In last month’s post, we talked about virtue—about cultivating tolerance, kindness, and concern for the well-being for ourselves and others. I described how virtue is not just a moral value that we hold but is the active practice of that value. “A value is a choice about what who we want to be. Virtue, like ayni, is an application of will to apply that value—or cluster of values—to reveal how we actually show up in the world.”

In this long post, I want to follow up on that thought with a discussion of an energy dynamic for developing our virtue and refining how we show up in the world. The process involves our ñawis (our mystical eyes) and a capacity called qaway—clear-seeing, which we develop and access at the three uppermost ñawis: the physical right eye or paña ñawi, physical left eye or lloq’e ñawi, and the seventh eye in the middle of our forehead, the qanchis ñawi (what is called in some other traditions the third eye). Qaway is, as don Juan Nuñez del Prado has said, “seeing reality as it really is.”

To be like the hummingbird as a bringer of sami, rather than only the condor who eats hucha, we want to practice virtue without also screening ourselves from the harsh realities of the human world. While optimism is a worthy value, it serves no one if we wear rose-colored glasses. Clear-seeing means facing the human heaviness—and even horrors—that we inflict on each other.

It can be emotionally challenging to focus on our heaviness. Yet if we won’t bear witness to our own and humanity’s heaviness, we won’t cultivate the will to work for inner and outer change. By cultivating qaway, we strengthen our ability—and also our willingness—to see what is real, no matter how difficult. By developing and using qaway, we not only understand more accurately what is happening, we also reinforce our ability to not be buffeted—or brought to despair—by circumstances and conditions. Qaway allows us to acknowledge hucha—and even human depravity and evil—but not be overcome by it. Don Juan counsels us that only by turning toward human heaviness can we bolster ourselves to dispassionately deal with the world as it is. As former Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan once said, “We must meet the challenge rather than wish it were not before us.”

Qaway is an energetic power that helps us meet challenges. It is a capacity distributed among the three uppermost ñawis. The qanchis ñawi allows for mystical and creative vision: to see the world of energy, poq’pos, seqes, and spirit beings, as well as to inform us through visions, imagination, dreams, and creative insight. The two physical eyes add more worldly energetic capacities to the mix. The right eye (paña ñawi) mystically helps us to see what is happening around us and to respond with rationality and yachay (knowledge and the wisdom that can come only through personal experience). It helps us to see past all the extraneous data, drama, and diversions so that we can become laser focused on the relevant facts of the matter. Once we understand the core of the issue, then the mystical aspects of the left eye (lloq’e ñawi) help us to respond with practicality and llank’ay (action). Instead of being overwhelmed by a dizzying array of possible responses, we quickly grasp the essentials of the issue and respond in the most efficient and effective way to deal with, diffuse, or resolve the situation. If we can learn to simultaneously process the input from all three of these uppermost ñawis, then even as we stand witness to human heaviness, we can think, feel, and act with greater understanding, effectiveness, impact, sobriety, and tolerance.One way to develop qaway is to move our energy up from the base of the body—from the siki ñawi (the mystical eye at the root of the body)—through all of the ñawis until we reach the top of the body and the three uppermost mystical eyes. This is a long and usually difficult energetic journey. It asks that we be self-aware and self-motivated. But it is worth the effort, for if we don’t raise our energy to use our qaway, instead of bringing sami to the world we tend to generate more heaviness. Let me provide an example from the Israel-Hamas war.

When destruction rained down on the courtyard of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, the response, rightly so, was outrage and horror at the hundreds of needless civilian deaths and injuries. The next response for tens of thousands of people in the region and around the world was—without any forensic or other evidence—condemnation of Israel for either deliberately or errantly bombing a civilian target. The belief that the Israeli Defence Force was to blame prompted calls for protest and a push for retaliation. That reaction was a purely siki ñawi response, as it usually is when we are shocked, outraged, or traumatized.

The siki ñawi is the place of our impulsive and instinctual energies, our raw humanness, and our survival instincts. While this energy is usually left unexamined and so unconscious to us, it is felt powerfully when it is stimulated by such things as a strong primal desire or a perceived threat. When this energy erupts, it activates our atiy—our capacity for action—and the energy rushes from the siki up to the qosqo ñawi—the eye of the belly or naval, which is our primary power center from which we then take action. If we perceive a threat and the need to defend ourselves through the siki ñawi, we act to counter the perceived threat and defend ourselves and our loved ones through the energy of the qosqo ñawi. There are times when we must marshal these energies, when defending ourselves is necessary. However, too often this siki ñawi energy flares because we have misperceived someone or some event as an enemy or threat when, in fact, they were not. Sometimes we don’t wait to determine who is responsible and instead unthinkingly react by lashing out at someone, anyone. That someone or anyone usually is a person or group against which we already hold prejudices and toward whom we already feel suspicion or animosity. So, the energetic process at the siki ñawi in its hucha-inducing aspects is an impulsive, almost animalistic reaction that usually is unhinged from our yachay (rationality).

What are we to do? We can train ourselves to move the energy of our base impulses up to higher ñawis and give ourselves the opportunity to refine the energy so that we act less harshly, unproductively, or even incorrectly. Don Juan calls this process of refining our energies “taming” our “wildness,” with our wildness being our more animalistic, overly emotional, and non-rational siki ñawi impulses. If we can move these energies up all the way to the three uppermost eyes, we can stimulate our capacity for clear-seeing. In the case of the Gaza hospital tragedy, doing so would have meant alleviating the suffering of the wounded while withholding blame about who and what caused the destruction until evidence was available to do that rationally. It turns out that current evidence suggests, not conclusively but persuasively, that the destruction was caused not by a bomb dropped by the Israelis, but by a missile misfired by a jihadist group sympathetic to Hamas.

That is one current situation where qaway—clear-seeing—was woefully lacking. We can all name countless others. This kind of impulsive reaction is unfortunate although understandable, as there are so many ways that we in our humanness prevent ourselves from refining our siki ñawi energies. In the aftermath of the Gaza hospital tragedy, doing so would not have lessened our outrage and grief at the loss of life, but it would have prevented bias and untruth from becoming more fuel for the fire of conflict.

Following this example, how might moving our siki energy up through the other ñawis influence our potential reactions to such things as threats and challenges?  Let’s move the energy and see. The next ñawi is the qosqo ñawi, the eye of the naval or belly. This is our primary power center, from which we take action in the world. The main capacity at the qosqo is khuyay, a passion that motivates us to do things in the world and to persist even when the going gets tough. Khuyay also is related to what we call our emotional intelligence, particularly to how we make emotional attachments. Our attachments to people, groups, beliefs, opinions, ideas, causes, and so on can be healthy or unhealthy, sami-filled or hucha-inducing. By examining this aspect of our khyuay and personal power, we can probe how we are acting in the world. Are our relationships supportive or controlling? Are we stubbornly attached to a belief even when the facts run counter to it? Are we asleep to our own biases, but awake to everyone else’s? If we can bring some measure of clarity to the many kinds of attachments we make (and how and why we make them), then we can use our will to make other choices for how we use our personal power. In the case of the hospital tragedy, we might have been able to see that placing blame and raising calls for protest were premature since there was not yet any evidence indicating who the perpetrators were. Instead, in the throes of a siki impulse, many people were blindly attached to their animosities and biases, which led to erroneous assumptions and actions that heightened the hostilities.

We can refine our siki energy higher still, from the qosqo to the sonqo ñawi. This is the mystical eye of the heart or, more accurately, the eye of our feelings. Having engaged our personal power at the qosqo to become aware of the often unexamined (and unhealthy and even destructive) ways we are blindly attached to groups, ideas, beliefs, and so on, we can now bring the capacity of munay to bear on the impulse.

Munay usually is translated from Quechua to English as “love.” A better translation is “love under our will.” Munay involves the conscious choice for cultivating the range of feelings associated with being loving, such as tolerance, respect, kindness, and compassion. Munay doesn’t ask us to like everybody, but it does ask us not to hate anyone. Munay, even in its most tenuous expression, is transformative.

One way that transformation might unfold is as follows. Having moved our outrage at an injustice up from the siki ñawi to the qosqo, we tamed the impulse toward an unthinking or even violent reaction with a choice of how to use our power—to not allow ourselves to be controlled by our outrage but instead to exert some personal control over it. We still feel outraged at the injustice, but rather than tear the house down in a wild rage, we can direct our energies in a more productive way to tip the balance toward actions that support both reasonable accountability and greater justice. When that energy then moves into the sonqo, we can further temper our outrage by deliberately using our will to bring compassion to the equation. We don’t have to condone an action, but we can begin to generate sami toward both parties: for those who are suffering from the injustice and for those who for whatever reason have rationalized their need to perpetuate it. This equanimity is the doorway to transformation. Munay helps us build a bridge from our raw, undeveloped selves to our more conscious and equanimous selves.

The next ñawi is the kunka ñawi, the eye of the neck. The two main capacities here are yachay and rimay. Yachay is what we know and understand through firsthand experience. Our experiences and what we make them mean have led to us to being in the world in particular ways that make us who we are, different from everyone else. Rimay is our ability to communicate what we know and who we are with clarity and integrity.

When our outrage is tempered at the kunka ñawi by yachay, our perception of the cause of the outrage morphs from the abstract to the personal. Through both munay and yachay, we are able to identify vicariously both with those who perpetrate injustice and those who are subject to it. Our self-righteousness is softened by the realization that at some time we all have abused our power and acted unjustly toward others, and we all have been on the receiving end of being treated unjustly. Through this personalization, we can admit that we all have hucha and have acted from that heaviness. We are able to feel and understand more truly, deeply, and honestly how we all are imperfect human beings. And with this understanding, we can seek accountability in a more productive way: instead of taking sides we can put our own preferences aside and begin to consider the need for reconciliation between the parties. We can use our energy to work toward understanding the root wounds underlying the conflict. No doubt both parties contributed to the conflict, so both parties must be part of the solution. Communication goes from being one-way to two-way. This is the gift of rimay, the other capacity of the kunka ñawi. Rimay’s power is embodied through the honesty and integrity with which we express ourselves and allow others to express themselves. Rimay speaks truth, while acknowledging that there may be a gulf between our truth and another’s truth. Yachay and rimay together make room for both truths and reveal the common ground between the two.

The final lift up the ñawis is to the three uppermost eyes, the two physical eyes and the seventh eye, which together confer the capacity for qaway, clear-seeing. Following our example, by the time our outrage reaches the upper ñawis, we still feel the pain of a tragedy, but we are not subsumed by it. Through qaway, we can, as don Ivan Nuñez del Prado says, hover high above the storm: we see it clearly below us as present and real, but we are not swept up in its fury. From the vantage point of qaway, the world feels and looks different because we feel and see not only with our human eyes but also with all seven of our ñawis, our metaphysical eyes. We are of the world but not in the world, at least for a time, and a host of insights can arise to help us find our way when we feel lost and bring light to both our inner and outer darkness.

The physical human world and the metaphysical realm of the living energy are in yanantin relationship—they are different but complementary. If we can develop qaway, we can eventually achieve a japu, a perfect harmonization of these two aspects of reality. Perceiving from both realms—the physical and the metaphysical—we double our capacity for creative insight, honest and effective communication, and productive action. We can become chakarunas—bridge builders. We can realistically acknowledge the hucha that drives people apart and use our energies artfully to foster the sami that helps draw people together. Rather than stoke the energies of separation and condemnation, we work the energies of reconciliation and understanding. This truly is how we walk not between two worlds, but simultaneously in both worlds.