Consciousness Studies

The study of consciousness has remained a difficult topic in the sciences
and humanities. Anthropology’s biocultural approach and
neurophenomenological approaches, provide great benefits in superseding
the paradigm bound constraints of science. A significant application of
anthropological methods in the study of consciousness has involved the
study of the “sacred plants,” also known as the hallucinogens,
psychedelics and entheogens. These substances provide special
perspectives on the nature of consciousness and the spirit world. I have
coined the term “psychointegrators” as a more appropriate characterization of the experiential and physiological effects of the serotonin-based
substances on consciousness.

Winkelman's article, “Psychointegration: The Physiological Effects of Entheogens” addresses neurotheology perspectives on sacred plants.

Scientific Approaches to Psychointegrators

For regular updates on recent research on entheogens, ask Tom Roberts to add you to his listserve. His e-mail address is P80TBR1@wpo.cso.niu.edu.

For scientific studies and public policy approaches to entheogens, see
the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) website
at http://www.maps.org.

The Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona holds
biannual "Toward a Science of Consciousness Conferences" in Tucson,
Arizona. For more information, please see
http://consciousness.arizona.edu.

The Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness holds annual
conferences. For more information, please see http://www.sacaaa.org.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule
For a behind-the-scenes look at the cutting edge of brain science,
especially the psychopharmacology of serotonin, check out "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences" by Rick Strassman, M.D., a clinical psychiatrist.

From 1990 to 1995, Dr. Rick Strassman conducted DEA-approved clinical research at the University of New Mexico in which he injected sixty volunteers with DMT (N, N-dimethyltryptamine), one of the most powerful psychedelics known. His detailed account of those sessions is an
extraordinarily riveting inquiry into the nature of the human mind and the
therapeutic potential of psychedelics. DMT, a plant-derived chemical that
is also manufactured by the human brain, consistently produced
out-of-body, near-death, and mystical experiences. Many volunteers
reported convincing encounters with intelligent nonhuman presences,
angels, aliens, and spirits. Nearly all agreed that the sessions were
among the most intense experiences of their lives. For more information
about the book, including an overview, table of contents, chapter
summaries, a sample chapter, reviews, and order information; please go to
Strassman's web page at http://www.rickstrassman.com.

Therapeutic Approaches with Psychointegrators

Psychedelic Medicine and Consciousness
The importance of these new perspectives on these substances is illustrated in Psychedelic Medicine: New Evidence for Hallucinogenic Substances as Treatments [2 volumes, edited by Michael J. Winkelman and Thomas B. Roberts). The contributors illustrate a wide range of applications of these psychointegrators in diseases such as cluster headaches for which biomedicine has no effect treatments.

The treatment of substance abuse, particularly cocaine and opioid addictions, is among these novel applications of the psychointegrators. These substances have also open exploration of the transpersonal realms of consciousness and provided new understandings of the nature of the transpersonal realms of consciousness and the unconscious structures of the mind.

Takiwasi (http://www.takiwasi.com/indexing.html ) is an organization in Peru led by Dr. Jaques Mabit that has pioneered the use of ayahuasca in the treatment of addictions, particularly cocaine.

Luis Eduardo Luna provides experiential studies in entheogens; see his website for the Research Centre for the Study of Psychointegrator Plants, Visionary Art, and Consciousness at http://www.wasiwaska.org.

Michael Bailot runs a shamanistic ayahuasca healing center in the highlands of Brazil. He can be reached at www.southerngate.net.

Applied Consciousness Studies:
Messages from the Future

Hank Wesselman, Spirit Walker: Messages from the Future (Bantam Books, 1995); Medicine Maker: Mystic Encounters on the Shaman’s Path (Bantam Books, 1998); Vision Seeker: Shared Wisdom from the Place of Refuge (Hay House Inc., 2001).

Hank Wesselman is a physical anthropologist (UC-Berkeley) whose career activities include research with teams in Africa’s Great Rift Valley where Lucy and other early human ancestors have been discovered. His background as a physical anthropologist concerned with long-term ecological change plays a role in these books, but their real import has to do with a very different path--one of spontaneous and then deliberate shamanistic experiences that reveal a dramatically different future for humanity.

Wesselman’s journey began in the early 1980’s while finishing graduate
studies, with an early morning spontaneous altered state of consciousness.
While his initial experiences were conceptualized as contact with an
impersonal “shadow” and out-of-body experiences, the core of Wesselman’s experiences emerged some years later when he moved to Hawaii and established “dreamtime” contact with a descendant living 5,000 years in the future. Through the memories and experiences of a man named Nainoa, Wesselman comes to know this future world in which the high tech modern civilization as we know it has disappeared and the survivors of humanity have reverted to hunter-gather and simple agricultural lifestyles.

As Wesselman’s spontaneous shamanic initiation and sporadic learning about Nainoa and the future expands through deliberate activities, he also has other transcendent experiences and develops other contacts with the spirit world and non-ordinary reality. Many of these involve a spontaneous
unfolding of a shamanic development, where animal allies and impersonal
cosmic forces provide him with learning opportunities, powers and revelatory experiences. Central to the first book Spirit Walker is Wesselman’s experience of Nainoa’s own quest to establish linkages between his own people (living along an inland sea of what is now California’s inland basin) and others living further inland. Here he encounters hunter-gatherers, amalgamated survivors of Americans, Canadians and Native Americans, who help him develop his shamanic potentials.

Wesselman’s second book Medicine Maker follows Nainoa’s return to his people and his development as a kahuna, paralleling Wesselman’s own move to Hawaii and engagement with the local traditions and powers. Medicine Maker recounts Nainoa’s rise to power within his group, and Wesselman’s growth as a healer and spirit walker in non-ordinary reality. Wesselman turns increasingly to deliberate training with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (FSS) and meditative retreats for activities that help him develop and refine natural faculties that might have otherwise remained dormant. (The FSS can be found online at www.shamanism.org.)

In the third book Vision Seeker, Wesselman incorporates further visions of Nainoa and other visions that followed further fieldwork in Ethiopia, where he establishes contact with what he perceives to be humanity’s ancient ancestors from millions of years ago. He also follows Nainoa’s training as a kahuna, and incorporates this Polynesian perspective with those of core shamanism (FSS) and Buddhist esoteric traditions. His contacts with Nainoa become joint journey’s to levels of reality in which they access unfathomable levels of the universe--the great beyond, the source of all being. Here he connects with mythic and archetypal sources of knowledge that span human pre-history and the future. His shamanic developments contribute to an expanding public profile, catapulting him into a career of teacher and healer as he communicates his experiences and messages. He claims not to heal himself, but to be a vehicle that enables healing through contact with the transcendent self of the patient. In the context of his healing activities, he reports what many other contemporary spiritual healers claim--the spontaneous arrival of the spirit of Jesus with a healing power that enables miraculous cures.

Vision Seeker contextualizes Wesselman’s experiences within the “hero’s
quest” and the “Master Game” of expansion and evolution of consciousness.

Wesselman considers the future of humanity to be dependent upon those who engage these developmental trajectories. He expands our concepts of the potentials for shared consciousness, time travel, knowledge of the future and learning through spirit contact in dream time. He addresses notions of other forms of spirit beings and powers, particularly what he calls dorajuadiok, represented as a hugh dark obelisk that is a source of
knowledge of humanity’s past and the universe. These dorajuadiok act as
guardians, affecting humans’ perception and consciousness to influence their personal development through providing information, experiences and power. Wesselman links these entities to concepts of quantum holograms and phase space--an intelligent inorganic living map emitting an attractor pattern that holds information energy and transfers it across time.

Wesselman illustrates the continued relevance of the ancient shamanic paradigms for understanding his experiences and the future of humanity. He examines his spontaneous and deliberate shamanic experiences from the perspective of a scientist, integrating his psychic and spiritual experiences with a cutting edge understanding of the forefronts of DNA and molecular biology, quantum theory, evolutionary biology, ecology and climate change. The unusual physiological nature of Wesselman’s altered states of consciousness are confirmed neurologically. They exhibit the super fast 40 Hz brain waves (gamma rhythms) that have been occasionally documented in other advanced meditators. This 40 Hz pattern is hypothesized to reflect activation of the midbrain thalamic circuits that are aroused in the bonding of sensory information, memory, and motor patterns. These brain patterns play a fundamental role in the physical generation of consciousness and produce a “hyperaroused gateway to transcendent experience.”

Wesselman views this access to an “inner threshold” that permits expanded consciousness as derived from a genetically based biophysical-energetic program. This program was evoked by many experiences, including: his work as a paleontologist concerned with the origins of humanity that linked his consciousness with our earliest forebearers; fantasy play in childhood
with imaginary playmates; contact with nature, including gardening, as a primordial source of power; and extended periods in nature in the Great Rift Valley, that expanded his consciousness. Wesselman also undertakes training in traditions akin to the monastic practices, but he rejects claims that destruction of ego and denial of sexual gratification as being key to accessing transcendent experiences. The repeated spontaneous shifts of consciousness following sex with his wife suggests that this activity--and perhaps its direct relationship to the production of his descendants--opens an inner doorway to transcendent experiences and created ties to experiences of the future.

For those familiar with the traditions of “anthropologists gone shaman,” a
comparison with Carlos Castaneda’s books is inevitable. Clearly Wesselman’s books rival Castaneda’s descriptions of non-ordinary reality and extraordinary experiences. Although Wesselman makes no claims to study contemporary people or actual practices, he considers his experiences to be “fieldwork” and took scrupulous notes to document them.

Wesselman tells the reader, “There is no fiction in my book,” and "everything that I recount in this book I experienced as real,” rejecting any boundaries between the “real world” and his shamanistic experiences.

He suggests we apply the anthropological principles of cultural relativism, understanding these experiences on their own terms. If merely seeking novelistic New Age entertainment, readers will find themselves deeply engaged with Wesselman’s books. But there is more to his books than entertainment, and they should not be confused with fiction. Wesselman wrote these books to inspire people to find their “inner doorway” and embark on the classic hero’s journey that enables them to engage the “Master Game” of expanded development of consciousness. The books provide useful descriptions of practices for accessing non-ordinary reality and provide a wealth of information that integrates shamanic and other traditions of the Master Game of evolving consciousness. The books carry the potential to evoke alterations of consciousness and awareness, eliciting one’s own potentials and memories. His experiences can provide a template for organizing and focusing attention on one’s personal consciousness development.

Perhaps the most fundamental and most difficult implications of Wesselman’s books for many to accept is that they are primarily based in his prophetic awareness of a future 5,000 years from now when Western civilization and high technology no longer exist. Paradoxically, Wesselman suggests that he does not see this as inevitable. Perhaps with this warning humanity can correct their sins of environmental destruction and live within the fragile ecological balance and carrying capacity of planetary resources. To do this we must reign in the multinational corporations that are destroying the global ecology in their relentless search for resources and wealth. Wesselman suggests that the roots for addressing this destruction lie in the ongoing spiritual reawakening occurring in North America and Europe, reflected in a resurgence of interest in shamanism. These “evolutionary sleepers” are awakening to bridge to the next stage of human evolution, with the contemporary neoshamanic movement part of a broad revitalization that is changing our relationship with self, others the environment and spirit.

The basic message that Wesselman has is that humanity needs to change to survive. The real message is not that we can escape the cycles of nature and the planet that involve warming trends followed deluges and ice ages. Rather, he sounds a wake-up call for those who are to participate in the next stage of human evolution, surviving the impending global destruction due to the catastrophic consequences of the melt down of the polar ice caps and their contribution to the next glacial cycles produced by global superstorms (e.g., see Bell and Strieber’s The Coming Global Superstorm).

In this sense, Wesselman may have brought us the most important “applied anthropology of consciousness”--using shamanistic potentials to adapt to the greatest catastrophe humankind will have encountered. It certainly is easier to treat his books as fiction.

References to Winkelman’s Publication on Consciousness

2007 Psychedelic Medicine: New Evidence for Hallucinogenic Substances as Treatments [2 volumes, edited by Michael J. Winkelman and Thomas B. Roberts. Portsmouth, NH: Praeger Press/Greenwood Publishing Group.

2005 Cultural Awareness, Sensitivity and Competence.
Eddie Bowers, Peosta Iowa.

2005 Drugs and Modernization. A Companion to Psychological Anthropology: Modernity and Psychocultural Change. Conerly Casey and Robert Edgerton, eds.
Blackwell In., (with Keith Bletzer). pp. 337-357

2004 Divination and Healing: Potent Vision.
Michael Winkelman and Philip Peek, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

2004 Spirituality and the Healing of Addictions: A Shamanic Drumming Approach. In: Religion and Healing in America, Edited by Linda L. Barnes and Susan S. Sered.
New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 455-470

2004 Spirits as Human Nature and the Fundamental Structures of Consciousness. In: From Shaman to Scientist Essays on Humanity’s Search for Spirits, J. Houran, ed.
Lanham, MD.: Scarecrow Press. Pp. 59-96.

2003 Psychointegration: The Physiological Effects of Entheogens.
Entheos. 2(1): 51-61.

2001 Psychointegrators: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the
Therapeutic Effects of Hallucinogens. Complementary Health Practice
Review. 6(3): 219-237.

2000 Altered States of Consciousness. In Encyclopedia of Human
Emotions. D. Levinson, ed. New York: MacMillan Reference Press, p. 32-38.

2000 Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey.

1997 Altered States of Consciousness and Religious Behavior. In
Anthropology of Religion: A Handbook of Method and Theory. S. Glazier, ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 393-428.

1996 Sacred Plants, Consciousness and Healing: Cross-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives Yearbook of Cross-cultural Medicine and Psychotherapy. Berlin: Verlag. Michael Winkelman and Walter Andritzky, eds.

1996 Neurophenomenology and Genetic Epistemology as a Basis for the Study of Consciousness. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 19(3): 217-236.

1993 The Evolution of Consciousness: Transpersonal Theories in Light of Cultural Relativism. Anthropology of Consciousness. 4(3): 3-9.

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