Healing is a mystery. We don’t understand the human body, mind, emotions, or spirit. Yet no doubt each plays a role in healing. We don’t understand the nature of physical or metaphysical energy flows, yet each likely plays a role in healing. Whatever healing is, we can make a distinction between it and curing. Healing often means finding peace of mind with “what is,” which can range from physical or emotional limitations to impending death. Curing most often means turning a diseased body into a disease-free body. Yet these distinctions hardly matter, because we don’t fully understand either healing or curing.

In the Andean mystical tradition, paqos develop a range of mystical capacities and assist their communities in a variety of ways. At the top of the paqo hierarchy are the fourth-level alto mesayoqs, and one of their most consequential roles is as hampeqs (healers). Andean prophecy tells us the time is ripe for the emergence of a new level of healing mastery—that of the Inka Mallku, or fifth-level paqo. None has emerged as far as we know. And we would know—for a fifth-level paqo is a tukuy hampeq, a total healer. The astonishing capacity of tukuy hampeqs is infallible healing. With a touch of their hand, they cure every disease, ailment, and condition every time, without fail.

Paqos cannot train to be tukuy hampeqs. The karpay to the fifth level is said to be a transmission of energy directly from Taytanchis (God). Paqos become candidates for this karpay when they are tukuymunaynioqs, total masters of munay, which is defined as love under our will. This kind of love is not a feeling or an emotion—it is a power. And munay is the primary power for healing.

Although fifth-level healers have highly developed capacities for love, and so for healing, the tradition tells us that healing does not come from the paqos, but through them. Tukuy hampeqs channel the powers of Mama Allpa (Mother Earth), Pachamama (the Cosmic Mother), Pachatayta (Father Cosmos), and Taytanchis (the metaphysical God). They are channeling the combined energies of the four great Creators to activate the ill person’s own self-healing capacity. At least that is what the tradition suggests, although we have no idea what the actual mechanisms for healing are.

Tukuy hampeqs would appear to be performing miracles. Conventional medicine would call these healings “spontaneous remissions” of disease or, more cynically perhaps, the placebo effect. A less pejorative characterization might be “anomalous.” But these terms are at least half empty, because no one yet knows what causes a spontaneous remission or which psycho-biological processes are at play in the placebo response. Yet they happen. The same is true for energy or spiritual healing: although there are plenty of rigorous scientific studies and reams of anecdotal evidence supporting the reality of both, no one knows how they work.

I have spent time thinking about fifth-level healing, and although I have no experience of it and only a little knowledge about it, I do have speculations. From the little we know about tukuy hampeqs, I think it is fair to say they are performing a mast’ay: through just a touch they are reordering or restructuring the person’s body-mind. (More accurately, they channel the power of the four Creator powers mentioned above to reorganize the body.) When I wonder about what is being restructured, I think of Jungian analyst Robert Johnson’s description of psychological shadow work: there is nothing wrong with us, nothing to fix, there is only the right thing in the wrong place. Perhaps with their touch, tukuy hampeqs initiate a mast’ay such that everything in the body once again is in the “right” place and operates in the “right” way. Even though we don’t know how they might trigger the mast’ay, it seems reasonable that cells, organs, or biological processes that are dysfunctional somehow regain their normal, natural operations.

I lean toward this view because I have had my own experiences, few as they are, performing energy healings. In one case, after only two sessions there was an astounding result (to me, to the person on whom I was working, and to that person’s team of doctors). Some of my students also have shared the impressive, and in some cases astonishing, effects of their sessions. From their reports and my own experiences, I have come to believe, as many energy healers do, that a highly effective way of working with body-based illness is not to try to extract a disease or eradicate the “wrong things” (such as kill tumor cells). Instead, robust healing responses seem to occur more frequently when we marshal the life-forces of everything that is “right” in the body.  On a wave of munay, we broadcast energy and intentions to all the well-functioning aspects of the body, supercharging them to deliver whatever signals (biochemical, bioelectrical, ionic, and so on) that help dysfunctional neighboring cells, organs, or whatever “remember” how to be normal. We not only honor, but work with the intelligence of the body. The mast’ay is the restoration of the community—of the natural interdependence of cells, processes, signals, and such. Healing happens when the rogue elements that have split off from the community return to it. The word “healing,” after all, comes from an Old English root meaning “to make whole.”

Science slowly is validating the healing force of love and amassing persuasive support for energy healing approaches that emphasize a return to wholeness. In one laboratory study using different healing intentions on three lines of cultured tumor cells, the intention that most diminished their growth (by 39 percent) was “Return to the natural order and harmony of the normal cell line” (p. 268, Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce H. Lipton and Steve Bhaerman). Adding visual imagery to the intention doubled the effect. Many other laboratory studies, including those involving William Bengston, the author of The Energy Cure, have shown the same robust effects of what are variously called wholeness, coherence, or resonance healing intentions.

From his own experience with hands-on healing, Bengston believes we are not working directly with energies of the physical body, but within a unitive consciousness field: an energy-information field he calls “Source.” As he so artfully and succinctly puts it: “Consciousness has no plural.” He humbly admits he does not know what his own statement about Source means. Nor does he know what Source is. Nonetheless, he is sure that all he is doing is channeling Source energy. He uses a metaphor about traveling through this unitive field to explain what he thinks might be happening during an energy healing. His speculation dovetails with Robert Johnson’s analogy of psychological problems arising because the right things are in the wrong place. Bengston says, “When I am treating you, what I think of as my consciousness and what you think of as yours may be traveling through concurrent existences together. If mine is an experienced traveler, perhaps I can nudge yours into a place where your body would prefer to be . . . You may think I am changing something physical in you the way a doctor would, but maybe you get better because I take you to the right place . . .”

I was given a similar type of message from Q’ero paqo don Juan Paquar Flores, although the context had nothing to do with healing. Back in 1996, while I was conducting the interviews for my book about the paqos, don Juan pulled me aside to gift me a khuya (a stone or object charged with a particular intention.) He explained how it was to be used and then provided an invocation or prayer to say while using it. The invocation reminds me of Bengston’s idea of healing as travel through space-time (or consciousness). Don Juan’s invocation was translated from Quechua to English as “May the path that I walk be walked; may the words that I say be spoken; may the wish that I make be wished: that the walk that I do be done.”

Both Bengston’s form of traveling and don Juan’s prayer are imbued with two core Andean sensibilities. First, that space and time are energetically intertwined (or even a singular state within consciousness). And second, that consciousness (intention) influences or even directs energy. While channeling the four Creator powers, perhaps tukuy hampeqs have power over time itself (or the illusion of time). Through their touch the journey from illness to wellness happens in an instant. With a touch, “so it is.”

Currently, there are healers across the globe who occasionally display fifth-level abilities. Their rare successes are evidence that it is possible to heal with only a touch. William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, has addressed the doubt of those who rely on inductive reasoning (think scientists!) to dismiss these experiences: all swans we have ever seen are white, so we can assume all swans everywhere are white­—until we see our first black swan. Still, we end where we began. We don’t know what energy healing is. We can do nothing but speculate about the mechanisms of infallible healing. However, Andean prophecy tells us the emergence of fifth-level healing abilities is imminent, so if we put our faith in that prophecy we may soon find out.