I was recently reading Dean Radin’s new book Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. Aside from my interest in staying abreast of current research into human consciousness and my planning to teach a workshop in September 2019 on supercharging your intuition, I was struck by how this book confirms so much of our practice as paqos—especially that the “secret power of the universe” that Radin mentions in his subtitle is intention. The “beauty teaching” of the Andean mystical tradition is that energy must follow intention. All we need to interact with the universe of living energy is our intention. What we call ayni, Radin calls magic.

If you have taken the lloq’e training (the left side of the path), we call the practical application of our intention the “magical” aspect of the work. It’s magic to us because we are learning to take action in the world—to be in greater, more effective, and increasingly effortless ayni through our actions.

As paqos, our entire practice is based on learning to be in more perfect ayni. Ayni is the interchange of our intention with the conscious universe. The effortlessness and effectiveness with which we manifest anything through ayni—from something as abstract as joyful well-being to something as concrete as a new house—is proportional to our personal power. Our personal power is a state that arises from the coherence of our energy body (more sami, less hucha). In other words, the more sami-filled our poq’po, the more clarity we bring to our ayni and the more effective it is. With less hucha we are able to do more. This focus on llank’ay—doing—is also the magic that Radin talks about.

Using “magic” as his metaphor for “psi” (psychic) abilities, Radin writes: “The word magic comes from the Greek word magos, referring to a member of a learned  and priestly class, which in turn derives from the Old Persian word magush, meaning to “to be able” or “to have power.” That just about sums up what a paqo is and our goal of increasing our personal power (which is another way of saying perfecting our ayni).

But ours is not a practice of intense effort. It is pukllay, or playfulness. It is a playful, relaxed state of bringing consciousness to our three human powers: yachay (what and how we know), munay (what we feel, especially love under our will), and llank’ay (how we apply ourselves—and our consciousness—in the world). As we evolve our consciousness, and thus experience a greater state of energetic coherence, we discover that our power as co-creators increases—we enhance the effectiveness of our ayni. Our “magical action” left-side powers become charged.

This energetic coherence (less hucha, more sami) is similar to the state that Radin identifies as optimal state for psi functioning. Radin writes that the most successful participants in psi experiments (in this case to influence random-number generators, but it applies to all “magical” intention) are those who feel “resonance” with the machines (feeling at one with it, softening of boundaries between the self and other) and who experience “effortless striving,” which is intense desire or focused concentration that is devoid of anxiety. This, to me, is a way of saying being in ayni.

In addition, as paqos we want to have such energetic coherence that we are open to all the “flavors” of energy. As my teacher Juan Nuñez del Prado says, we never want to put ourselves into an energetic jail, where we are afraid of energy. Energy, according to the Andean tradition, is amoral—beyond the moral overlay that we humans impose upon it. Radin confirms that view when he writes about the nature of elementary particles and the forces of nature. They are not subject to moral overlay. However, our use of our powers (the application of our intention) is dependent on our ethical and moral system: we make a choice how to use it and to what ends. We can be paqos who work for the well-being and benefit of ourselves and others, or we can be layqas who are only interested in satisfying our own desires, often at the expense of others. Radin’s view mirrors our own as paqos. He writes: “[T]he way magic is used is completely up to the magician. The power itself, like any fundamental force of the universe, is morally neutral.”

While Radin believes that an altered state of consciousness—a deep meditative state, a hypnotic-like state, or an emotionally charged state—enhances psi abilities, we as paqos learn to be in effective ayni in a normal state of consciousness. Still, the mechanisms that Radin sees in play are just like ayni—there is a two-way interchange: you project outward your intention to influence the energy of the universe, and the living energy of the universe reaches back to you and responds. While the laboratory effects of psi abilities are quite small, they are statistically significant to an irrefutable degree.

According to Radin’s and others’ experiments, this intentional interchange—what we call ayni—can be applied in almost unlimited ways, from “intending” that your food be supercharged for your health, to sending healing energy to another person across time and space, to drawing toward you the object of your desires, such as a new house. As already mentioned, Radin says that those who are in conscious coherence (such a long-time meditators) have better results than the average person. For us as paqos, this laboratory result leads us back to our basic practice of saminchakuy—reducing your hucha and increasing your sami. Saminchakuy increases what we could call the coherence of your energy body, which in turns helps you evolve your consciousness.

So, if you need a nudge of motivation to keep working the basic techniques of the Andean tradition, you have it—from science. Radin’s experiments have led him to the same place paqos, and other mystics, have discovered: that, as Radin says, “the secret power of the universe is not made out of matter and energy and physical stuff, but is probably made out of consciousness. . .”

(For information about the Intuition Intensive Workshop in North Carolina in September 2019, please visit the web page http://www.cfcchange.com. This is the first offering of my new endeavor, The Center for Conscious Change. I will be teaching with my friend and fellow intuitive-medium Randi Eaton. We plan to offer this workshop in Northern California over the weekend of October 11-13, 2019. Information should be on our page http://www.cfcchange.com within two weeks or so.)