Our dramas are an indestructible part of who we are. No matter what we do or how hard we try, we cannot get rid of them. The only choice we have to make is whether we are going to use them or they are going to use us.
—Debbie Ford, The Secret of the Shadow

If you view the spiritual realms through rose-colored glasses, then a life still plagued with disappointments, difficulties and challenges must mean you are doing something wrong. You are not deserving enough, evolved enough, energetically coherent enough, or sufficiently clear enough in your intention to create a life of love, passion, fulfillment, joy, abundance, or whatever a “perfected” life looks like to you.

Well, no, not really. . .

As a paqo, you certainly know that the kawsay pacha is overly abundant and you can manifest what you want according to your capacity for personal power and the clarity of your ayni exchanges. But like all of us, you are still human—and not a sixth-level human yet. As a third- or fourth-level human being, you are far from perfected. As a paqo, you have energy practices to reduce your heaviness—including emotional dramas and life’s challenges—to a minimum, but you still have them. As a qawaq, you can use your physical and mystical vision and perceptions to learn to see reality as it really is, and that means owning the disappointments, difficulties, strife, and even traumas that you experience. After all, if you don’t see them, you can’t put your practices to work to shift them (or rather, to shift your own energy).

Being a dedicated paqo means using what you know. Once you “see” (qaway), then you can understand (yachay) and act (llank’ay). You can do saminchakuy, saiwachakuy, hucha miqhuy, call on the assistance of a helper spirit, and use many other practices to improve your inner and outer reality. But “seeing” is the foundation stone upon which all your practices rest.

What is there to “see” about the difficulties in your life? Certainly not personal failure. Rather, personal opportunity.

Debbie Ford, in her book The Secret of the Shadow, likens each of us to a recipe. You have different ingredients—traits and life experiences—in your recipe than I do. My ingredients are perfect for me, as yours are for you. From a spiritual viewpoint, each and every ingredient is necessary to your living your life mission and fulfilling your promise in this life. Therefore, if you can see everything as necessary to your being who you really are and growing to the fullness of being, then you will reject nothing. You will shift your perspective and embrace life’s challenges (inner and outer) as opportunities to more deeply understand yourself and evolve your consciousness.

Author and human potential guru Napoleon Hill concurs with Ford. He wrote, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” Finding the benefit is what escapes most people. They just can’t see what good can come from pain or trauma. But from a spiritual perspective, there is always a compensatory benefit or gift.

In your work as a paqo, what Ford and Hill are talking about is the energy dynamic of yanantin. Yanantin energies are dissimilar energies. Good-bad, male-female, friend-enemy, boss-employee, conservative-liberal, and so on. While many people see only opposition, as a paqo you learn to see complementarity. Yanantin does not mean “either-or” but “both-and.” By examining the yanantin energy of your difficulties and challenges (admittedly, this often is easier from hindsight), you can follow Ford’s and Hill’s advice to see the drama or trauma for what it is—something hurtful or challenging or painful—but also to seek the compensatory gifts—the hidden opportunities—in the difficulty. Let’s look at a few examples.

As a young boy, your father drilled into you that boys can’t be sissies. You had to be tough, take your lumps like a man, not back down from a challenge, always push ahead. As a result, you learned to be bold, outgoing, even a risk taker. The yanantin dynamic may play out in myriad ways. We’ll look at one possibility. The downside is that your father’s programming may have caused you to incorporate untrue, unrealistic, and unhealthy beliefs about manliness into your unconscious that hamper your emotional growth and take a lot of self-work to transform. The compensatory gift is that as an extrovert and a risk taker, when you chose sales as a profession, you persisted, met every challenge, and used your competitive edge to be among the top salespeople in your company. In this context, your emotional trauma as a child translated into professional gifts as an adult.

Here’s another example. You are a busy, passionate person involved in all kinds of activities, from family to volunteering. You are outward directed and don’t want to waste a moment. Then you come down with an autoimmune disease and are in pain, can no longer work, and must rely on others in a way you never did before. One aspect of the yanantin energy is that you suddenly lose your health and even your sense of a vibrant, independent self. Life as you knew it (and your sense of self as you knew it) is over. The other aspects of the yanantin are the compensatory gifts that your new situation bestows: You pay more attention to your body and to what you eat and how you move; you learn to be humble and not only to give but to receive; your capacity for empathy for others deepens; and you learn to be still and go inward, to appreciate the small, quiet moments.

As is true for each of us, you create hucha for yourself when you see only one side of the yanantin energy dynamic—usually the loss, pain, failure, hurt, etc. Your challenge, as is true for most of us, is to enlarge your vision and understanding to see that a yanantin always involves twoness: the bad and the good, the loss and the gain, the “punishment” and the “reward.” If you can work both sides of the yanantin, you can reach a place of wholeness. This harmonization of yanantin energy is called a japu, wherein no hucha is created.

By working the whole yanantin, you can even be the generator of your own transformation. You can move closer to achieving not only a restoration of harmony, but also of wholeness—no matter what is happening. Without that bullying father, you may have never developed your gift of perseverance and persistence. Without that disease, you might never have learned greater empathy and humility, appreciation for simplicity and inner stillness. In the yanantin dynamic, if you can achieve japu, you are holding a scale of justice, with the two scales equally balanced.

Do you have to learn your lessons and gather your gifts through strife or sickness? No. But, seeing things as they actually are, as a human being you are not yet a perfected being and none of us is living in a perfected world. At the level of your eternal spirit, you are a perfected, divine being. But in this third-dimensional, material world in the body of flesh and blood, you are an imperfect human being. The core spiritual yanantin of the sixth level or seventh level of consciousness is: god in the human, human as god. However, here in the Pachamama—in the material realm—we must deal with the level of consciousness we are actually at, which is third or fourth level.

But we don’t have to be victims. We can be victors! Whatever feelings and experiences you need in your “recipe” will come to you in a way that allows you—if you choose—to continue developing toward the completeness and wholeness that is encoded in your Inka Seed. As Ford writes, when you understand each “painful event as the perfect ingredient to make your recipe complete, you will witness the magic of transformation. You will bless what you formerly saw as a curse. You will watch as the horrid becomes holy.”

As we work to evolving our consciousness to the fourth level, we can’t help but reframe our views about what it means to be a human being, revise our beliefs and values, and generally act in the world in more efficient, practical, and impactful ways. And if we strive to achieve the level of a teqse paqo—a universal paqo—we refine our capacity for yachay (knowledge), llank’ay (ways of acting) and munay (expressions of love and of our highest feelings). It’s not too hyperbolic to say that we seek to live our godliness. So, in this post I would like to explore what we can learn from how Andeans named God and understood certain characteristics of godliness.

The Andeans had many names for God, among them were:

• Runa Camac: Runa means people/humanity, and camac means “to make.” Therefore, this name for God means Creator of the People or Creator of Humanity.
• Pachacamac: Pacha means many things, but in this context it means cosmos; camac as defined above means “to make.” So this name for God would translate to Maker of the Cosmos. Another translation is Invisible Ordering Creator.
• Hatun Taqe Wraqocha: Wiraqocha is used by itself as a name for God. It’s translation is disputed by scholars and is not important for our purposes here. Hatun means “high” or “great.” Taqe means “to join.” So translated this is the Great Joiner God. This is the translation of the name for God that I want to focus on for our benefit as paqos.

Holding the thought that the Andeans, through this name for God, saw God as the “one who joins,” let’s take a look at the other great being of the cosmic world: Satan. Under the influence of Christianity, many Andeans now believe in and talk about the devil and sin. However, in the past, they may not have. See my blog post “Evil and Andean Mysticism” (April 24, 2017) for a discussion of the closest figure I could find in the Andean pantheon of spirit beings to the Christian devil. His name is Supay. He actually was the guardian god of miners and of minerals and was associated with the underworld (ukhupacha) and so came to be associated with mortality and thus death. But he was not a personification of evil. However, it appears this is the figure the Spanish Chroniclers morphed into an Andean devil, wrongly as far as I can tell.

Most religions teach some form of opposition in these two energies: Good versus Evil. The energy of God is expressed as creator, ultimate authority, righteousness, benevolence, and so on; and Satan, as the fallen angel Lucifer, is the Evil One, whose expends his energy to draw us away from God, tempt us to sin (create hucha for ourselves), and so on.

If we trace the origins of certain words—such as Satan and the Devil—we will discover that those root meanings provide us insight into this being’s energetic influence on us and in the world. In Hebrew ha–satan means “the adversary.” The Hebrew Bible was first translated into Koine Greek, and the Koine Greek word for what came to be translated as “Satan” was kategoro, which means to “categorize” or to create a “division.” The Greek word for “Devil” was diabolos, which means “accuser” or “slanderer.” I think you can immediately see that the meanings of these words are a far cry from “evil.” Mostly, if we rely on these root meanings, the devil is our adversary because he is the one who seeks to cause us to divide or separate ourselves from our true nature—our godliness.

Here is the question that all of this information is leading you toward: As a human being and as a paqo, are you expressing the energy of “joining” (God energy) or of “dividing” (Satan energy)?

This is a profound question to answer, for your answer can shift your view of everything: from seeing people and events as “good or evil” to “that which brings us together or that which drives us apart.” What a shift this creates in how you see your responsibilities as a human being—as a parent, sibling, friend, boss, coworker, citizen. What a shift in how you view your work as a paqo. What a shift in how you think about the sami and hucha within you, and within other people. What a shift in how you decide which leaders, spiritual and political, to support or not. What a shift in understanding what is going on in our world today.

When we view people and situations according to this view of “joining” or “dividing” we can release the too-rigid judgments of good and evil and instead see people and their words and actions as either furthering our cooperation or fostering our separation. What a kinder—and less accusatory—way to view the world. Most important, as paqos we can examine our own thoughts, words, and deeds to ask: “Is this a joining energy or a dividing one?” As Kahlil Gibran counsels: “Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.” Imagine the possibilities if we all adopted the attitude of being Great Joiner Gods.