I’ve just finished Medicinemaker - Mystic Encounters on the Shaman’s Path, Hank Wesselman’s 2nd in what became a 4 book series. Wesselman’s “journeys” to his Future self, Nainoa, continued even after he left his Hawaiian home and returned to the mainland to teach in San Diego, California. This book provides further insights into the process of accessing another consciousness that both is and is not our present self, yet feels both comfortable and compatible. Medicinemaker, and Wesselman’s 1st book, Spiritwalker, do it so well, I am recommending them to people interested in Past Life Journeying.
As I wrote previously when discussing Spiritwalker, we receive information about our Other lives—their personalities, their language and culture—through multiple modalities, and Wesselman describes this beautifully:
Within these states, I have 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 it 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.
Insights like this can be helpful to someone new to this path:
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 am merely "sat within" and observed…
In the process, I discovered that if I wished to look at something, Nano 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 Nainoa’s 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.
By this point in their interactions, Wesselman and Nainoa have accepted their presence in each other’s lives, though neither is able to consciously connect to their Other self. In this 2nd book, the Future self, Nainoa, has embraced the presence of his “ancestor,” Hank Wesselman, and is basically running his Past life as an anthropology teacher in late 20th century California.
We tend to think of ourselves as individuals, as singularities, but we are really composites of many energetic and spiritual lineages that stretch back across time to all of our ancestors…
‘We’ are actually a singularity within which two separate selves exist in two separate time frames.
This not yet an experience I have had, though I’ve extended an open invitation to my Past and Future selves to visit and ask questions. The implications of this “back and forth” for the contemporary theories of quantum physics are mind boggling. For the concept of Block Time to be correct, all events—past, present, and future—already exist but cannot be changed. Any interactions between “future” Nainoa and “past” Wesselman would have had to be “already included in their histories” as described by Eric Wargo in his Time Loops.
Although Wesselman doesn’t directly address the concept of Simultaneous Lives, he recognizes how this operates:
Only about 20 to 25% of my life force energy was associated with my current physical embodiment.
Like many contemporary Past Life practitioners, Wesselman posits the majority of our consciousness is actively involved in the realm of the Non-Physical:
The realm where the spirits reside is largely a level of information. This every day world here is a level of action, a level on which many things are possible…
Wesselman’s interactions with his Future self, along with his studies of Michael Harner’s work, blend with his Nainoa’s own shamanic training to reframe the death of the physical body and what I call the Non-Physical Experience Between lives:
With the demise of our physical bodies, our energy body does not die. It exists in a free state at that point, carrying many of our feelings and memories within it…
Each of us is like a knot along a cord that includes an immensely long succession of knots that, in turn, are woven into the living, spiritual net-like matrix of humanity. Each string of knots is a continuously reincarnating lineage that grows and changes as it travels through time…
MedicineMaker ends with Wesselman picking up his pen to write after asking “for input from my esteemed friend.” I look forward to the next chapter in the shared Journey of Hank Wesselman and Nainoa.
Eventually we will all achieve levels of experience and awareness that allow us to remain merged with the source. .. When we reach that stage, we no longer need to return to life on the physical plane. Such highly evolved ancestral spirits often take on the task of guiding human destiny to some degree with their collective will, so we are still in relationship to them in a way. Each of us is actually in relation to a cluster of such soul spirits, and we confer with them many times during that period when we are in the spirit world between lives…This is …our responsibility—to grow in beauty and wisdom positively and deeply so we can contribute to the greater good of the human spirit.