In last month’s blog, I discussed some of the qualities, characteristics, similarities, and differences (and mysteries and paradoxes) of the kawsay pacha, kawsay, and sami. I ended by musing about the nature of sami (the light living energy) versus k’anchay (visible light). Here I will become even more speculative as I consider the mystical implications of k’anchay. K’anchy as visible light is reducible to photons, and the nature of light/photons is an immensely interesting (and paradoxical) study. Taking even a brief look into it can bring us full circle: from the unmanifest realm of the Kawsay Pacha to the manifest material world of the Pachamama and sami and k’anchay, and then back to the immaterial Kawsay Pacha.

The photon is the smallest “packet” or “quanta” of light energy. A standard interpretation among physicists is that light (or the photon) has, like most quantum entities, a dual nature as both wave and particle.* They say it really is not either a wave or a particle until a measurement is made. Or, alternatively, it is a superposition—it is both wavelike and particle-like at the same time until its wavefunction is “collapsed” and it reveals itself singularly as having the characteristics of either a wave or a particle. This quality of being indefinable or essentially unknowable before it is apprehended in some way and takes on distinct qualities is rather like kawsay (the living energy): it is both being and non-being.

Another way that k’anchay, as light or photons, shares similarities with kawsay is that neither a photon nor kawsay has mass, but both have energy. They have energy because neither is ever at rest. Kawsay’s nature is to move unimpeded, and light’s movement dictates the universal constant of motion (in a vacuum): the speed of light, or 186,000 miles per second. As Einstein said, “Nothing happens until something moves.” Currently physicists tell us that theoretically we can approach the speed of light, but nothing that has any mass can ever reach the speed of light. That’s because the acceleration to reach light-speed would require an infinite amount of energy. At the speed of light, there is no space or time. So, there is no duration, distance, or direction of motion. At the speed of light (and perhaps of kawsay), the universe collapses down to . . . what? Nothing that we can define without using metaphysical language. Kawsay and light (from their perspective, rather than ours) exist in what amounts to an unmanifest, dimensionless, atemporal state. Theoretically and mystically speaking, it might be as accurate to say that kawsay and photons are nothing, nowhere, never as it is to say they are everything, everywhere, always.

Another correlation is that Andean paqos say that everything is made of kawsay (or sami as an expression of the most refined kawsay) and scientists tell us that everything relies on photon interactions. The paqo view is that without kawsay or sami there would be no manifest world and, thus, no physical life. Scientists reach the same conclusion about the primacy of photons. Without photons there would be no mass. Photons create the electromagnetic force, which means that without them there would be no atoms. Atoms are the foundation of chemical elements. Without chemistry, there is no life. Therefore, without kawsay and without photons there would be no manifest universe.

I have mentioned only a few of light’s/photons’ characteristics (and even paradoxes) from our perspective. But what is reality like from a photon’s perspective?

I first came across this provocative question in a book by astrophysicist Bernard Haisch. His astronomy-focused scientific research had stoked his curiosity about the nature of light. The deeper he probed into the nature of photons, the more he began to stop resisting beliefs he previously would have labelled as outlandish, or even kooky. One of the core beliefs that arose from his thinking about light (photons) is that consciousness must be prior to matter. (See his book The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What’s Behind It All.) While his question about a photon’s “perspective” blatantly anthropomorphizes photons (as he acknowledges) and must be cast in metaphoric language (as he acknowledges), it nevertheless sets us up for an interesting thought experiment. (He is not the only scientist who has asked the following kinds of questions about the nature of photons.)

Haisch explains that if we look up into the night sky and see a dim object such as a distant star or galaxy, the reason we are seeing it at all is because photons of light from that star or galaxy travel through space and are absorbed into our retinas. Our brains then interpret that flow of electromagnetic energy to construct an image. He uses the example of looking at the Andromeda galaxy. According to clock time, that light takes two million years to travel from Andromeda to our retinas. When the electromagnetic signal is processed by our brains, we see the faint flow of that galaxy.

Now flip the scenario around to the perspective of the photons. What would photons experience?

Haisch writes, “For a beam of light itself, however, things look different. Instead of radiating from some star in the Andromeda Galaxy and racing through space for two million years, every single photon sees itself, metaphorically speaking, as born and instantaneously absorbed into your eye. It is one single jump that takes no time at all, according to the theory of special relativity. That’s because, in the reference frame of a particle traveling at the speed of light, all distances shrink to zero and time collapses to nothing. From its own perspective, the photon of light leaps instantaneously from there to here because distance has no place in its existence. We can almost say that the photon was created because it has someplace to land and, in an instant, it jumped from there to here, even across two million light years of space from our perspective.”

Once we fully absorb that scenario, we might ask, as Haisch does, “Is it even possible for a photon to exist if it has no place to go?” This question, he says, is “unresolved in both physics and metaphysics.” But he maintains that “there must be a deep meaning in these physical facts—a deep truth about the simultaneous interconnection of all things. . . .”

Haisch has come to believe that there is an unmanifest realm that is First Cause and that the manifest realm is a subtraction from it. Additionally, he presupposes that there must be a Creator Consciousness—God if you will, although this is an Unmanifest God that is beyond human conceptualization. He further concludes (as do Andeans mystics and the mystics of other traditions, and even some scientists) that consciousness is the driving force of creation, and so consciousness is more fundamental than matter.

Haisch’s speculation makes me think of a line from the song “Sleeping at Last,” by the Palestinian group Saturn: Perhaps “the universe was made just to be seen by my eyes.” Interesting metaphysical speculation. . . . There actually is a lot to say about this idea in terms of the Andean concept of ayni (energetic interchanges, reciprocity) and qaway (clear-seeing, simultaneously apprehending both the metaphysical and physical realms), but space prohibits me from taking you down that rabbit hole except in the most superficial of ways.

Drawing together the points I have made in these two blog posts and wrapping up all this speculation, we could say, along with other mystics and scientists such as Haisch, that the nature of the unmanifest realm (the Kawsay Pacha) is a creational essence (God, Consciousness, Source, the All That Is) and the creational force is kawsay, or the life-force. The photon is similar to sami in that it is foundational to there being a manifest, physical world. Movement from the photon’s perspective also is similar to the flow of sami and the relational interaction of ayni (reciprocity, energy interchanges). Both sami and ayni operate in nonlocal ways. Nonlocality means that certain entities are connected (“entangled” in the parlance of physics) in ways that are not subject to the constraints of time and space. Thus, there can be instantaneous correlations between two entities that were once in contact but have become separated. No matter how far apart they are, they can instantaneously respond as a pair even though there is no known type of information-bearing signal passing between them. What happens to one affects the other regardless of whether they are separated by three inches, three feet, three miles, or three light-years.

From the perspective of mysticism, this is true of us. We are, to once again paraphrase Sri Aurobindo, where God-Spirit meets God-matter, and our separation from Creator is an illusion. Through ayni, which is an exchange (and feedback loop) of intention/consciousness, we are in an instantaneous nonlocal and reciprocal relationship with the living universe, with whatever “God” is in the unmanifest and manifest realms. Our ayni in the physical world may also be nonlocal, but until we have reach advanced levels of consciousness (fifth, sixth, and seventh levels), we do not yet have infallible ayni, and so we can at best only influence the material world, not change it or control aspects of it. (We occasionally may be able to change or control something in the physical world, just not consistently; certainly not infallibly, as can those with more perfect ayni. For most of us, it’s hit or miss.)

All of this speculation is just that, of course—speculation. But it is perhaps one reason to admire the way don Juan and don Benito explained who we are as human beings and as metaphysical beings: we are Drops of the Mystery. Perhaps the manifest realm is, as so many mystics say, the way that Creator knows itself. To have any sense of Itself, It must split into an Other. We are part of that Other, while simultaneously being part of the originating Creator. I tell my students that if we think of ourselves in this way, the momentous consequence is that in the flow of ayni, we are the feedback to Creator’s ayni. Ayni is a process of intent, followed by action, followed by feedback. How would you perceive yourself and your life differently if you granted legitimacy to the premise that you (and every aspect of how you are in life) are Creator’s feedback about one aspect of its own True Nature?

Acceding to this premise, we can better understand how the universe was created just to be seen by our eyes. Each of us is the center of the universe! This point of view might motivate us in our mystical practice to learn mastery of the self: to be able to absorb everything in “reality” without rejection so that we can live as a being who radiates the All. In other words, to master ourselves is to perfect our ayni so that someday we achieve the sixth-level of consciousness, that of the enlightened human being. And as a literally “enlightened” human being, as a physical-mystical being of pure sami, each of us would visibly glow with k’anchay.

When we are perfect absorbers of sami and so glow with the light of k’anchy, we would live as what and who we truly are: an aspect of Creator. We would have all the abilities of Creator available to us here in the human world. The Andean prophecy of our creating a “heaven” on Earth allows us to understand that achieving such a state of being requires that we achieve a japu in our yanantin nature. Yanantin means the complement of the differences, which when harmonized creates a Whole or Unity (japu). The Whole in this context means that we realize and live from both our God-nature and our human nature in a perfectly integrated, harmonious way. In the view of science, we would be a superposition: expressing both our wave nature and our particle nature simultaneously.

Many mystical texts and adepts express this same relationship far more poetically. As I have already pointed out, don Juan Nuñez del Prado and don Benito Qoriwaman said, “We are drops of the Mystery.” The Indian mystic Kabir reveals the entangled, nonlocal relationship embedded in that metaphor: “All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.” I believe that these musings about the relational energy dynamics of the Kawsay Pacha, kawsay, sami, and k’anchay lead us to this same truth.

*This view about the complementary nature of particles is part of what’s called the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was developed by Danish physicist Neils Bohr. It is not universally accepted. In fact, some physicists say it is a misinterpretation of the nature of particles because of the messiness of trying to describe physics concepts in language instead of mathematics. The alternative view is that everything is particle in nature, and the wavelike properties arise only because of probability distributions. Here is one such explanation: “[T]here is no reason to say that quantum entities are ever really waves. Rather, the probabilities of where we will observe them in an experiment can be conveniently determined by the calculus of the Schrödinger equation, proposed in 1926 in response to de Broglie, which is formally analogous to a kind of wave equation. But a wave of what? Not of a physical thing – a density or field – but of a probability. The distribution of these probabilities, when observed over many repeated experiments (or a single experiment with many identical particles), echoes the amplitude distribution of classical waves, showing for example the interference effects of the famous double-slit experiment.” https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/a-common-misunderstanding-about-wave-particle-duality/4019585.article