The Kawsay Pacha and kawsay. Sami and light. I have thought a lot about these two pairings: about the essence of each member of each pairing, and about their similarities and differences. That speculation leads naturally to musings about the nature of the unmanifest and manifest realms and, of course, ultimately to musing about ourselves. This post is the result of such contemplation and its possible relevance to our understanding and practice of the Andean mystical tradition.
Let’s start with kawsay because metaphysically it is the innate “substance” of everything. The Kawsay Pacha is the realm from which kawsay flows. The Quechua world pacha has many meanings, but in this context means world, realm, space, and time. Kawsay is the animating energy, the creational, life-force energy. Both the Kawsay Pacha (the realm from which kawsay emerges) and kawsay (the life-force) are complete mysteries. We don’t know what they are—they are beyond characterization. Yet, there is something instead of nothing because of them. Andean mystics and those of other traditions tell us that 
everything is comprised of this living energy (kawsay), and while we can perceive it, we can never truly know what it is and from where it emerges.
Kawsay, this creational life-force energy, animates everything but remains as yet beyond our understanding. Some say that if we ever can truly apprehend the nature of “First Cause”—of whatever agency started everything and whatever force, field, consciousness, or intention keeps it going—then we would know the essence of God. When I use the word “God,” I am doing so stripped of religious overlay. It is simply a convenient term I will use in this post for whatever First Cause or the Source is. Although kawsay cannot serve as a synonym for whatever God is, as the life-force energy it has the same ineffable essence as whatever God is.
Andeans were not philosophers and did not have a written language, so we cannot truly know what their general understanding of kawsay was (and is). However, we can look to other traditions to get a sense of how they thought of this “God” realm that is the Kawsay Pacha and this living energy called kawsay. (See my April 7, 2017 post “The Nature of the Kawsay Pacha,” of which this current post is an update.)
The ancient Greeks called this foundational animating energy or essence ylem. They thought of it as an immaterial but primordial force that existed before the formation of the physical universe. They had other names for this essence, such as aperion, which can be translated as “indefinite” or “boundless.” It is the limitless, unknowable, and unobservable Source energy from which everything comes and everything returns. They also thought of it as “Logos,” a rational structuring principle that ordered the cosmos.
In Hindu Vedic philosophy, the nature of the cosmos is found neither in Being nor Non-being, for the primordial Source energy permeates all things, but is not itself those things. In the Chinese Taoist view, the Wu, or “first principle,” is considered Non-being, which is the matrix that is itself beyond any concept of “thingness,” but is the Non-beingness from which beingness and everything physical arises. Yet, Wu cannot be understood as above and beyond the manifest physical realm because it cannot be separate from that which arises from it.
In a similar way, kawsay is the essence of the primordial, foundational “realm” of the Kawsay Pacha. As I already pointed out, the Kawsay Pacha’s very name contains within it the concepts of world, realm, space, and time, so Kawsay Pacha may be translated as the Realm of Living Energy or the Realm of Life-Force Energy. But the Kawsay Pacha itself cannot be characterized by any of the definitions of “pacha,” because each relates to temporality or spatiality. The Kawsay Pacha is outside of space and time. It is an unmanifest, immaterial, infinite, unbounded something that is different from the physical realm of the manifest world and yet not separate from it.* Whatever we say about the Kawsay Pacha distorts it, except perhaps acknowledging that its essence as kawsay—this life-force energy or the living energy—is what creates a manifest world. Everything in the physical universe is comprised of kawsay, although kawsay itself cannot be reduced to any “thing.”
There is a different term for the material cosmos—the Pachamama, which can be translated quite literally as the Mother of the Space-Time Realm. Pachamama also is used to refer to the planet Earth, although as a being in her own right, the Earth has her own name: Mama Allpa. Anthropologist Inge Bolin points out a distinction between these two terms: she says that Pachamama is used by Andeans to impart a sense of 
the sacred to the Earth (and the material cosmos), whereas Mama Allpa is the termed used in the more mundane context of the land in which Andeans plant their crops and upon which their animals graze.
It is the within the realm of the Pachamama that we can situate sami. Sami is the most refined frequency of kawsay, which is the foundational life-force energy. When the Andeans call human beings allpa camasqa, they are calling us “animated earth.” When we work with energy, it is sami that is our focus as the empowering energy of life. It is perceptually experienced as “light” living energy, but not in terms of visible light. It is “light” in that it is the most refined frequency of living energy, and its lightness refers to a sense of weightlessness, not of luminosity. Sami, as I said, empowers us. It lifts us, helping us step up the qanchispatañan (levels of personal development). In contrast, there is a way that human beings—and only human beings—disturb the flow of sami in a way that changes its quality. It comes to feel heavy to us. This is called hucha, which is the name for sami when we slow it or block it and so reduce its frequency or density. Don Juan Nuñez del Prado has said that hucha can best be thought of as sami that has lost some its transformational power. There is much more to say about hucha as a condition of sami, but the focus of this post is sami in its unreduced state, so let us return to considering another of its mysteries.
I am circling back to what I see as a potential paradox in the nature of sami. It used to be a mystery to me that sami as the light living energy is not constituted as visible light and yet visible light is the identifiable characteristic of someone who is running pure sami energy!
As we develop our ayni—our conscious interchanges with the living universe through sami—we evolve our consciousness. This is called stepping up the qanchispatañan, which has seven levels. The sixth level is that of the enlightened human being. A sixth-level person no longer creates hucha. They have perfected their ayni—their reciprocal interchanges with the living universe and so never slow or block sami (in other words, they do not create hucha). Prototypes of sixth-level enlightened beings are the Buddha and Jesus. Enlightened human beings experience an absolute lightness of being—they are pure sami. And, the identifiable characteristic of a sixth-level person is that they glow. Literally glow!
It seems to me to be a contradiction, or at least a confusion, to equate sami with visible light when its essence is about lightness of being. I once asked don Juan about this possible paradox, and he said that sometimes don Benito called sami by a different term—k’anchay. K’anchay has various definitions, most of which are related to visible light: to emit visible light, to be luminous, to glow, to shine, to be bright or
radiant. Don Juan confirmed that generally sami is equated not with visible light but with an essence of being. However, a person who is a master of sami and so has evolved his or her consciousness would perceptually reveal this lightness of being through k’anchy—by radiating visible light.
Using my common sense, I understood that k’anchy cannot have an equivalence with sami, because k’anchy as white light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and, additionally, the visible light of the electromagnetism is itself only one kind of energy. Furthermore, visible light is a further reduction within the larger electromagnetic spectrum, for it is only a tiny portion of it. All of this means that reducing sami to visible light (as k’anchay) severely restricts sami as the living energy, confusing two different kinds and qualities of energy. (I will discuss k’anchy in detail in Part 2 of this post next month.)
The more I thought about this, the more I came to think that this apparent paradox actually reveals an aspect of the brilliance of the Andean sacred tradition. Most traditions valorize the white light. They are traditions whose practices are what would be called “ascending” practices. They focus on teaching us about the most refined states of being and they tend not to teach about or train people in dealing with the heavy aspects of being. Yet our heavy aspects comprise most of who we are as human beings! These ascending traditions tend to reject the bodily or worldly, or they seek to help us leap beyond the physical world and our humanness. Many of them even see the physical world and our humanness as corrupted or degenerate. In contrast, the Andean mystical tradition is a descending tradition. Everything is made only of sami, and our work is to attend assiduously to our humanness so that we can grow and evolve. In other words, we have to attend to our hucha. We are not corrupted or degenerate. IN our true nature, we are Godlike. I like to use Sri Aurobindo’s phraseology to explain this view: this world and human beings are where “God-Spirit meets God-Matter” and “there is divinity in the body.” Instead of seeking to rise above our humanness, we immerse ourselves in it to reveal is sacrality. (See my blog post “Andean Mysticism as a Descending Tradition,” October 3, 2021.)
Using the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum as a metaphor for sami as something that glows, we can parse the radical difference in viewpoints and practices of ascending and descending traditions. From the Andean point of view, we cannot radiate all frequencies of sami (emit visible white light) unless we first learn to be perfect absorbers of every frequency of sami. In other words, we have to master the black light before we can radiate the white light. White light is the reflection of all the frequencies of the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, whereas black light is the absorption of all these frequencies. We cannot reflect all the frequencies of visible light unless we first learn to be 
perfect absorbers of this energy. That is exactly what the Andean tradition teaches us to do.
Our practices for the most part focus on teaching us not to block or slow any frequency of sami—or, in other words, to not create hucha. Another way of saying this is that they teach us not to avoid hucha. Only humans create hucha, we create a lot of it, and so we cannot avoid it. (Although most of us try to!) Therefore, we must be masters of transforming this hucha (remember, it’s only slow sami) back into its natural state of sami, whose nature is to flow unimpeded. I don’t know of many traditions that stress this type of mastery of incoming energy flows. But this mastery is exactly what we have to achieve before we can be “enlightened” and emit visible white light.
I want to stress this point, because I feel it reveals the brilliance of Andean energy work. In the words of don Ivan Nuñez del Prado, we must be able to “perfectly absorb absolute reality.” That means we have to be able to mediate any and every kind of energy, especially the heavy human energies. We repel or reject nothing. That takes some kind of mastery! I believe that k’anchay—glowing, being able to radiate every frequency of energy—is evidence of that accomplishment: of having achieved the mastery of being in perfect ayni with sami as the living energy in every one of its forms, even as hucha. Radiating white light means we have to become perfect masters of ourselves and our relations with the manifest and oh-so-human world and with the unmanifest Source, which we call the living universe. And that understanding, for me, explains with simplicity and gracefulness the relationship between sami and k’anchay, and the beauty and power of Andean energy practices.
But what about k’anchay as a living energy and as a physical characteristic of an enlightened human being (as actually glowing with visible white light)? Is k’anchay, in its own way, as fundamental to the manifest world as are kawsay and sami? With these questions in mind, visible light soon became the new focus on my musings. In Part 2 of this discussion, which will be posted in July, we will delve into some k’anchay’s paradoxes and mysteries.
Q'enti Wasi - House of the Hummingbird 