Hank Wesselman - Medicinemaker: Mystic Encounters on the Shamans Path

More Praise for Hank Wesselmans
MEDICINEMAKER
Mystic Encounters on the Shamans Path

Hank Wesselman is that rare combination of visionary and scholar whose message has the ring of truth, clarity, and urgency. Medicinemaker is anchored in personal experience, not fantasy. It is a thrilling journey that challenges our complacent assumptions about reality.

Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Prayer Is Good Medicine

An engaging personal narrative of spontaneous nonordinary experiences bridging 5,000 years by paleoanthropologist Hank Wesselman, whose earlier book, Spiritwalker, set the stage for sharing his new inner adventures.

Michael Harner, author of The Way of the Shaman

Medicinemaker is Hank Wesselmans eloquently written, courageous true story about a scientist turned shaman who travels 5,000 years into the future. It is a powerful testimony to the timeless connections between spirit and the intuitions that bind us all together with love.

Judith Orloff, M.D., author of Second Sight

Wesselmans dramatic story continues and unfolds in a way to inspire us all.

Sandra Ingerman, author of Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self and A Fall to Grace

Wesselman makes a dramatic case for environmental activism.

Publishers Weekly

This edition contains the complete text
of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED .

MEDICINEMAKER
A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published 1998
Bantam trade paperback edition / 1999

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1998 by Henry Wesselman

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-50139
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-57365-0

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

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When heaven is about to confer
A great office upon a man,
It first exercises his mind with suffering,
And his sinews and bones with toil;
It exposes him to poverty
And confounds all his undertakings.
Then it is seen if he is ready.

MSHI

I am an anthropologist who works with a team of scientists investigating the eroded, ancient landscapes of eastern Africas Great Rift Valley in search of answers to the mystery of human origins. My academic training lies in the fields of environmental and evolutionary biology, geology and anthropology, and much of my research involves reconstructing the paleoenvironments of the prehistoric sites from which the fossilized remains of humanitys earliest ancestors have been recovered.

In Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future, I have written about how my life took a decidedly different turn in the early 1980s, while I was finishing up my doctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley. One foggy summer morning just before dawn, I experienced a full-fledged altered state of consciousness that occurred spontaneously, without the catalyst of any spiritual practice or mind-altering substances. While deep in this expanded state, I had a close encounter with what a tribal person might call a spirit. This episode was followed by several other vivid experiences accompanied by ecstatic feelings of force or power that rendered me physically paralyzed yet hyperaware. I was at a complete loss to explain these strange occurrences. I was not one of those who had spent decades studying at the knees of the wisdom masters, practicing meditation and yoga, hoping for visions and transcendent experiences. In those days, I worshiped solely at the altar of science.

Several years later, my family and I moved to a farm on the Kona Coast of Hawaii, where I experienced another series of spontaneous altered states. In the first, my conscious awareness was brought into contact with that of another man in a most dramatic fashion. It was as if I were inside his body as an invisible visitor or witness. I could see what he was seeing and hear what he was hearing. I could perceive his thoughts and emotions almost as if they were my own, and yet there were two separate personalities, his and mine, existing simultaneously within the one physical aspect.

When I recovered from my astonishment, I discovered that I could tap into this mans memory banks, receiving information as a multi-layered complex of thoughts, emotions, impressions, memories, and judgments. I learned that his name is Nainoa and that he is an individual of Hawaiian ancestry who lives somewhere on the coast of California roughly five thousand years from now in a world profoundly different from that of today. To say I was surprised by this incredible experience would be an understatement of vast proportions.

I had heard about such things as telepathy and clairvoyance, channeling and trance mediumship, but up until that moment my reaction to these psychic phenomena had been one of amused skepticism. Now here I was, a trained scientist, experiencing the awesome jolt of the real thing myself. My initial response was confusion mixed with disbelief, and I shakily branded the episode an extremely lucid dream. I say shakily because part of me suspected that what I had experienced was not a dream at all.

Much to my astonishment, the altered states continued, becoming an ongoing series of episodes that occurred roughly in sequence over the next four years. They were largely spontaneous in that I could not deliberately induce them through my intentionality alone, yet in each, my conscious awareness was merged with that of the same man.

Within these states, I had learned a lot about him and his world visually through his eyes, experientially through his actions in his level of reality and time, and cognitively through the veil of his culturally determined perceptions, judgments, interpretations, memories, and opinions. His thoughts and feelings had an alien quality, a foreignness, that was very distracting at first. I came to realize that this was due to the profoundly different shape of his mind, determined largely by his experiences since birth in his own slice of reality and within his own culture.

When I opened my eyes in Nainoas body the first time, I tried to control his movements. His body responded with confusion to two separate sets of commands. Somehow, despite my own confusion and excitement, I managed to figure out the problem, and so I became completely passive. I merely sat within and observed. I believe that my limited experience with meditation proved invaluable, as I was able to discipline myself to become completely still, yet fully watchful. In the process, I discovered that if I wished to look at something, Nainoa would very shortly walk over and look at it. If I wanted to know something, it would obligingly appear in my mind and in his. Although Nainoas language is different from any that exists today, I was able to receive the gist of meaning of his thoughts and words as the shape of his knowing was translated into mine, a process I am still trying to understand fully.