our own personal organizing intelligence with whom we are in relationship for the long term. As we grow, increase, and become more it grows, increases, and becomes more in response. This is what I mean by a co-creative relationship.
TS: You also speak about something in The Re-Enchantment the world soul. The world soul herself. You tell a pretty astonishing story of how you met and encountered an experience of the world soul. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that?
HW: I can. Did you like that story?
TS: I did, Hank. You’re a terrific storyteller.
HW: Thank you for the compliment. I’ll try and live up to it. The Gnostics of antiquity were the university professors of the ancient world for 1,000 years before they were exterminated by the emerging Christians. The Gnostics had this incredible myth in which at the center of every galaxy is a dark region. We call them black holes and these dark regions were called the pleroma.
The dark regions were believed to be inhabited by creator-beings that the Gnostics called the Aeons. The Aeons are great beings who are sourced by the source itself, that they call the originator, and the entire organization and maintenance of each galaxy is governed by these god-like beings that reside at the galactic center. One of these god-like beings was the one called the Sophia. The Greeks called her Gaia after the teachings of the mystics of their time and the mystery schools of their time and place.
Sophia was the one according to the Gnostics who dreamed the dream of the arthropods, of humanity. She fell in love with her dream so she did something extraordinary. She left the safety of the pleroma and she flowed out into the arms of chaos as a river of conscious light. She came into relationship with a star, with our star, and she solidified it so that this beautiful planet, Earth, is her physical body and her spiritual essence, her soul, resides in the skin of life that surrounds this planet.
She’s the life force embodied who breathes essence and wonder into ourselves and into the world. Now the Gnostics had this incredible myth of the Sophia and I was given a book years ago by Michael Craft at the Omega Institute—a book written by John Lamb Lash called Not In His Image in which he explores a great deal of what’s recorded in the Nag Hammadi texts which were discovered in Egypt, I believe in 1945 or 1946, which preserved some of the teachings of these ancient Gnostics before they were all gone. He talks about the Aeons and he talks about the Sophia and I was quite struck by his information.
I made contact with him through his website and after the initial guarded connections, I guess you could call them, he realized that I was for real and he went to my website and he saw the books that I had published and so forth and so on. In our discussion, which came to an end shortly thereafter, he revealed to me that he had given the Sophia a name—a new name and this is in alignment with the fact that the Sophia who lives in the biosphere, she loves innovation and this is very much in alignment with the evolutionary process when you think about it.
I think it was Charles Darwin who observed that God must have had a wonderful perception or appreciation of beetles because there are over 250,000 different species of beetles. This is species diversity to the max. There seems to be this built-in universal impulse within the universal process toward diversity—towards ever-increasing diversification. He came into a relationship with the Sophia through meditations and he gave her a new name to which she responds.
He gave me that name and I was quite struck by this. It’s a name in Sanskrit and I wondered why he chose Sanskrit and he said, “Well, I could have chosen any language in the world, but this is an ancient language.” In the connections that I’ve had with Sophia, I decided to try to use this name to see if I could get her to respond. I recorded a couple of stories in The Re-Enchantment about my connections with the Sophia in which I achieved a meditative shamanic state of consciousness and allowed myself to expand.
Then I turned my attention toward her and uttered her name in a breathy whisper, as though I was talking to my lover in the midst of a joyous marital encounter and she responded, but it wasn’t like I was face to face with a winged superhuman. It was more like natural process. For example, I remember being at the Breitenbush Hot Springs Conference Center in Northern Oregon in July and it was just breathlessly hot.
This complex lives in the great forests of Northern Oregon. The tress are 100 feet high, they have a beautiful river, they have hot springs, it is very tribal, and I teach there three or four times a year. I remember walking down this road through this tunnel of trees, in this breathless heat, and suddenly I stopped. I looked this way, and I looked that way, and I was alone. I closed my eyes and I expanded my conscious awareness. This is a very easy thing to do once you learn how to do it.
Then I uttered her name three times and then I waited. Suddenly up through this tunnel of trees came this wind and this wind was just ice cold. It was as cold as the North wind. I was surrounded by this wind which was blowing my hair this way and that way. Rocks and flying, the dust was flying, and then suddenly it was gone. I took that as a response. There’s no way this cold wind could have approached me on this breathlessly hot day.
Then there was the event that happened at the beach here in Kona where I went down to the ocean on a day when the ocean was completely flat and I did the same thing. I accessed the shamanic state of consciousness and then I extended my awareness towards her and uttered her name three times and I waited. Then three times a wave came and broke right at my feet. Then the ocean was flat again. I took that as a response.
I believe, Tami, that these kinds of experiences could actually happen to us all the time, but most of us miss it because we’re not paying attention or we don’t believe it’s possible. The Sophia, there’s another aspect of the Sophia that I didn’t talk about in The Re-Enchantment that sometimes when I’m drumming, for example, for a group I will turn my attention in the direction of the Sophia and utter her name three times and then wait. You know what it feels like if you take an orange from the refrigerator and you press it against your face?
TS: Yes.
HW: I got this strange sensation of something cold and sort of porous that presses itself against my face and I think it’s the Sophia or I’ll have the experience where suddenly one nostril, not both, but one nostril will slowly start to drip in response to my connection with her. It’s a very strange experience, but then I have a very strange life. That’s why the subtitle of my book is A Shamanic Path to a Life of Wonder.
TS: I’m curious here because I can imagine someone who’s listening and they’re saying, “Hank Wesselman has a great imagination. What a great storyteller. No wonder his trilogy Spiritwalker, about his visionary experiences, sold so many books. This guy can really tell a story. Here I am though, and I want more wonder in my life, and not just wonder, I’d like to have confidence in the existence of my personal over-soul, so that as Hank described, when there’s physical death, I’ll have confidence the way that Hank has in a continuity of experience and a re-consolidating and sharing of wisdom with my personal over-soul. I want to meet Sophia, the world soul herself. I’d like that.”
What do you say to that person who’s listening, who’s open-minded, but wants their own experience?
HW: Well, some things have to believed to be seen. That’s a glib way to put it, but I think the first step is to really understand the nature of the all that is and that’s part of the goal of the shamanic path. It was Hale Makua who said, “You know, the first two question we have to address is ‘Who are you?'” and this hinges directly on what he talked about in terms of the three souls, including the over-soul, the immortal aspect of the self that does not die. The aspect of the self that reveals that we are all immortals traveling across time and that there is continuity after the death of the physical body.
The second question we have to ask is “Where are you?” Where are you on your path? Where are you on the path of your destiny? In order to understand where you are, Hale Makua would say, “You have to look back at where you began to really have a perception of how far you’ve come and this will help reveal to you where you are at this particular time.”
In terms of the Sophia, I described a connection with the Sophia in the book The Bowl of Light when the Hale Makua took me up onto the side of the great mountain of vision called Mauna Kea. We didn’t go to the top. We went up on the side where there’s a particular cinder crater. The cinder crater is shaped like a bowl and it’s very steep at the top and it evens out at the bottom.
He told me that this cinder crater was a direct entryway into the lower world of dream. He encouraged me first of all to walk around the rim of this crater three times. This is a story which I recorded in that chapter in The Bowl of Light called Speaking Woman because this place is called Whakawahine which means Speaking Woman. Well, when I went around the first time, he said, “You don’t have to go any further. I’ve been told that you can go down,” but I had to do it one more time to confirm something which I’d experienced.
When I went down into this crater, and I got to the bottom, it was a blazingly hot day. The sun was just like I was being cooked in a convection oven in the bottom of this crater. I would say it was probably about maybe 150/200 feet deep. I expanded my conscious awareness and invited the soul of the world, the spirit of this place, to come to me there. What happened was very slowly, the crater filled with mist. It filled with fog. This white, murky, milky radiance.
This mist filled with light and there was a voice. The voice told me things. Now I didn’t record what that voice told me in The Bowl of Light because these are private experiences, but I remember saying in this book and in The Re-Enchantment as well. Do you remember that story of the prophet Elijah, in I think it was the 9th century BC, having a meeting with the angel of the Lord.
It’s in the bible and the interesting thing is that Elijah didn’t see this angel as a winged super human. He perceived it as a radiant white light filled with a voice that communicated with him. That’s the Sophia. That’s the soul of our world. She is very concerned for us, in my experience, because she’s the one who breathed humanity into existence here. The shamans understand that everything that exists here in this world was dreamed here.
Everything that exists here has a dream aspect in the dream world. All the trees, all the birds, all the humans, we all have a dream aspect in the other world. I remember hearing shamans in many different societies in Africa. I’ve lived with, not visited, but lived with over 12 different traditional tribal groups of people in Africa during my checkered career as an anthropologist.
I remember hearing something from them and if I were to summarize it, it would come out something like this: “The animals and the plants own the wild places. The humans own the cities and the towns, but the shamans own the air.” Now, what does this mean? Well of course, the shamanic tradition involves the phenomenon which is known as soul flight. We’ve got many different religious practitioners of many different kinds on the planet today but only the shaman sanctified by their initiations and furnished with their bodies and spirits, only the shaman can venture into the mystical geography of the spirit world and they do it through the phenomenon of soul flight. This is what I mean by direct experience and when I began to have these experiences, there was no looking back. I’m sure it’s given all my academic colleagues real pause for thought.
TS: Hank, one of the things I want to ask you about with The Re-Enchantment is you’re not just referring to personal re-enchantment. You talked about it at first in terms of your early childhood experiences of wonder in nature and having a leopard man be your invisible best friend, but you’re also referring to it in terms of our collective potential to be re-enchanted. In the book you point to the fact that if this doesn’t happen, that it doesn’t bode well for our very survival as a species. I know you have a research specialty in the area of climate change as well as evolution, so I wonder if you could talk about that? Our collective re-enchantment.
HW: One of the ideas that comes forward very strongly in this book is the idea that I really feel that our collective survival as well as our collective thriving will involve, not only a re-enchantment of ourselves, but a re-enchantment of our relationship with the natural world. That’s where the truth is.
Everything that makes up our technological Western world is questionable, but everything that makes up nature is true. Nature is a complex library and, if you know how to read the symbols, it’s all there. All of the lessons that we need to learn. All of the qualities and abilities that we need to develop within ourselves.
I really perceive part of our thriving and surviving across time as a kind of re-enchantment of our relationship with nature. To me this is very important. This is very important. In terms of my own experience with climate change, that’s what I do as a scientist and I’m well-published in that field. That’s what my PhD dissertation was based on.
A sudden change in the climate where we went from a greenhouse world into an ice age world and in the tropics things got very dry, and the great forests dried up, and we had to make a living differently. This is when we began to pillage and plunder big carnivore game kills and we began to include animal protein in our diet on an ongoing basis because although all the fruiting trees around rivers and lakes were gone, there’s food out on the Savannah grasslands in Africa and it comes in a very concentrated form. Meat.
I know that the vegetarians may regard this as scant but the fact is that in the evolutionary record, the minute human beings start to eat meat, the brain starts to expand. As we move into an ecological niche, which involved ambush hunting of big game animals, our brain tripled in size in a million years. There’s a direct feedback relationship between animal protein and the development of this large brain.
This all happened in response to a dietary shift which all happened in response to a climatic shift. We’re now at that stage where we appear to be going back into the greenhouse world once again. This is very important. We have to really plan what to do. I don’t think we can reverse what’s been set into motion at this stage. I think it’s done.
What we have to do now is adapt to the changes that are about to befall us and, as I pointed out in The Re-Enchantment, there’s a very big chance that the sea level will rise between five and nine meters in the next 50 years. That will inundate every coastal city in the world and if the big ice sheets on the continent of Antarctica melt down, 90% of the world’s fresh water supply is there, sea levels will rise approximately 100 meters. Let’s say 350-390 feet.
This is very serious. The world that I’ve described as Nainoa’s world is really a greenhouse world. It’s after the greenhouse warming has happened. Understanding nature’s cycles is very important because the Sophia Mother Nature does not negotiate. Although businessmen, and attorneys, and psychologists say, “Everything is negotiable,” that’s a very nice theory. Unfortunately, Mother Nature does not negotiate—she responds and that response has already begun. That’s just an underlying message I sneak into all of my books and I think I included some information about that in The Re-Enchantment as well. I really feel that our salvation lies in the re-enchantment of our relationship with nature. That’s where I find hope for the future.
TS: Now you said these changes, the climate changes that we’re experiencing, are already so far advanced that we need to adapt. What did you mean by that when you said, “We need to adapt?”
HW: Well, we can’t reverse what’s already been set into motion. We’ve gone beyond the tipping point. We’ve known about these environmental changes for 30/35 years, and of course this information has been suppressed by our politicians and our corporate community because sea level rise is not going to be good for business. You know Black Elk. Everybody, I think, has read Black Elk Speaks. The old Black Elk was probably the last real traditional Indian.
He passed about 60 years ago and before he passed, he dictated his second book to another anthropologist named Joseph Epes Brown. It’s called The Sacred Pipe: The Seven Great Rituals of the Oglala Sioux. In this book, in the introduction, he describes the legend of White Buffalo Woman and how she gave the sacred pipe to the people. I think I recorded some of this in the book I wrote with Sandra Ingerman, Awakening to the Spirit World.
After she had presented the pipe to the people, she was about to leave the lodge that they had been set up to receive her and she turned. Now she was a buffalo who turned herself into a woman in order to interact with the humans. She turned and she looked at the Indians in the tent and she said, “Remember, in me there are four ages. In every age I shall return and look in on you and at the end it’ll be over.”
Now, what she meant was that the Lakota believe that there’s a buffalo that stands at the center of the Earth. The buffalo is like the dharma in Buddhism. The buffalo stands on four legs, but in every age the buffalo loses one leg and every year it loses one hair. They’re all in agreement now that the buffalo is standing on its last leg and it’s very nearly bald. They believe, and this was according to that myth, that with the ending of the fourth age, that the waters will rush in and everything will be destroyed.
That’s a very interesting thing for people who live in the center of North America to say because these people had never seen the ocean. The waters will rush in and everything will be destroyed. This is where Black Elk gets us off the hook.
He gets us off the hook by observing that as the waters rush in with our re-enchantment, with our relationship with nature, we can restore ourselves and we can continue and the cycle of ages will begin again at that point. From that point of re-harmonizing and re-balancing. That’s a very interesting myth. I believe I wrote about that with Sandy Ingerman in Awakening to the Spirit World.
TS: You did. Hank, as I’m listening to you now, I live in a place of great natural beauty, Boulder, Colorado, and I know you’re speaking today from Hawaii, another very natural beautiful place, and I’m curious what you have to say to the person who’s listening who is in a busy city. They may not at the end of listening to our conversation walk out into the mountains like I’ll have the chance to do or onto the beach like you’ll have the chance to do.
They’re walking out into the midst of potentially traffic and pollution and yet you’re saying this re-enchantment hinges, if you will, on our ability to connect deeply with the natural world. What would you say to that person?
HW: Well, first of all, I lived in Boulder for 10 years. I did my undergraduate work and my graduate work in zoology there from 1959 to 1969. I love Boulder and every time I go back there I can’t believe that I ever left. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I know that area very well—like the back of my hand. For the person who lives in an urban environment, I see the mystery in small acts that a lot of people miss, like I’ll look at a sparrow hopping along the sidewalk and I’ll see the breeze ripple the feathers on its bac, of this small inconsequential bird and I’m just thrilled by that.
I’ll feel the breeze come in through the door and I’ll think, “Oh, what have you got to tell me?” I know it’s a crazy thing, but very often these breezes will contain information if you turn your attention in their direction. I think it’s a matter of paying attention and allowing yourself to be wonder-struck by the beauty and the wonder of what it is to be embodied as a human on this beautiful world. For people who live in concrete and steel surroundings and glass surroundings all day, I remember that when I was a little boy my dining room window looked out on the concrete wall of the elevator shaft of the apartment building next door and so I was always looking at this grey wall in the twilight.
I had a wonderful imagination, since you brought up imagination, as a little boy and I would project this wonderful image of living on a tropical island. Running away to the South Seas like Marlon Brando or Robert Louis Stevenson and living on this tropical island and I held that dream when I was a little boy. Here I am living on this tropical island and a place that looks very much like Tahiti. I live surrounded by beauty and I’m growing food all over my land. Breadroot and coffee, and mangoes, and papayas, and pineapples, and citrus, and all sorts of wonderful things.
I think it’s a matter of paying attention and just allowing your attention to be drawn towards beauty, however that beauty reveals itself to you. I’m very fond of museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was one of my touchstones because my mother took me there when I was a little boy. Whenever I’m in New York, first of all I have to go to Central Park to say hello to all my trees. They’re a lot bigger now. A lot taller now than I remember when I was a boy. I go to the museum and I allow myself to be moved by the beauty and the power of the great art that we’ve created. These are the things that thrill me. That and reading. I’m a voracious reader.
TS: At the end of The Re-Enchantment you offer a couple of very helpful appendices. One’s on the role of the authentic shamanic teacher and the other is on the three qualities to look for in a shamanic teacher. I wonder as a final note, for the person who’s listening who’s thinking, “You know, I would like to study shamanism. I’d like to find a good shamanic teacher.” What should such a person look for?
HW: Well, when I encounter a shamanic teacher, I look for three things. The first thing I look for is humility. If you’re working with somebody who’s being autocratic and demanding and saying, “You can’t do this and you can’t do that. You’ve got to do it this way. You’ve got to do it that way,” you might be with the wrong person. Everybody’s got their own way of doing it. In my experience, the greatest teachers that I’ve encountered have all been very humble people.
The second quality I look for is reverence. This isn’t like some sort of pre-programmed reverence that is involved in going to church and being reverent. Reverence is a kind of active respect for everyone and everything that you encounter in life. In other words, no judgement. I look for that reverence. It’s very important to me. The third thing I look for in a shamanic teacher is discipline. Self-discipline. We are to know all that we possess with discipline.
If you’re working with a teacher who has watery boundaries or who violates their students’ boundaries, I’m thinking specifically sexually, you may be with the wrong person. This is a problem in the transformational community. It’s a problem with the yogic people. The shamanic people. I don’t know about the Buddhist community as well because I haven’t walked that path in a long time.
TS: It’s a problem.
HW: I look for reverence and I look for discipline. The really great shamanic teachers, their job is to help facilitate your path by getting you in touch with your spirits. I see my job as to facilitate this connection between my students and their spirits—their spirit helpers. Once that connection has been made, my job is essentially done and then my job is to get out of the way. It’s really wonderful because in a shaman’s world it gets you off the pedestal right from the start. It gets you out of the guru trip before you even get into it.
That’s a few words that I would leave with your listener. There are a lot of good shaman teachers out there. Sandra Ingerman is a wonderful teacher. Michael Harner’s foundation has many wonderful teachers in it. Everybody’s got their own ways of doing it, but this connection with nature and connection with the spiritual essence within nature seems to be the core practice which gets us going. Then once we progress through nature and mysticism, we move up the scale and into authentic deity mysticism and we’ve talked about that in The Re-Enchantment as well.
TS: I’ll leave that for people to discover on their own. I have been talking with Hank Wesselman who has released a new book called The Re-Enchantment: A Shamanic Path to a Life of Wonder. With Sounds True, Hank Wesselman has also written the book The Bowl of Light: Ancestral Wisdom from a Hawaiian Shaman and with Sandra Ingerman has co-authored the book Awakening to the Spirit World: The Shamanic Path to Direct Revelation. Hank, you always surprise me whenever we talk. I always enjoy talking to you. It’s a wild ride. Thank you so much.
HW: Oh, I look forward to crossing trails with you again.
TS: Thanks everyone for listening. SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey.
