Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future by Hank Wesselman

Author:Hank Wesselman [Wesselman, Hank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-57399-5
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 2012-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

My excitement about my experiences was tempered by caution. My academic colleagues had given a vitriolic reception to Carlos Castaneda’s well-known books about his apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer. Castaneda’s work was steeped in controversy almost from the start, and most professional anthropologists believe he had made up a story and foisted it on the world as the real thing. To the anthropological establishment, the fact that his books became immensely popular and made a lot of money was the kiss of death. One of my professors at Berkeley ranted against Castaneda’s work, calling it cultural anthropology’s equivalent of the Piltdown man hoax. Perhaps this tirade was due to the professor’s never having experienced an altered state. Harner says that individuals who have the most difficulty in achieving the shamanic state of consciousness tend to be in highly structured, “left-brain” professions. My academic colleagues would probably share my own inner professor’s skepticism about my experiences. Most anthropologists have highly trained intellects that become ever more narrowly focused on their specialty areas. Many are completely unaware of the nature of their subconscious and how it functions.

Albert Einstein, it is said, went sailing to relax after intellectually wrestling with a problem that he couldn’t quite solve. During his sail a bolt of intuition suddenly showed him the solution. From the Ho’omana perspective, Einstein’s solution probably originated from his aumakua, came in through his ku, and was received by his lono intellect. The ku, which is gratified by any pleasurable physical activity, must have been delighted at being outdoors, in dynamic association with nature. Under these circumstances Einstein’s ku responded to his need for information, rewarded him in turn with a momentary expanded state, made contact with his aumakua, which is in touch with the collective informational matrix, and the problem’s solution was revealed.

I could also now see why Nainoa might think that the cross represented the human aumakua in nonordinary reality. Other ancient cultures also use it as a spiritual symbol. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for instance, I have seen crosses embroidered on the breast and knees of a Chukchi shaman’s costume. Ethnographic data obtained when the outfit was acquired in Siberia in the 1800s revealed the crosses to be birds, symbolic abstractions of the shaman’s spirit flight into nonordinary reality.3

Even the Neanderthal people may have used the cross as a symbol. A small round stone engraved crudely but definitely with a cross—from the site of Tata in Hungary4—has been dated at fifty thousand years before the present. It is one of the earliest examples of symbolic expression in human evolution. It may mean that the Neanderthals had shamans or that they used the cross as a symbol for an abstract concept. Like the stone monolith, the cross found its way out of the human mind and into the art of most of the world’s prehistoric cultures.

Viewed from this perspective, the image of Jesus on the cross acquires an entirely new, expanded meaning: a composite symbol of both the spiritual teacher and his aumakua aspect.

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