Term Paper on "Technology Global Warming"

Term Paper 4 pages (1192 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

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… READ MORE

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