<SPOILER ALERT - for anyone considering reading this book, originally published in 1996, return to this page after you’ve finished Book 1>
I’ve been reading Hank Wesselman’s Spiritwalker - Messages From the Future (Bantam 1996) after it was recommended by Trevor Lewis for it’s depiction of a man accessing his Future life. Even more interesting, Wesselman accessed a series of Future Lives spontaneously when he was living in Hawaii in the 1980s. (There were eventually 4 books in total written from his ongoing experiences)
That in itself is fascinating. I’m always appreciative (and envious) of people who discover their own Adjacent Lives in a vision or flash of insight, and location seems to be the most common trigger for these awakenings.
An interesting sync is that Trevor Lewis recommended Spiritwalker as I am compiling my Future life sessions with George whose story, while fascinating, had become so extreme dark sci-fi that I had considered writing it as fiction. Wesselman tells how he struggled with the method to tell what he was learning about Nainoa, his Future self:
…my first impulse was to write a novel, a fictional narrative, within which I could safely reveal what I have learned without jeopardizing my scientific reputation…Yet my story is not science fiction, nor is it imaginative fantasy. It happened as I will tell it to you in this book. I cannot hide or disguise my experiences.
Wesselman’s struggle with explaining his experiences to an audience whose inexperience reinforces their skepticism resonated with me and my attempts to capture my Future lives and their parallels to my Present life.
So how does one present information of this sort without sounding like a candidate for certification in a mental institution? I offer it as I perceived it. My creative imagination is undoubtedly involved to some extent in this reconstruction, because I have had to compose a framework in which to express these extraordinary experiences, yet I did not make up this trip out of whole cloth…I have chosen to write Nainoa's life like an adventure story because that is very much how I experienced it. In this story another man's life and my own form a double helix, a twisted ladder whose edges consist of two lifelines, Nainoa's and mine, with rungs of connection between them at various intervals along the continuum.
Hank Wesselman is a very good writer and I recognize his struggle to tell a story that defies logic. But what I most appreciated in Spiritwalker were the details of his Other life sessions, which occurred most often at night and on their own schedule, and how they resonate with my own early excursions using the Awareness Technique. Mirroring the directions given before a Past Life Journey, to “see through the eyes and hear through the ears,” Wesselman describes his connection to the personality he is continually drawn back to, Nainoa:
I had really felt as though I were inside Nainoa’s body, seeing through his eyes, hearing what he was hearing.
Later he dives deeper into his own awareness of this Other Life personality:
While I was merged with this man, it was as though I were him, and yet my personality had not dissolved, nor had his. The two of us existed simultaneously within one physical body. His personality remained distinctly separate from mine, and he had seemed completely unaware of my presence within him while I was “there.”
Wesselman discovers how differently Time operates when in this state:
I had been "there" for at least 16 to 18 hours of his time, yet by the dream’s end, less than five minutes had elapsed in my time.
Congruent with my own Past Life Journeys, the information comes into awareness through a variety of sensory modalities:
…most of what I learned about him, his world, and his recent history arrived in my mind as disjointed blocks of —to me—completely new information. I absorb these blocks as if I were transferring information from one floppy disk to another. The information appeared in the form of impressions, feelings, thoughts, opinions, ideas, and memories, and would suddenly materialize as a series of vignettes in my awareness.
(Wesselman was writing this in the 1990s when floppy disks were the main mode of storing and transferring digital information. But it’s a beautifully descriptive metaphor.)
It is only after the first few sessions that Wesselman realizes he is this Nainoa, but that Nainoa is his Future life, who is alive on a dramatically different planet Earth thousands of years beyond his own late 20th century timeline:
I had journeyed across space and time to merge with the consciousness of another person, one who lives right here on the earth, in ordinary reality, but in a slice of the future that is profoundly different from the reality that exists today… From Nainoa I had learned that a sudden rise in sea level's was connected to the collapse of western civilization.
Wesselman is influenced by the Shamanic training he pursued with Michael Harner. I am simpatico with the impact that Shamanic Journeying had on his work, in helping him to understand his experiences:
I seemed to be making what Michael Harner would call an extended "middle world" voyage, traveling to another place in ordinary reality, but traversing time to get there….Were Nainoa’s and my state of mind equivalent to the expanded awareness of traditional shamans? Was this marvel possibly only because each of us was a suitable contact for the other? In what ways were we suitable—because of our intentions to know and explore without preconceptions or goals, for the empirical experience?
Spiritwalker details Wesselman’s efforts to find a framework for the interactions between his 20th century self and what he determines to be Nainoa’s 5,000 years in the future. This parallels my own upheaval in trying to grasp the non-linear nature of our Soul’s progression:
Yet I also began to consider that Nainoa might actually be one of my reincarnations living a future live 5000 years down the road. Could this be what a true ancestor-descendent relationship represented? Could reincarnations depart from genetic lineages and move randomly between different lines through time?
*SPOILER ALERT*
(For those who haven’t finished the book and are considering reading it)
A further sync with my own Journeys occurs when Nainoa has his own psychic impressions of an Other life, in the Western world before it’s collapse, and the inconceivably strange vehicles, buildings, and other structures such as metal bridges. This sets up a back-and-forth between these two Time Traveling consciousnesses that sustains the narrative brilliantly. (It is only in my 2023 sessions, after dozens of sessions exploring one of my most spiritually advanced lives, the monk I call Maleek, that I had the experience of my Adjacent life personality recognizing my presence and acknowledging my participation in their training.)
That Hank Wesselman would be a natural for Past (and Future) Life Journeying is shown by his willingness to relate traumatic Other life experiences to his own:
Because I could “receive” Nainoa’s cognitive and emotional processes, I was able to measure my own response to this experience against his.
Later in Spiritwalker I recognize evidence of looping between Future and Present lives when Wesselman recognizes the terrain that Nainoa is traveling through in the SouthWestern US, since Wesselman lived there as a child.
Something else is important here: I was familiar with the valley where Nainoa was injured. I knew with certainty where he was.
Simultaneous lives—present and future—interacting with emotional effects on both sides of the equation; non-linear Soul progression, recurring significant personalities; healing energies sent through Time: the recognition of Future influences on our Present TimeLine- all of these are dealt with engagingly in Spiritwalker-Messages From The Future. Thanks to Trevor Lewis of thrivingempath.com for suggesting this book.