The concept and practice of soul retrieval is millennia old and spans cultures, especially in relation to spiritual, mystical, and healing traditions. It refers to a condition in which a shock, trauma, and other severe physical, emotional or spiritual upset causes a part of the self to split off and flee. It’s the condition when the soul splinters and the wounded aspect of the self goes into hiding. Soul retrieval is just what the term implies—the process of coaxing the split aspect of the self to return and integrate back into the self.

In Andean mysticism, soul retrieval is called animu waqyay. The Quechua speakers borrowed the word animu from the Spanish, where it means “soul” or “spirit.” Waqyay means “to call” in Quechua. In this sense, soul retrieval Andean-style is a calling back of the soul, restoring the partial or  fractured self to a whole self.

To tell the truth, in all my queries to paqos (which, frankly, haven’t been a lot), I was never able to learn much about soul retrieval. I hear now that a lot of the younger paqos who travel and teach in the United States and Europe talk about it and teach it, but a lot of what I hear (which,  frankly, also hasn’t been a lot) sounds like information tainted by beliefs and practices from other cultures. I am open about my bias that I tend to trust what the older paqos (who had little contact with modern, outside cultures) say more than I do what the younger, most modernized paqos say. So I am a bit skeptical of at least some of what I hear, and I continue to try to sort through information and learn more from reliable sources.

I recently was in Peru and had a chance to talk, over a three-hour dinner, with two anthropologists about many subjects, including both soul retrieval and “secret knowledge” among the Q’ero. One of them has been living among and gathering information from the most respected and reliable paqos in Q’ero. Still, I was not provided much information, really only a few minutes of our hours’ long visit, but what I was told is intriguing.

Let me start with making a distinction between the spirit and the soul. In the Andes, the spirit is that drop of the Mystery that becomes “you” at the moment the sperm and egg meet and the egg is fertilized. It resides in or is encoded in your Inka Seed. Your spirit is pure sami, indestructible and incorruptible.

Your soul, in contrast, is that which informs you at the moment you are born. At that moment of separation from your mother, you become a singular human being and your soul starts to develop. Your soul is growing, changing, responding as you grow. It is the sum total of all your thoughts, desires, experiences, relationships, etc. It is your decidedly human aspect in contrast to your untainted divine spirit. The condition of your soul can cause you to produce hucha. Soul retrieval, thus, is about an assault to the soul that causes a significant fracture to your sense of self as a whole human being. What is being  retrieved is the split-off part of your soul. So, to be clear, it deals with the soul and not the spirit.

Like most Q’ero and Andean practices, the form of soul retrieval I was told about many years ago is incredibly simple. To call back the split-off aspect of the soul, the paqo simply marshals his or her intent and then whispers into the person’s ear, speaking to the split-off self, “Come back. Come back.” Using his or her intent and qaway (mystical seeing and knowing) the paqo intends to draw back the wounded aspect of the self. Like all Andean practice, there is no elaborate ceremony. Soul retrieval is all about how energy must follow intent. Just like a paqo talks to an apu, in a normal voice with little fanfare (but with reverence), so too do they call back the split-off soul. It is like a mother calling a son or daughter home to dinner. It is matter-of-fact and practical, but infused with munay (love grounded in will). The power is in the paqo’s intent and munay, not in any ceremony. That’s all I ever knew about soul retrieval for almost twenty years.

This year I learned things are a bit more complex! First, let me say that part of my discussion with these two anthropologists touched briefly on secret knowledge. Over the years there has been a lot of hype about secret knowledge among the Q’ero and others, and yet no paqo I ever talked with (or others I know talked with) ever said anything except that if someone asks for a teaching it is the obligation of the paqo, through ayni, to pass on that knowledge. Of course, they use their judgment about passing on information to others. But they denied there was anything secret in their tradition, and, in fact, stressed that keeping secrets was against the belief system of the tradition, founded as it is on ayni, or reciprocity.

When I talked to the anthropologists, I understood that “secret” is the wrong word to use or ask about. There is not much, or perhaps anything, that is “secret,” but there is knowledge that is “private.” That nuance immediately struck me as important. For instance, in terms of the poq’po (your energy body), we never have anything to fear from kawsay (the living energy) so there is no reason to ever have to “protect” our poq’pos. However, there are plenty of times when we want to be “private,” and so we will pull our poq’po in close to our body and close the “eyes” of the energy centers (the ñawis). So I immediately understood this subtle difference between “secret” and “private.”

I learned that, yes, there is knowledge that is “private” and so not openly shared with others. This is knowledge and practice that has to be earned through long apprenticeship and by gaining the confidence of your teacher.

So what was this “private” knowledge in terms of soul retrieval? Well, since it is private I did not get many details! What I did learn was that there are “levels” of practice when it comes to soul retrieval. The practice moves from the simplest and fastest approach to coaxing the split-off part of the soul home to increasingly complex methods. Or, more accurately, the practices moved from “informal” to “formal.” You try the informal, and quickest, method first, and if that doesn’t work move to the more formal methods. I received only the broadest outlines, but my interpretation is that the calling back of the soul by whispering in the ear is the first approach—the most informal—of practices for a soul retrieval. Another first-line practice is to throw the coca leaves to try to divine what has happened, why the soul split, and how best to recover it.

If those methods don’t work fully or at all, then the paqo moves to a more formal, and elaborate, practice. When I inquired about what some of these more formal practices were, I was given only one example. (We were at dinner, in a crowded restaurant, and so conversation was free-flowing but also interrupted often and disjointed as we skipped from topic to topic). In this example, a paqo would have to do a lot of preliminary work before even undertaking the soul retrieval. He or she would have to determine how and why the split occurred, and where the soul had fled. This information might be divined by throwing the coca leaves. I learned that the soul almost always flees into Mother Earth, so it could be hiding just about anywhere, such as on a mountainside or in a cave.

The paqo then has to determine what the best means of communication is to that spirit being of Mother Earth (the apu, the cave, etc.) where the split-off aspect of the soul is hiding. Before the soul can be called back, that spirit being has to be persuaded to give up that part of the soul, to release it. Only then can the soul be talked to directly and, hopefully, persuaded to come back and integrate into the person. It appears that all the work done by the paqo is with the nature spirit and the split-off aspect of the soul, and not much is done directly with the person for whom the soul retrieval is being conducted (in terms of energy work on their body, ceremony, etc.).

Wow! I don’t know about you, but I found that information incredibly interesting. And hearing about it provoked myriad feelings. I felt humbled by how little most of us who are not native to the mountains of Peru actually know about the tradition. I marveled at how deeply connected to nature and energy the paqos are. I felt chagrin that so much misinformation is flying around the Internet about Andean soul retrieval (at the very least, as regards claims that certain practices are Andean when they clearly are not). I felt honored to have learned this information. And, despite the incredible Italian food and wine I was consuming, I felt hungry for more information, for renewed contact with the paqos, and for an even deeper understanding of the tradition. So, ever the student, my practice continues, as does my learning.

The chaskas—stars. The apus—mountain spirits. The ñust’as—female spirits of rivers, lakes, and caves. Andean practice is rooted in developing ayni relationships with others, including the beings of the spirit world and nature. Three of the most elemental relationships you want to establish are with your guiding star, itu, and paqarina. Over the years, I have not been able to amass a lot of information about this aspect of the path, but what I have been able to learn is sufficient for our practice as paqos. So if you have not yet met and opened a dialogue with these three most personal and intimate tutelary spirits, I invite you to do so now.

The Guiding Star

Back in the 1990’s, when I was working in Peru just about every year, I remember hearing about the guiding star for the first time. I cannot remember the paqo’s name, but he was an alto mesayoq who explained that we each have a guiding star and if we can discover which one it is, then we can read our destiny through it. Over the years, I have inquired about the guiding star, but I have not received much in the way of details. Mostly what I learned is that we don’t have to “discover” our star, we choose it.

Most of us at one time or another have gazed upon the starry skies and found ourselves drawn to a particular star. That attraction is enough to claim that star as your guiding star. Today, having done the lloq’e training—the left-side work of don Melchor Desa, as taught by Juan Nuñez del Prado and his son Ivan—I know that the Andean tradition works very much from choice. In the lloq’e training, you work with eight helper spirits. They don’t choose you, you choose them. With one exception, the process is the same with your guiding star. There is no magic to it, except the magical pull of connection you feel with one particular star. Don’t discount that attraction. Introduce yourself and invite the being of that star to be your guiding spirit. Then open a dialogue over time.

Long ago I heard another a paqo, perhaps it was don Manuel Q’espi, describe his guiding star as his “luck.” That makes sense considering some of the more literal translations of the word “sami,” which in the tradition refers to refined living energy. Among its meanings is “nectar,” with the light living energy being the nectar of the universe. But sami has other meanings, including “fortune” and “luck.” So it makes sense that a guiding star, which is made of pure sami, would also be your luck or good fortune.

The renowned master don Benito Qoriwaman had a guiding star. In fact, he worked with it regularly, using a dark dish filled with water. He would stare into the water, which reflected the starry heavens, to work with his guiding star, in a type of scrying. I have no idea why he didn’t work directly with his star—he may well have—but scrying is an ancient practice and I find it interesting that it was used in the Andes, at least by this one paqo.

Elizabeth Jenkins, who was one of Juan Nuñez del Prado’s first students, describes an Andean belief that says our spirits enter the earth plane through a cosmic doorway—a star. That star remains as our guiding star, connected to us always. It is the doorway through which we will one day return to our celestial home. I haven’t heard that from any paqos directly, but it sounds compatible with other aspects of the guiding star that I have heard firsthand.

Interestingly, the term “guiding star” is also metaphoric. It can refer to an apu. In this case, however, the apu usually chooses you, instead of you choosing it. Juan tells of a time he spent the night at the summit of Apu Manuel Pinta, and during the night he unexpectedly heard the apu speak to him. When he told don Benito about this, the master declared, “Apu Manuel Pinta is your guiding star.”

The Itu and Paqarina

The itu and paqarina are spirit beings connected to your place of birth, most commonly by being associated with prominent natural formations, such as a mountain or river.

The itu is the male energetic spirit of the natural formation closest to the place where you were born. The paqarina is the female equivalent. In the Andes, the understanding is that at the moment of your birth, you not only have two human parents but also two energetic parents: your itu and paqarina. As reference points for your entry into the material world as a human being, they become your guardian and tutelary spirits. They remain with you for life. In this sense, they also serve as forms of guiding stars.

In the Andes, the itu usually is a mountain or large hill (although not all apus are considered male; examples are Apu Veronica and Apu Mama Simone). The paqarina is usually a body of water, river or a cave. However, here again there are exceptions. Rivers may not always be female. The Urubamba/Vilconta river is, according to its ancient name, called the Willkamayu (sacred river or river of black light) in Quechua and the Willkanuta in Aymara, which means “house of the sun.” The sun, or Inti, is a male spirit being. As you can see, things can get a bit complex.

Generally, however, in the Andes it is relatively easily to identify the male and female guardian spirits of your birth. If you are Andean, there is always going to be a mountain nearby! But what about the rest of us? What about someone born on a flat savannah of Africa or plains of the mid-western United States? What about someone born in the middle of a bustling modern city, where everything is asphalt and skyscrapers?

Obviously, we have to expand our ideas of what an itu and paqarina are. But that is not a problem, because everything in the material world has a poq’po (energy bubble) and can be thought of as an energy being—including buildings. This means the hospital building in which you were born could be your itu! I admit that doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, especially those who are inspired by nature. But that’s part of our work. If everything is an energy being, then the hospital in which you were born is more probably your itu than is a mountain this is 100 miles away.

Speaking to this point, I remember watching a video of author and teacher John Perkins relating a story about a paqo he brought to New York City. The paqo went up to a huge skyscraper apartment building, rested his hands on it and put his ear to the bricks, as if he were listening to it. He reported that the spirit being of the building was lonely. He seemed to be indicating that the people who lived in that building did not think about it, care for it, or consider it a being. He seemed appalled at the state of our ignorance that buildings are beings and that we need to have relationships with these beings.

Because we are more comfortable identifying natural formations as housing our spirit guardians, it can be a stretch to admit otherwise and confusing to idntify our own guardian spirits. Some of my students, especially those born in the Midwest, have no point of reference, coming as they do from flat, featureless plains. Even I have had difficulty. I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are no mountains close by. The closest hills are about 30 miles away, and they barely qualify as hills. So I have no idea what my itu is. My paqarina obviously is the Charles River. But, wait! Is this river male or female? Rivers are usually female spirits, but this river has a male name and local identity. If male, it would be my itu! And if it is my itu, then my paqarina would have to be the Atlantic Ocean—and that felt like a stretch.

To try to clarify this dilemma, I talked with Juan when I saw him recently in Peru. He, as usual, got right to the point. He said that being so hung up on the right or wrong of things, of compartmentalizing things so rigidly, is third-level thinking. We need to be fourth-level about our guiding stars, itu and paqarina.

What does that mean? It means to get past categorization and labels and establish an ayni relationship with your broader place of origin. He used the term “paqarina” as all-encompassing, getting beyond labels of male or female and using it to refer to the spirit of the general place of your birth. He explained that this place is the earthly-energetic womb from which you emerged. “Don’t complicate things,” he counseled. “Just connect with your place of origin. That is your paqarina. That is your guiding spirit.”

That advice settled the issue for me. Instead of two guiding spirits (an itu and paqarina), I accepted that the Charles River is my “womb” place. I no longer concern myself with whether it is literally a male or female spirit; it is simply the spirit guardian of my birth with no labels attached. That’s the fourth-level approach. I no longer worry about finding another spirit being to form a male and female yanantin pair. This one is enough. It is my earthly (kaypacha) guiding star.

For those of you who can’t easily identify your itu and paqarina, resolve to take a fourth-level approach and identify with the general landscape of your birth. And remember, that may be the city in which you were born or even the hospital building! They have energy bubbles and are energy beings in their own right.

You also don’t have to be near your place of birth to open this relationship. You can send a seqe (cord of energy) to it to work with it from wherever you now live.

One final point. Elizabeth Jenkins has written that don Humberto Sonqo has said that to be healer one must know and work with your itu and paqarina. There is no reason to doubt him, although without knowing more from don Humberto himself or from other paqos I would consider this a personal opinion. Forgive what may seem like a judgment, but this is counsel that seems to me to be third-level thinking. If you have personal power (clear and efficient ayni), you can use your power for whatever purposes you want, including healing. You may indeed be a better healer with the help of your itu and/or paqarina, but you can be a healer without knowing them as well. Plenty of people in the helping professions prove that point.

That said, working with your guiding spirits in all their manifestations is part of playing in the field of the living energy. Your celestial guiding star and your earth-based spirit of origin are tutelary spirits, beings from whom you can learn, grow, evolve. If you don’t already work with them, I suggest that your New Year’s resolution be to make their acquaintance and open a dialogue with them. Make 2017 a year of deepening your work as a paqo by allowing your guiding spirits to help advise you during your one-of-a-kind earthwalk.

This post about Andean energy dynamics covers personal power. I’ve spoken about personal power in many blog posts, but let’s drill down and look at this concept in more detail.

Personal power is a measure of the quality of your ayni. But saying that is like looking at only one strand of a spider’s web. We have to see how the entire web of personal power gets woven. Here is the short version: Ayni, as you know, is reciprocity with the universe of living energy (kawsay pacha). It is your ability to “push” the kawsay using your intention. How successful you are is dependent on the state of your poq’po, or energy body. The less heavy energy, or hucha, in your poq’po, the more effortlessly you can practice ayni. That’s why saminchakuy is the primary practice of a paqo. It is a way to “cleanse” the poq’po of hucha and empower it with the light living energy, called sami. This entire dynamic is at play in the concept of personal power. Ayni, at heart, is your capacity for and display of personal power. So, we can see that the strands that make up your ayni—your personal power—involve sami, hucha, intention, and the state of your poq’po.

Because the qosqo, the belly area, is the center from which we most often engage the world, this is a primary center of personal power. The belly is the puka chunpi, or red belt, and one of its core capacities is to use khuyay as you engage life. Khuyay is passion, as in passionate engagement. It is not action in passion, but action through passion. There is a difference. You are not swept away by an impulsive passion, but combine your passion and will to fully, joyfully, and deeply engage life. The qosqo is the place of kinetic action—of being able to do what you intend to do. Khuyay is how you do it. So the qosqo is central to our capacity for and display of personal power.

Coupled with the qoqso is the root center, the yana chunpi (black belt) which girdles the hip area of the body. This is the center where you measure your personal power. You go to your qosqo to take action, but to your root center to sense whether you actually have enough personal power to carry out that action. You may have the intention and passion to act, but not actually have sufficient energy to act (or to act successfully and efficiently). In addition, the yana chunpi is crucial to the timing of action. You check in here to determine if this is the optimal time to act. So together the puka and yana chunpis are dominant energy centers when it comes to your personal power and your actual ayni exchanges.

Some people think that luck plays a major role in life. It may. But when opportunities present themselves serendipitously or not, you have to be able to detect the opportunity and take advantage of it. Thus, most luck is being at the right place at the right time with sufficient personal power and qaway (mystical seeing) to take advantage of the confluence of events and timing. In this way luck is really personal power.

Stepping back to take a larger view, your personal power is at its best when integrated with your three uppermost mystical eyes (the two physical eyes and the seventh eye in the forehead). Although each of us can “see” through each of our twelve ñawis (mystical eyes), and certainly through the seven primary ones, it is these three (the two physical eyes and seventh eye) that promote exceptional qaway, or mystical seeing. Using qaway, you can better see reality as it really is, stripped as much as possible of your personal judgments, illusions, projections, etc. Doing so ramps up the effect your personal power can have in the world because you have to be clear-seeing to evaluate what is happening, perhaps why it is happening, what response is best suited to the situation, and so on. Right action is often dependent on clear-seeing.

Emerging from this concept of qaway is the notion that information underlies energy. Mystical seeing is about seeing reality as it really is, which means that mystical seeing is a kind of knowing. You accurately assess “meaning” and “state of being” as well as what is actually happening. Thus, this kind of knowing goes beyond the energetic into the informational realm. There is a scientific theory, proposed by Peter Marcer and colleagues, called Phase-Conjugate-Adaptive-Resonance (PCAR) that can help us get a handle on how this informational aspect of qaway might work.

PCAR proposes that every material object emits phase waves (energy) that encode information about that object. This happens simultaneously at multiple levels. So for, example, there is a phase wave that encodes “tree.” Then there are phase waves that encode “pine tree,” or “apple tree,” or “redwood tree.” Then within each category, the individual phase wave of a specific tree encodes information about that particular tree (if it is healthy, stressed, been hit by lightning, infested with harmful insects, etc.). According to Marcer, what determines how much information you can extract from these multiple phase waves is your level of attention. The more attention you direct to the object, the more information you can extract from its phase waves. This hypothesis can be easily applied to the Andean concept of intention. The more focused your intention and the more refined your qaway capacities are, the better your ayni and the greater your personal power.

As you can see (no pun intended!), personal power is not really something you acquire—although we talk about it that way when we are training in the tradition because we are learning to move and tune energy, focus our intention, and refine our ayni. Actually, personal power is something you are. It is a state of being. It is the sum of all your capacities as a paqo. It changes as you change and grow as a paqo and as a human being. Personal power, then, is commensurate with—and really the integration of—your state of consciousness and your state of energy.

In the Andes we talk about working with “both hands,” meaning working the “right side” and the “left side” of the path. While paqos tend to be more adept at one side of the path or the other, the ideal is to integrate the powers of both. The word mast’ay refers to bringing order, usually in relation to making a despacho. But as runa mast’ay it means to bring order and wholeness to the self. It is about putting ourselves into order through more perfect ayni—offering ourselves (our intention and energy) as perfectly as possible to the kawsay pacha, or, as the Christianized tradition would say, to the Holy One. This process of restoring or fostering wholeness begins with mastering both “sides” Andean practice.

The Right Side of the Path

The right side of the path, paña, is often called the mystical side of the work. It is a path of yachay, or knowledge. This is the work of accumulating the personal power to be able to meet with and dialogue with the spirit beings by ourselves, with no need for an intermediary. We accumulate that power by cleansing our poq’pos (energy bodies) of hucha. The less hucha (and thus the more sami, or refined kawsay) we have, the clearer our intent, the more perfect our ayni, and the more effective our abilities are as paqos. The great teacher of ayni, and a core practice of the right side, is the despacho. The despacho at its core is always a tawantin, which is the symbol or structure of wholeness.

In addition to connecting you to the spirit beings, such as the apus, inti (the sun), and other nature spirits, the right side energies also connect you to the old master paqos and their lineage. This work is associated with the misha, the “power bundle” that usually contains khuyas (sacred stones and objects) gifted to you from teachers, acquired from other sources such as sacred sites, or selected because they are meaningful in your life. Your teachers, however, don’t only have to be humans. The apus—mountain spirits—especially are tutelary spirits. Paqos often are in “service” to one or more apus, which serve as their guiding stars. A paqo may also have a single celestial star as an anchor in this life and a guide to the next life. Being able to establish a relationship with, dialogue with, and learn from both human and spirit teachers is a mastery of right-side work.

While ayni (clear intent and a “clean” poq’po) is paramount to right-side work, most of this work is energetically initiated from the qosqo, the power center at the belly area. From the qosqo we send out seqes, cords of energy, that connect us with the world beyond ourselves. We can send cords across time and space, and these cords of energy can become conduits for the transfer of information. When I teach the paña workshop, I always send participants into the outdoors to play with their qosqo energy dynamics, practicing sending seqes to different kinds of “beings,” from a flower to a lawn chair to a buzzing bee. Most have fun with this exercise and then, I suspect, forget about it. They don’t continue to practice perceiving energy relationships after they leave the workshop. Not doing so ensures they will never master the right side of the path. Energy relations are everything in this tradition, and working with the qosqo to become exquisitely sensitive to energy connections is paramount to Andean practice. Honing this perceptual skill is a primary right-side pursuit.

We don’t just perceive through our qosqo, however. We “see” through all twelve of our ñawis (energetic eyes), although mostly through the seven primary ones  (at the tailbone, belly, heart, throat, two physical eyes and seventh eye) and the four primary chunpis (belts of power). In fact, we perceive through our entire poq’po, making all kinds of connections through it. Juan joked once that our poq’pos look like porcupines because there are seqes emerging from all directions over the entirely of our energy bubbles.

The right side is the part of the path where we also work with the three worlds: the immaterial upper world (hanaq pacha), this material world (kay pacha) and the lower world (ukhu pacha). There are many ways to work these realms, but in this context it is about our ayni flows. We pull sami from the upper world (from the perfected spirit beings and the Holy One) or this world (from Mother Earth or the beings of nature) to empower ourselves. We send sami to the beings of the lower world, who don’t know ayni, to empower them.

The Left Side of the Path

The left side of the path, lloq’e, is often called the magical side. It’s the path of llank’ay—of action. It is magical in that we harness the supernatural inside of ourselves (energy and intention) to do work in the human, material, and natural world. Thus, whereas paña is the path of knowing, lloq’e is the path of doing. It’s all about the use of your personal power right here in the human world.

The left side is predominantly the path of healing and of the chunpis (belts of power). Each of the chunpis encodes or confers potential abilities. At the throat, there is rimay, the capacity to speak as who you really are; at the heart is munay, the capacity to choose love and compassion using your will, and kanay, the ability to know who you really are and live it; at the belly is khuyay, the capacity to engage the world and relationships with passion; and at the hip area is atiy, the ability to take right action at the right time according to knowing and living as who you really are and according to your amount of personal power (ayni).

The left side of the path fosters in us the ability to use our powers on behalf of ourselves and others. If you have personal power, as a paqo you are obligated to use it. You can do that in any number of ways: through offering a despacho, doing saminchakuy or hucha mikhuy on another’s energy body, and so on. One of the primary actions of the left side is healing. According to the Andean tradition, no one can trump another person’s will, so in reality all a healer can do is create the energetic conditions to help their client activate their own self-healing capacities. But the mechanism by which that happens is mysterious, often purely energetic  (and thus invisible). That’s why healing can appear to be both magical and miraculous. In fact, this is partly why the left side is said to be an integration of the supernatual and the natural inside the human body.

In the lloq’e workshop, participants are taught to bring deep coherence to their poq’po and all the ñawis and chunpis. Even more important, perhaps, is the goal of weaving our energy body into a single system. For most practitioners, their energy body is compartmentalized. The separate parts of the energetic anatomy have not been integrated into a whole. They may be adept at communicating their knowledge, and so working through the belt at the throat, but unable to manage or communicate their  emotions (at the belly). In the left-side work, we weave everything together so that we can work at mastering all of our gifts and all three human powers (yachay or knowledge, munay or love, and llank’ay or actions). You can think of this state as the difference between being a skeleton that is a collection of connected bones and a body that is interwoven together with muscles, tendons, nerves, and so on. There is some connectivity in the first state, but it doesn’t hum with life yet. In the lloq’e work as well we enlist the wisdom and assistance of eight spirit helpers. They hold the space for capacities within that are as yet underdeveloped in us. They model for us ways of being and doing in all spheres of our humanness.

To fully develop as a paqo and, more importantly, as a human being, we have choose conscious evolution and use the tools that help us evolve. This information provides a basic overview of the right and left sides of the Andean path and how they, together, can help us achieve the fullness of being . It is more than enough information, I hope, both to persuade you that it pays to know about both sides of the path and to motivate you to learn to work with both “hands.”

The more we delve into quantum mechanics the stranger the world becomes; appreciating this strangeness of the world, whilst still operating in that which you now consider reality, will be the foundation for shifting the current trajectory of your life from ordinary to extraordinary. It is the Tao of mixing this cosmic weirdness with the practical and physical, which will allow you to move, moment by moment, through parallel worlds to achieve your dreams.
—Kevin Michel

For those of you not science minded, you may find this post a little challenging. For those of you who love to probe the mysteries at the scientific frontier, you may find this post provides a cornucopia of food for thought.

In 2010 a book came out that deeply intrigued me. I had just co-written a book about information theory and biology (Decoding the Body-Field: The New Science of Information as Medicine), and this book was right up my alley, hypothesizing that information is more fundamental than energy.  The book was Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information, and its author, Vlatko Vedral, PhD, argues that “outside of our reality there is no additional description of the Universe that we can understand, there is just emptiness. This means that there is no scope for the ultimate law or supernatural being—given that both of these would exist outside of our reality and in the darkness. Within our reality everything exists through an interconnected web of relationships and the building blocks of this web are bits of information. We process, synthesize,  and observe this information in order to construct the reality around us. As information spontaneously emerges from the emptiness we take this into account to update our view of reality. The laws of Nature are information about information and outside of it there is just darkness. This is the gateway to understanding reality.”

While I don’t agree with all of Vedral’s conclusions, his book provides deep insights that correlate to many of the core aspects of the Andean mystical tradition. So let’s take a look.

1. There is an immaterial and a material universe.

Vedral is not saying in the paragraph quoted above that nothing exists beyond the material world. There is an aspect to the universe that is immaterial. There may or may not be a supernatural being or Intelligence as First Cause, but we cannot ever know about them using the scientific process (natural laws such as the laws of physics, mathematics, inductive reasoning, etc.). We can, however, know the material universe, which is a subset of something larger, which he calls the darkness or the emptiness.

The same is true of the Andean tradition’s cosmovision. There is a unknowable immaterial universe called the kawsay pacha. A subset of this infinite field of animating energy and information is the material universe, which is called Pachamama. All we can really know is the Pachamama, although through ayni we can interact with and even influence the immaterial kawsay pacha. Quantum allows for the possibility of a participatory universe. Andean mystics would turn that uncertainty into certainty, as according to their cosmovision, energy not only is responsive to information (including intention, human consciousness) but must follow intent.

2. The universe is digital, not analog.

Vedral posits that the bit (as in computer theory and application) is the model of the material universe, or Nature. Although because of quantum superposition, at the quantum level a “thing” (say, an electron) can be in all possible states simultaneously, once an observation is made the wavefunction collapses to display that object in the material world (our reality) in either an X state or Y state (for example, the electron is either here or there; its spin is either up or down, etc.). There is a twoness (digital 1 or 0) to the way the material universe manifests from the immaterial universe.

When it comes to energy dynamics, the Andean tradition is more digital than analog. There are only two expressions (or kinds) of energy in relation to the human energy body, but they are not really energies as much as informational states about energy. There is either sami (kawsay that moves) and hucha (kawsay that is slowed or barely moving).

There also are two energy relationships, and in this case the dynamic is almost purely informational: masinitin and yanantin. Either an energy you are in engagement with or in relation to is similar to your energy state (masintin) or it is dissimilar (yanantin). Energy also is either compatible or not compatible with your energy state. There are no other core energy dynamics in the Andean system! In this respect, Andean mysticism correlates beautifully with Vedral’s theory of a digital universe at the energy and information level.

3. Everything depends on relations

Bear with me as I paraphrase or quote from Vedral, because this text contains a lot of points that are applicable to the Andean tradition. He says that in “quantum theory, entropy is proportional not to volume (such as atoms inside and on the surface of a ball) but to the total number of atoms on its surface only.” The quantum correlation occurs in relations only: between one object and another. “So the total amount of mutual quantum information must be proportional to something that is mutual between the two”—in this case the boundary surface area of the two distinct objects. So entropy as information content is not in the object but on its surface area. “It is a relational property of the object in connection with the rest of the universe.”  (For clarity, be aware that entropy here is from the context of information theory, not kinetic energy theories, and refers to how much information can be contained within that event. The more uncertain or random an event is, the higher its information content. But mostly we are concerned here with Vedral’s statement about boundary and surface area as being of greatest account in the relations between two objects and the information that can be gained through that interaction.)

In the Andean tradition, we say that each of us is the center of the universe because all we can know is our own experience—our own relation to the universe and others. When we come in contact with another energy body (a tree, building, or human being), all we can know is our own perceptions of that interaction. That perception can be of a masintin or a yanantin relation and perceived as an incompatible or compatible relation. Everything is dependent on relationship in the Andean energy work—the relationship as you perceive it between your own state of energy and the other energy entity. You really cannot know anything about the “real” state of the “other.” You can only assess your own energy perceptions in relation to that other. Therefore, the information is contained not within the self and other, but in the relational interaction between the self and other. Vedral says, “All quantum information is ultimately context dependent.” Meaning comes only through correlation—one thing in relation to another. The same is true of energy perceptions according to the Andean mystical tradition.

What’s more interesting is that the Andean tradition would agree with Vedral’s hypothesis that information is mostly (or only) contained in or on the surface area of the object. While Vedral is talking about what can be packed into an object’s surface area, we will look at his statement in terms of actual material surface. In the Andes we know that our poq’pos (our energy bodies) have an anatomy, including a surface boundary or “skin.” Hucha mostly accumulates on the skin of our energy bubble. It rarely penetrates very deep. When we experience loss of well-being, it is because hucha has accumulated on this skin—this boundary between the interior of our bubble and the outer world. We then use saminchakuy to “cleanse” this energetic skin, just like we would wash the skin of our bodies.

One final point. The ultimate relational interaction in the Andean tradition is intention. Intention is pure information, which influences the energy of the kawsay pacha. The Andeans stand unequaled in history as having perfected practices for marshaling the force of intention to drive energy. If in quantum mechanics a “measurement” (and the ultimate measuring instrument is consciousness) collapses the wavefunction to manifest the immaterial into the material, in the Andean mystical tradition “intention” is that measurement.

In these ways and others, the Andean mystical tradition—its natural “laws” laid down thousands of years ago—seems to correlate well with the latest quantum theories, Vlatko Vedral’s being only one of many such theories.