Technology and global warming

Technology / Global Warming

Undoing the divide between science and faith -- a response to Hank Wesselman's experiences as a Spiritwalker

Author Hank Wesselman is a researcher and trained academic whose spiritual and visionary experiences transcend the conventional boundaries of rationality and science. Even while he continues to work as a college lecturer, he presents his encounters with the future as snapshots of reality, as nonfiction rather than as myths or fictional stories. In his book entitled Spiritwalker, Wesselman chronicles his visionary experiences, where he says he has seen himself in another lifetime, many years ago in the far future. Yet Wesselman's visions are not purely personal, like those chronicled by many other New Age gurus, and do not merely provide insight into his own personal struggles and conflicts. For example, one of his most significant visions of the far future is how the world will be destroyed by a great flood, presumably because of the ocean's overflow due to global warming.

The nature of Wesselman's focus on the planet's environmental health suggests that the author's scientific training impacts his visions even while he is in an altered state of consciousness. Factual, learned truth merges with spiritual, emotionally 'felt' truth. In conventional Western views of science and religion, the two disciplines are usually viewed as incompatible. But one of the most important themes of Spiritwalker is that the body/mind and religion/science divide in Western culture is a false dichotomy. Wesselman suggests that his scientific training makes him a better shaman, because it enables him to better comprehend the visions he sees. At first, he is resistant to the nature of his received learning because of his Western background and culture, and his academic training, but once he is able to get beyond his resistance to non-rational methods of understanding the future and the truth, he is able to combine his scientific and religious knowledge into one narrative, and to use what he has learned to better serve the needs of humanity.

Over the course of the book, Wesselman the scientist is transported into the consciousness of a Hawaiian kahuna, or shamanic healer, named Nainoa. Nainoa is like Wesselman, or who Wesselman will become five thousand years in the future after civilization had been destroyed by a sudden rise in the ocean level caused by global warming. In the projected vision Wesselman receives of the future, there will be no more scientists, because the universities and methods of generating scientific knowledge will have been destroyed, just as the modern era has created a world of people shut off from shamanic methods of apprehending knowledge. Wesselman suggests that to be truly complete, one must merge both parts of one's character, the scientist and the shaman, Wesselman's and Nainoa's different visions.

In the future, the results of humanity becoming estranged from its knowledge of the natural world are all too obvious. Ironically, as the result of industrial technology, the world of the future has grown more primitive, rather than more technically sophisticated as one might expect. The once-proud urban skylines had been covered with forests, or reduced to rubbish and wreckage. Viewing the future, Wesselman has harsh words for scientists who saw the evidence of global warming as "inconclusive" and based upon "uncertain scientific evidence" (56). What Wesselman sees with a shamanic persona confirms what he long knew as a researcher.

According to Wesselman, while other concerned nations of the world, such as the European community, urged the U.S. To take action, America did nothing and even frustrated attempts to reach an accord on the issue (132). The future-dwelling Nainoa gives Wesselman a "point blank" warning for what may happen if America continues to proceed in its current course of development (215). If Americans continue to live as if technology is the most important thing, then there will be no technology and no improved quality of life for future generations. The scientist Wesselman underlines Nainoa's words with statistics, that current data on global warming suggests that the earth's increasing overall temperatures have exceeded normal expectations of variation in climate fluctuation (216). "The warming [trend] since 1957" when careful records began to be kept by scientists, "has been remarkably uniform over the east-west extent of the northern Atlantic" (217). In Africa, the glaciers on Mount Kenya have already shrunk by forty percent since 1963 (216).

These are all measurable statistics and facts. Deprived of science as a result of scientific so-called progress, Nainoa has the wisdom of a shaman, not a scientist, but the emotional impact he has upon Wesselman is profound. Nainoa is wise, even in a world lacking in science, perhaps even more wise than the scientists of the present, who doubt the truth of global warming based upon their biased views of the evidence, in the wake of political influence. Nainoa is uncomfortable in a modern kitchen, seeing a car or asphalt, yet he has an important message and a way of communicating with Wesselman that is equally powerful as science (50).

The fact that scientists have not sounded the alarm in America, the nation that is perhaps best able to do something to change the current state of environmental affairs in the world, shows how science itself is not completely objective. Scientists have become pressured by politicians to state that global warming evidence is not as dire as it might seem. The combination of fact and fantasy makes the reality of what humanity is doing to the planet seem more potent. Regardless of what one thinks of the author's visions, the idea that different modes of knowing and different methods of persuasion are necessary to change the world is suggested by Wesselman's narrative presentation of his concerns in his book.