Dr. Hank

INTERVIEW BY DEEPAK CHOPRA WITH HANK WESSELMAN PHD. Originally posted on Deepak Chopra's site www.howtoknowgod.com in March, 2001. Research paleoanthropologist Hank Wesselman, PhD is one of those rare cutting edge scientists who truly walks between the worlds. He did his undergraduate work, as well as his Masters Degree, in Zoology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, then went on to receive his doctoral degree in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. For the past 30 years, he has worked with an international group of scientists, exploring East Africa's Great Rift Valley in search of answers to the mystery of human origins. He is also a shaman in training, now in the 19th year of his apprenticeship... COULD YOU TELL US ABOUT THE KIND OF WORK IN WHICH YOU ARE CURRENTLY ENGAGED AS AN ANTHROPOLOGIST? Since 1994, I have been working with a research expedition along the Middle Awash River in northern Ethiopia where our team is excavating a series of sites between 4.4 and 5.8 million years old from which we are recovering the fossilized remains of an early form of human called Ardipithecus ramidus. This species preserves a suite of primitive characters unlike any seen before. Not only have we found humanity's earliest ancestor, we may also have discovered the famous missing link between apes and humans that Charles Darwin predicted would eventually be found. To say that this is an exciting discovery is an understatement of vast proportions. JUST HOW DID YOUR WORK AS A SCIENTIST LEAD TO THE WRITING OF YOUR BOOKS--FIRST SPIRITWALKER, THEN MEDICINEMAKER, AND NOW VISIONSEEKER? In the early 1970s, while working with an expedition in southern Ethiopia's Lower Omo Valley, I began to have spontaneous mystical experiences strikingly like those of traditional shamans. In an attempt to understand, I went beyond scholarly research into direct, personal contact with the ancient methods for achieving mystical states practiced by tribal peoples. In the