Encounters on the Shaman's Path: Deity Mysticism

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Posted at Meta Arts

by Dr.Hank Wesselman, P.h.D.

Deity Mysticism

In many of the essays I have written for the Meta Arts over the past several years, I have repeatedly made mention of the fact that a new spiritual complex is coming into being in the West, one at whose center lies the realization that each of us has the capacity to make the direct, transpersonal connection with the sacred realms that defines the mystic… the shaman.

I consider this to be very important as it reveals that a new kind of religion is taking form within Western Culture—one in which each person has the capacity as well as the responsibility to become their own priest or priestess, their own guru or teacher, their own prophet, receiving revelations directly from the highest sources themselves, without the need for any intermediary religious organization or priesthood to stand between them and their experience of “The Sacred.”

And it is through this experience, through direct revelation if you will, that we as individuals may establish contact with our immortal, transpersonal aspect—our oversoul.

The Deity

We have described how the oversoul is in fact the personal “God in Heaven” who listens to our prayers, works in mysterious ways and sends occasional messengers to Earth (us) who usually get treated badly.

We have also explored the understanding that this wise being is always in connection with us—how it is, and forever will be, our guardian angel, our higher self, our “god-self” that increases, grows and becomes more in response to what we, its embodiments, do and become here on the physical plane through countless lives on our long journey across eternity. This is about the co-creative relationship between Heaven (spirit) and Earth (ourselves).

This oversoul is the same entity that my friend Frank DeMarco, also a Meta Arts columnist, likes to call “the guys upstairs,” revealing its true nature as a mosaic.

The oversoul exists as an etheric field that is comprised of all of our former selves who lived former lives in former embodiments. Each of these “selves” exists within our personal oversoul field, much like a DVD, preserving a record of everything that we did and became during those lives.

This reveals, in turn, that it is the personal “ancestral field” to which we may have access, whether through our dreaming or through past-life regression therapies utilizing hypnosis, or through goal oriented shamanic journeywork while very much awake.

To create a visual, the oversoul exists in a form that is like a stack of DVDs, arranged much like a child’s “slinky” toy, laid out on its side with the ends of the coiled column joined in continuum. As such, the higher self takes the form of a tightly woven basket of energy that appears to the mystic eye like a donut or torus made of light, with the hole from top to bottom creating a dense vertical shaft of light within the comparatively dimmer radiance of the basket itself, with each strand, each line or coil of the slinky, representing a former self in a former life.

The vertical shaft is often what mystics see first, revealing why the Hawaiians and the Incas used the standing stone as the symbol for the creative principle—Kanewahine in Hawaii and Wirakocha in South America. And since standing stones are found all over the world, perhaps this reveals what the symbol actually meant to those who placed these stones upright in antiquity…

This is what I have been shown in my own journeywork through which I connected with this immortal self-aspect of myself, and I share this percept with you, the reader, in order to give you a greater sense of it, extending as well a gentle invitation for you to join me in my mystic fieldwork.

The Druids

As I consider the wonder of this direct revelation, I also know from my work as a scholar that the reincarnational cycle, as well as the nature of our personal immortality, lay right at the heart of the teachings of the Druids, the shaman-priests of the Celtic peoples of Europe and Britain. They knew about this with absolute certainty, based in their own direct mystic revelations.

The Druids also knew that ‘God’ is not a being, but rather a process that can be found in everything, everywhere, and that is densely concentrated in living beings and thus all of Nature.

The Druids were keen observers of Nature and studied how Nature works. Because of this, their knowledge of natural and universal processes was unequaled in the Roman and classical Greek worlds whose complete ignorance of reincarnation is well documented.

The Druids also served their tribal societies as judiciaries, as mediators who had the power to stop conflicts between powerful competing tribes or families or individuals, and who dispensed justice from their vast knowledge of tribal and natural law.

The Druids were the wisdom keepers of their peoples, and for them, as for shamans everywhere, the gateway into the transpersonal realms lay in the practice of Nature Mysticism, with the many aspects of Nature itself, including our own bodies, serving as the doorway into the Otherworlds.

Once the transpersonal realms were accessed through Nature, they knew that our consciousness could be “re-geographied” into and through our superconscious transpersonal aspect, our oversoul, and at this point, connection with many different levels of reality, awareness, and experience then became possible.

As an aside, this is really all we know about the Druids. The two primary sources of information that we have about them are the writings of Julius Caesar about the Gauls and those of a Greek philosopher named Posidonius who traveled into the Celtic tribal regions of Gaul on an extended ethnographic field trip early in the First Century BC. Everything else written about the Druids is from second hand sources (like Tacitus for example who drew heavily from Posidonius’ original writings, only fragments of which remain today.)

Tibetan Deity Yoga

This brings up the practice of authentic deity mysticism (often called deity yoga) that I have mentioned in other columns (see for example The Sermon in the Airport posted in March 2007 in the Meta Arts archives). Accordingly, it would be meaningful to say something more about this in this month’s essay.

The political travails of Tibet are much in the news these days, so let’s begin by observing that the practices of the Tibetan Buddhists are quite different from those of the Hinayana or Mahayana traditions in that they combine Indian Buddhist thought and practice from the south with the ancient Bon Po shamanistic practices and beliefs of Central Asia to the north.

Buddhism plus shamanism… an interesting combination of contemplation and visionary experience. This merger, often referred to as the Vajrayana Tradition, is thus quite unique.

Among the Tibetans, the most powerful spiritual practices in which they engage are those called Deity Yoga or Deity Mysticism—techniques that clearly reflect and utilize shamanist methodology.

In the practice of deity yoga, the yogi (the practitioner), in deep meditation (contemplation), creates a mental image or thoughtform (visioning) of a powerful deity such as Avalokiteshvara, the Himalayan Bodhisattva of compassion, also known as Kwannon in Japan or Kwan Yin in China.

Through ongoing and committed practice, the practitioner conjures up this deity, day after day, projecting it outward from the Self, and then visualizes them self stepping intentionally forward and merging with the deity.

In deity yoga, the practitioner thus becomes one with the deity, speaking, thinking, emoting, acting, and even behaving as if they are, in fact, this powerful archetypal force. In the process, they find themselves embodying profound wisdom, boundless compassion, and endless virtue in every thought and feeling, action and reaction as they pass through their daily life.

The Tibetans say that through the practice of deity mysticism, an individual can become a Buddha (an awakened one) in a single lifetime instead of the three countless eons that this process would originally take. His Holiness the Dalai Lama practices it daily, merging with the deity of compassion just mentioned.

This means that should you ever have the honor to meet with this holy man, face to face, you will be in the presence of the deity known as Avalokiteshvara. It will be this god-like being who speaks to you on his breath and who looks into your soul through his eyes.

But we can also extend this practice to merge with our own oversoul, thus becoming one with our god-self, and we can do this at any time, any place.

The Eastern Orthodoxy

This singular and extraordinary realization of our potential union with a god-like being, or even with our own god-self, lay right at the core of the original teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as well… but can you, in fact, find it in the scriptures as they are presented to us today? And can it be found in the practices of Christianity at large?

The answer is that you can, but you have to know where to look.

Although it was a common practice to both the eastern and western branches of the early church for a thousand years, it is now virtually absent in all the Western forms of Christianity. But it can still be found in the Eastern Orthodox traditions.

While the Latin church placed more and more power in the hands of its pope and its bishops over the past two thousand years, in the Eastern Orthodoxy, the guardians of spiritual truth are considered to be the entire people of God—the populus at large. This has created a strongly democratic religious system in the Eastern world about which most of us in the Western world are largely unaware.

My favorite Saint in this Eastern Orthodoxy is a Tenth Century monk who was born with the Christian name George and eventually canonized as Saint Symeon (949-1022). He was called the “New Theologian” of the Stadium in Constantinople, and he dedicated his life to the practice of deity mysticsm utilizing a technique called hesychia (hess-ick-kia) in his own time.

The pursuit of hesychia—a stillness or silence of the heart—incorporates inner attentiveness and control of the breath with an intention, a meditative practice much like that of dadirri—the deep listening of the Australian Aboriginals that I described in a former column (4/08 in the archives).

Through this discipline, Symeon and his “hesychasts” attained visions of divine light—essentially connection with the oversoul—as well as union (merging) with the God-force found within the all. This is deity mysticism in every sense of the term.

Now… this brings up the big question: how does this actually translate for those of us living our lives in suburbia today, a thousand years later, with jobs to go to, bills to pay, mouths to feed, children to raise, husbands or wives to nurture and cherish, goals to achieve, family to value, friends to hold dear, sports teams to support, and so forth and so on?

Here are some thoughts from my own meditations.

For Symeon, the mystical life was not to be considered extraordinary. Rather he understood that it is one of our natural birthrights to achieve the conscious connection with the field of grace that he called “the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” He wrote that “he who becomes aware of signs and wonders happening within himself is truly a God-bearer.”

In other words, he was encouraging all of us to find true power as well as connection with the transpersonal worlds (and by association, our God-self) within and through ourselves, and not through reading scripture or praying mightily in church on Sunday.

Symeon felt that the individual must become one with what he called “the Holy Spirit”—the same immortal being that we have been discussing as our oversoul—and he ran into trouble with the church of his day for teaching that the church belonged not to the ecclesiastic authorities but rather to those who had experienced such direct experiences and their attendant revelations.

What mattered to Symeon in the sacraments were the subjective experiences of each individual, the direct conscious connection with the transpersonal realms of spirit, rather than the objective ceremonies conducted by the priesthood.

The answers to all the mysteries, he counseled, lie within ourselves, and specifically with the practice of deity mysticism that he called hesychia—achieving the contemplative state of deep listening through the stillness of the heart.

Saint Symeon knew from direct experience that through this practice of inner silence, it was possible to become one with God—to actually become God.

Heresy? Not a chance.

Here is a quote about the Eastern Orthodoxy from the writer Patricia Storace from her book Dinner with Persephone.

Our people have followed the path that Alexander laid down for them in the pre-Christian world and (that) Constantine (espoused) in the fulfilled world—(the goal) of becoming gods.

This is part of our Orthodox theology, not like your “salvation” which puts a piece of virtue in the bank and gets back divine grace as interest. To understand us, you must understand the concept of theosis.

Our church teaches that the goal of each Christian is deification—Saint Athanasius wrote that the Christ says to us, “In my kingdom, I shall be God with you as gods.”

In other words, each of us has not only the ability, but also the responsibility to become a god. This is where were are all headed… but we have to choose it.

And to do this effectively, we simply have to clean up our act. How can we become gods if we’re still thinking, speaking, and acting like barbarians? This question is worth pondering.

In last month’s essay on the perennial philosophy, we brought up the revelation that there is a way out of pain and suffering—a way leading us out of the school of hard knocks where we learn our life lessons… but we have to choose it.

The introduction to my second book in the Spiritwalker Trilogy (Medicinemaker) bears these words from a venerable ancient named Moshi:

“When Heaven is about to confer

A great office upon a person,

It first exercises their mind with suffering,

And their sinews and bones with toil;

It exposes them to poverty

And confounds all their undertakings.

Then, it is seen if they are ready…”

Our life experiences in the school of hard knocks propel us inevitably toward the irreversible vortex of authentic initiation and the result is personal (and permanent) transformation.

It is then, precisely then, that we realize who we are, as well as where we are, enabling our destiny to beckon to us in a completely new and expanded way.

Until next month, allow me to invoke the spirit of Chief Hale Makua, my great Hawaiian friend… and with his blessing (and his words), I extend to each of you the Light and the Love of the Ancestors, The Source of Life, rejoicing in the Power and the Peace, braided with the cords of Patience, revealing the tapestry of the strongest force in the Universe… your Aloha.

With warm thoughts—Dr Hank