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.

*While the Kawsay Pacha is the unmanifest “something” that comes before everything or anything, and hence is the unknowable source of the manifest world, in everyday usage many Andeans also use this term to refer to the manifest realm. In this context, it means the Realm of Life and so can be applied to the physical world.

Don Juan Nuñez del Prado, my primary teacher, calls the Andean tradition the “Andean sacred arts.” Paqos practice the sacred arts. However, art of all kinds flourishes in Andean culture. For example, the Q’ero create intricate weavings, have a distinctive musical style, and rarely pass up an opportunity to sing, dance, and laugh. Creativity—the playful and the sacred—is a part of their sense of sumaq kawsay—living a good and happy life.

This month, I thought I would bring some art to this blog. So, I offer a tawantin of poems. Offering one’s art to the world can feel risky—doing so might stir up all kinds of vulnerabilities—because our art is so personal. To overcome our resistances, we can engage our khuyay—our passion and our motivation to share our passions. As I take a risk here in offering some of my art—in the form of poetry—I hope you will be inspired to unleash the artist within yourself. Whatever your creative expression is, I hope you, too, will take a risk and share your gifts with others.

As I started along the Andean path, one of my first connections was with the spirit of Mama Killa, Mother Moon. That first touch was sweet. I was in awe of how real this connection felt. I guess, so early into my training, I was not expecting to really feel Mama Killa as an actual hanaqpacha being. That awe inspired both respect for Mama Killa and a bit of shyness on my part. Decades later, our relationship changed because I had changed. Energy connections had become a common reality, and I was more in touch with how Mama Killa is a bridge from the hanaqpacha to the kaypacha. I was more in touch with how my physical, human self is sacred in its own right. Under the northern California redwood trees with the moon streaming down here and there through the towering canopy, I felt liberated in a kind of fierce kaypacha moon madness.

Dancing for the Moon
By Joan Parisi Wilcox
© 2024 All rights reserved

Dancing for the moon
is dangerous
now.
My cycles have stopped
and the nimbus of a long-lived life
illuminates a self
unafraid
of fierceness.
No supplicant here.
No shy worshiper of reflected light.
No feet afraid of tangled roots
or eyes seduced by shadows.
You, moon, do not intimidate me
with your shapeshifting ways
and that face cratered by legend and lies.
Although I am an admirer, Moon,
I am no fool.
I have crawled from caution’s womb
and, still somewhat bloodied, set myself
free
to dance in this wilderness
of shadow and sparkle,
with you looking
down,
a bit haughty,
and, no doubt, a bit dazzled.
I know. I know.

Apu means “Lord” or “Honored One.” The giant snow-covered peaks of the Andes certainly command our attention and respect. My studies in the Native North American tradition had also helped me connect with sacred mountains. In the Native North American tradition, I had come across the phrase “sit like a mountain.” I had learned to meditate at age 17, and over the decades in that practice I had sat still—a lot! But the Andean mountains felt different. They did not seem to me to be about stillness. They seemed to be saying, “Move! Grow! Rise up so you can look me in the eye!” These Andean apus both inspired and confounded me. The Andean way is to be fully engaged in life, not necessarily to “sit like a mountain”—solid, resolved, and still. Introspection is a doorway into the self, and so is not itself a fully static practice, despite the many forms it takes that depend on outer and inner stillness. It seems my two practices were at odds, and all of these thoughts came together in this poem.

Sit Like a Mountain
By Joan Parisi Wilcox
© 2024 All rights reserved

Taking inspiration from
a mountain
is delusion,
so far are we
from being
immovable.
No matter what the gurus say,
awareness is not about stillness.
Or, it may be. But it is not only.
The roiling current of Life,
will be diverted,
neither by intention nor devotion.
When we sit like a mountain,
we prepare for the eruption
of our humanness.
In that terrifying moment,
in that molten thrust toward the surface,
when the ground of self displaces image,
and we glimpse the solidity
that gives shape to our center,
only then
do we touch bedrock
and understand the possible
futility
of sitting
still
at all.

I love Mama Qocha, Mother Ocean. The creatures who crawl along her shore and those who fly above her are each inspiring in their own ways. During a solitary walk along the Florida shore at dusk, the dozens of brown pelicans wheeling gracefully and effortlessly through the sky surely were inspiring, although momentarily, as they landed in a flock,  they also became harsh mirrors.

Dusk on the Florida Gulf
By Joan Parisi Wilcox
© 2024 All rights reserved

Three more swift pumps,
then wings extended,
the pelicans sail shadows
over the cresting water.
Close, close as dark can get to light,
they glide in over the silent shore,
until, legs outstretched in thin black lines,
they connect with land.
Once still, they turn their heads away,
up to the rising moon,
as if they cannot bear to see
my heavy, muscled self
struggling over sand.

What’s a collection of poetry without a love poem? The Quechua word munay means both love and will. It is a kind of love that is grounded in reality, yet informed by spirit. It is a kind of love that requires qaway (vision of physical and metaphysical “reality”). Like most Westerners, I learned of love mostly within the realm of romance. Romantic love too often has only a tenuous connection with “reality,” as it tends to be enmeshed with sentimentality, desire, and projection. But after decades of practicing Andean mysticism—and a lot of personal psychological shadow work—my view of love is a lot different today than it was when I first fell in love. Let’s just say my qaway about munay has matured! Although, to confess a truth, despite the claim in this poem, I am still a bit sentimental.

Warrior Love
By Joan Parisi Wilcox
© 2024 All rights reserved

Do not be distracted
by the soft earth
at my surface.
Plunge
deep
to bedrock,
solid as tempered steel,
a ground made safe for your arrival:
where resolved, unyielding
to the dark beasts stalking,
you surrender to the giving way
that is the only real way in.

Do not be seduced
by the tender touch.
Reach
beyond
the shiny things,
distracting as iridescent bird wings,
to the space
made luminous
by the steady spark of feeling
that is just beyond
the grasp of the body.

Do not settle for easy or safe with me.
Do not expect me to love you as a lamb
when I know you are a lion.

Expect a warrior love:
unscripted in its honesty,
fierce in its integrity,
unflinching in its courage,
immune to sentimentality.

Expect a warrior love,
where we drop our masks
and expose ourselves,
one to the other—
raw, radiant, and unafraid—
supplicants to the bounty
shimmering just beyond the horizon
of our still-too-small imagining.

When we are journeying along the ascending path of personal development—stepping up the qanchispatañan—we are committing to the sacred within ourselves. A Latin root of the word sacred is sacer, which means “set off from.” That which is sacred is set apart from or recognized as qualitatively different from the ordinary or mundane. It is acknowledged as being extraordinary. As we do our “sacred” work in the Andean tradition, however, we are aware that our challenge is not that we are set apart from the ordinary world, but from our Inka Seed—from the energetic core of ourselves where our glorious, extraordinary self remains mostly unrealized. Our Inka Seed holds within it our full capacity as human beings. An important part of our sacred work is to discern what kinds of screens and blocks we have put up that prevent us from more fully accessing and expressing our kanay, which means who we are as fully developed human beings.

As we walk this path, we use our qaway. This is the ability to be clear-seeing, to see reality as it really is. Using qaway, we can see—and bring our compassion to—where, how, and why we are denying ourselves our full grandeur. We travel inwardly to see how we are restricting or even denying ourselves a sumaq kawsay, a good and happy life. At the time same, we celebrate the capacities we have developed and that we are using well. We acknowledge how far we have come.

During this inward journey, we are not solo travelers. Satisfaction, delight, pleasure, contentment, affection, and love walk with us. As do confusion, dissatisfaction, anxiety, discomfort, and uncertainty. If we are wise, we reject nothing. We welcome each aspect of ourselves as a companion and guide for that portion of the journey. Each can be a catalyzing energy that prompts us to bring self-inquiry to important questions about how we either are or are not in alignment with our Inka Seed, and thus with our greater potential. Using qaway to see ourselves in an evenhanded way helps us bring conscious self-inquiry to decisions and choices we are making unconsciously. As psychotherapist Robert Holden explains this unconscious energy dynamic: “Every moment of your life you are deciding 1) who you are, 2) what you want, 3) what you can do, and 4) what you deserve and what you don’t.” (Italic in original)

How we answer these questions helps us determine whether we set the parameters of our reach in life narrowly or expansively. Nothing outside of ourselves has as powerful an influence upon us as does our own sense of kanay—of knowing ourselves and accumulating the personal power to live as we know ourselves to be. Yet, part of using qaway is seeing that we each seem to have an inner set point for happiness. Sociologists and psychologists in study after study have shown that no matter how good or bad things get in our lives, we eventually return to our individual set point of happiness. For example, many people dream of the day they will be financially stable or even wealthy. How happy they will be! But the evidence does not support this belief. Multiple studies show that people who have gained sudden wealth, such as through winning the lottery, are happier for a while, and then their response levels off. Sooner than we would think, they report that they are not really that much happier than they were before their financial windfall. Most of us do not experience such windfalls. However, the same happiness dynamic occurs in the more common occurrence of a gradual rise in income. Surely, we tell ourselves, we will be happier when our income increases. However, studies showed through self-reported “happiness levels” that people were happier, and remained that way, only until they were making a yearly salary of about $70,000. At higher income levels, people reported that they discovered they were not much happier than they were when they made less money. While the $70,000 income level might be dated, the premise holds. More money thrills us for a while, and then we return to our inner set-point of happiness.

Ah, you say, that is not me! I know I will be happier when I have more ______ (fill in the blank). The truth is that you probably will be happier in the short term, but not over the long term. Why? Because sustained happiness is not dependent on acquisition or outer circumstances. It is always and only an inner state that is strongly correlated with an integral sense of self.

Happiness is fueled by knowing, honoring, and expressing our true nature no matter what our outer circumstances (within reason, of course).  Aspects of our external life may be influenced by people and forces beyond our control, but the quality we ascribe to our life and the way we value ourselves are determined mostly by our inner state. This is not a New Age platitude. And it is great news! As paradoxical as it may sound, to change our lives we do not actually have to change our lives—we have to change our relationship with ourselves.

Our relationship with ourselves has brought us to exactly where we are right now—to this current moment in our lives. Whether we like where we have led ourselves is another story. If we are seeking change and are feeling the sacred call to align more fully with our Inka Seed (with all that we can be), the odds are that we are finally ready to say “Enough!” We finally lose patience with those aspects of ourselves that have been leading us astray from knowing, accepting, caring for, and taking responsibility for ourselves and our lives. As motivational coach and author Kevin Ngo so aptly says, the sacred truth is that “if you don’t make the time to work on creating the life that you want, you’re going to spend a lot of time dealing with a life you don’t want.”

Creating the life we want means we must, as don Juan Nuñez del Prado says, become the owners of ourselves. In this self-inquiry process, if we do not like what we see as our current state of life, then qaway as clear-seeing helps us to temper our judgments of ourselves. There is no value in blaming or shaming ourselves. Qaway shows us that there is nothing bad, missing, or broken within us. However, there are places where we are asleep to or in denial about how our own beliefs, feelings, cravings, choices, actions, and other states of feeling and being have conditioned us to see the world as “out there” instead of “in here.” Without qaway, we keep trying to change the conditions “out there,” which ultimately will prove fruitless. Qaway reveals how and why the real creational and transformational work take place within. As the Vedic tradition tells us, we are not in the world, the world is in us. 

I admire the wisdom of Alan Cohen regarding how the inner meets the outer, and the futility of seeing change as “out there.” This quotation is from his classic book Looking In for Number One: “The world is not defective and does not need fixing; the world is unfolding and needs belief. You will never create a perfect world by fixing everything that is broken. The more things and people you try to fix, the more you find that are broken. The only way to attain perfection is to claim it right where you are. If it is not here now, it will not be here later. Perfection is not a condition you attain; it is a consciousness you live from. Changing the world is not about setting it right, but seeing it right. Inner transformation must occur before change is possible.”

Let us apply this same wisdom to ourselves by revising the quotation as follows: “I and my life are not defective and do not need fixing; I and my life are unfolding and need belief. I will never create a perfect life by fixing everything that I judge as broken. The more things I try to fix about myself ,  other people, and the world, the more I things I find that appear broken. The only way to attain happiness is to claim it right where I am. If I am not happy now, I won’t be later. Happiness is not a condition I attain; it is a consciousness I live from. Changing my life is not about setting it right, but seeing it right. Inner transformation must occur before outer change is possible.”

Following on that idea, in another place in his book, Cohen makes a point that I feel is crucial to understanding the energy dynamics we face when we seek inner change. He writes that “every moment is a choice between resistance and affirmation.” What are resistance and affirmation? In this context, my definition of resistance is being enslaved by thoughts of “If only . . .”  If only I had more money, if only I had less responsibility, if only I were not alone, if only I had better health, if only, if only, if only . . . Conversely, for me affirmation is saying, “I can” or “I will try” no matter what the outer circumstances are. Affirmation, however, is not just aspirational. It is an intention put into action. Affirmation says, “This is who I am and this is the life I want live to reflect who I am—and this is what I can or will do right now to foster this self-expression.”

Don Juan Nuñez del Prado talks about hucha in a way that is similar to Cohen. Don Juan says that if we want to understand how we are creating hucha, we must look at what we are attaching to and what we are rejecting. Whichever terms you prefer, both resistance (or rejection) and affirmation (or attachment) are inner states that are independent of outer circumstances. The way we are expressing these energy dynamics within us has tremendous impact on the way we perceive the outer world. The “inner” and “outer” are in a continuously cycling feedback loop. In the Andes, this energy dynamic is called ayni. Ayni is intention put into action. Without action, there is no ayni.  However, the quality of our ayni is tied to how we feel about ourselves and the effect of our ayni is correlated to our level of personal power. That being the case, to transform our ayni we can spiral back to Robert Holden’s tawantin of questions and bring self-inquiry to them: “Every moment of your life you are deciding 1) who you are, 2) what you want, 3) what you can do, and 4) what you deserve and what you don’t.”

What we can do is called our atiy in Andean terms. Among other energy dynamics, our atiy is the measure of our power. It is what we are capable of doing at the current time. Among other effects, our atiy determines how much of our Inka Seed we are able to access, express, and bring to the world. In large part, our atiy is how through our measure of personal power we are either able or unable to drive the kawsay to realize our intentions. When we factor atiy into the energy dynamics of our kanay and Inka Seed, we are led to a conclusion that is astutely expressed by novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand: “The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

Unfortunately, the person who most often stops us from living “authentically” and “happily” is . . . you guessed it . . . ourselves. Don Juan Nuñez del Prado makes the same point, but through an Andean lens. He says that the combination of our atiy and our rimay is core to doing anything in the world. Atiy means we know the measure of our own power at the current time and how and when to best use it. Rimay is self-expression. Our life experiences have shaped us to be a singular, unique human being in a singular, unique life. Rimay is the ability to communicate who we are to the world with integrity and sincerity. Using the combination of atiy and rimay, no one can stop us from happily being ourselves, and no one can stop us from bringing our happily unique selves to the world. By combining atiy with rimay, we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk. And that is what the journey along the Andean qanchispatañan is all about. It is an insight journey to the true self. It is a compassionate conditioning of ourselves until our inner and outer lives are as perfectly harmonized as possible, so that we have attained sumaq kawsay—a meaningful and happy life that is the singular expression of our Inka Seed.

In my last two posts we explored our Inka Seed, which is an energetic structure within us that contains our potential to develop every human capacity to the highest level. We can develop ourselves consciously until we are seventh-level beings, which means godlike here in the human form. I like to use Sri Aurobindo’s phrasing to describe what each human being is: we are where “God-Spirit meets God-matter.” We have the potential to express our God-Spirit right here on Earth in this singular human lifetime.

Building on this concept, in this blog post we will examine personal power. Developing ourselves means acquiring more personal power: the power to love ourselves just as we are now, the power to be resilient no matter what challenges we have faced or will face, the power to know and express our unique selves, the power to bring our gifts to the world and appreciate the gifts of others, the power be of service and to allow ourselves to be served, the power to be the influence our own destiny, the power to dare to be divine.

Power. Power. Power. Just what do I mean by personal power?

Not dominance, control, authority, or supremacy over others. Not muscle, clout, toughness, brawn, or force.

Personal power is our ability to take responsibility for ourselves without excuse. Personal power starts with knowing ourselves, but it expresses itself in how we bring ourselves to the world moment by moment, day by day. As don Juan Nuñez del Prado said, at a minimum personal power is “being able to do something regardless of the circumstances around you.” At a maximum, as don Juan also said, it is “being able to do anything—but through ayni. Personal power is in service to yourself and others.” That is an important point: personal power through ayni (reciprocity) is never just about ourselves, but about how we use our power in relation to others. We benefit ourselves and others.

Our karpay is our personal power. Karpay means a transmission or sharing of energy—in this context the sharing of who we are according to our current state of being. You could say that we are what our personal powers are, for we cannot bring to the world what we have not yet become of the owners of within ourselves. Two of the most egregious errors we can make are underplaying and giving up our personal power. As novelist Alice Walker said, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

We each certainly have power. However, we may not be aware of our power, which, at heart, means we don’t have clear consciousness of our current capacities. Most of us woefully underestimate our capacities. If we cannot or will not acknowledge our full capacity at the current time, then why should anyone else? If we do not claim our power, we not only sell ourselves short, but we also purposefully reduce ourselves and limit what we can bring to the world. We should make no excuses for our present state of grandeur. And I do mean grandeur! That is a word—along with “glorious”—that I purposefully use with my students, because that is what the training in Andean mysticism is all about: growing our grandeur, becoming more and more glorious. We should have no false humility about what we have far so developed within ourselves. Taking responsibility for ourselves means truly owning all of who we are while also being honest about how much more there is within us that remains to be developed and expressed.

Personal power is both what is inside us and how we bring ourselves out into the world. As don Ivan Nuñez del Prado tells us, “Karpay is your capacity to share your power with another person.” And since our power equates to our available personal capacities, we have to know ourselves, be ourselves, and express ourselves as we are right now. For, as don Juan says, “the only thing we can share is our personal power.”

In the training, the very last practice is that of raising the amaru (anaconda). By doing so, we consciously externalize our personal power. Our amaru is outside of us, but it represents what is currently inside of us. It is the energy of making our karpay available to others and to the world. It is knowing ourselves perceptually and being perceptive of other people and the larger world around us. Where our perception of the inner and outer meet is an integration point from which we marshal the will to act in the world. As don Ivan explains, “With don Melchor, in the last step of the training—when you build the amaru outside yourself—that is the tukuyllank’aynioq. That is the power of the magician to be able to generate and feel energies outside yourself and address them—make them do things. That is the amaru.”

The tukuyllank’aynioq is the total owner of action. To become the “total” owner of our karpay means that moment by moment we know what we want to do, assess whether we have the personal power to do it, and then act or not according to that knowledge and assessment. Don Juan has said time and time again that our practices help us to “accumulate personal power.” This means developing more and more of the capacities held within our Inka Seed—turning what was only potential into actuality. However, using our personal power effectively requires that we know how to “measure” our power so that we can be realistic about our capabilities.  The mystical capacity we use is qaway: clear-seeing. If we want to do something, but fail to realize that we do not have the power to do it, then we not only frustrate or disappoint ourselves, we will likely fail.

Hesitation, procrastination, or fear about doing something are normal human emotions under certain conditions, and they do not have to reduce our power. We can feel them even when we have sufficient personal power to take action. Not having power means something different: it means that despite what we feel, we have not yet developed the capacity to realize a desire or fulfill an intention. We lack the requisite abilities.

That said, I think most of us will agree that we have a lot more power than we think we have. And, we will not discover if we do have a particular power until we try to use it. If we fail, no problem, because if we are motivated, we can use that failure to adjust or course correct. That is how we learn to develop new abilities. The tragedy of the self is when we have untapped powers and never dare ourselves to risk their realization. Our will is in our Inka Seed, the same energetic structure that holds within it this potential power that is waiting to be unleashed. We do not have to wait for other people’s approval or for outer circumstances to align on our behalf before we dare ourselves to express more of our grandeur. Our readiness comes from inside. For, as the novelist Eudora Welty reminds us, “All serious daring starts within.”

For me, among the most important forms of “daring” is to resist any impulse to keep ourselves small: to not capitulate to what others want us to be or expect us to be, to not question how our culture asks us to conform to its norms, to not bring self-inquiry to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves that restrict our full measure. Daring asks us to see and know ourselves as Taytanchis (Creator) sees and knows us. Taytanchis sees and knows all of us: our current abilities and our potential to be Creator’s ranti (equivalent) while here in this world in human form. So, I suggest that even as we realistically measure our current karpay, we also dare ourselves to look in the mirror to see our glorious potential. If we don’t see ourselves as Taytanchis sees us, then we must keep looking, and looking, and looking . . .

I ended Part 1 of this discussion about the Inka Seed with a few lines from a Mary Oliver poem. Now, I start Part 2 with lines from another of her poems, which is called “Sometimes.” She writes: “Instructions for living a life: / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.”

For the purposes of our discussion of the Inka Seed, rather than just telling about our capacities and experiences as human beings, I would amend that last line to “Act on it.” For paqos, kanay means not only knowing who we are, but having the personal power to live as who we really are. That means being fully engaged in the world.

As I said in Part I, we are working toward expressing more of the fullness of the self that is held in potential in the Inka Seed. Our personal power—our karpay—is measured by how much of our capacity we have available to use and express right now. There are many Quechua mystical terms that refer to how we put our intentions and capacities into action. They define how we understand the energy dynamics related to our Inka Seed. So, let’s take a look at some of these energy dynamics.

What might first come to mind is the energy dynamic of ayni: the interchanges we make with the living universe, the natural world, other human beings, and more. Ayni often is described as reciprocity: we have a conscious or unconscious intention that we send out into the world and the living universe reciprocates energetically. But intention is only part of the interchange. Ayni is intention applied. To put it another way, ayni is intention followed by action. As don Ivan Nuñez del Prado stresses so frequently: “No action, no ayni.” We don’t just think about calling a friend, we call. We don’t just intend to improve how we engage with someone we don’t really like, we actually make the effort. We don’t just intend to strengthen a relationship with an apu or a ñust’a (or any spirit being), we actively work to cultivate mutual communication.

Once an intention has been put into action, then the energy dynamic continues in that we must be aware that the living universe, the spirit beings, or our fellow human beings will provide a response or feedback. We don’t fixate on watching for that feedback, but we do remain perceptually open so that we can consciously register any feedback. Once we receive that response, we might realize we are being asked to refine our intention and adjust our actions. Then we begin a new cycle of ayni. Ayni involves many aspects of ourselves, but at the heart of all our ayni flows is our Inka Seed.

Ayni asks us to source from our Inka Seed. The whole cycle of ayni requires that we be in dynamic relationship with our personal power, which is another way of saying with our Inka Seed. But how exactly do we get in touch with our Inka Seed?

Let me start by saying that we are always in touch with our Inka Seed. Everything we are right now, we are because we are expressing some of the potential that is available to us. Yet, it helps to be concrete, rather than conceptual, about how we engage our Inka Seed or source from it. This goal requires that we use other kinds of energy dynamics.

The Andean tradition is a path of conscious evolution, so our work always starts with self-inquiry. One concrete way to gauge how well we are relating to our Inka Seed is to bring self-inquiry to how we are using our three human powers. These are yachay, munay, and llank’ay. Here I will talk only about yachay and llank’ay, and for reasons of space limitations the discussion will be rather brief.

Yachay refers to knowing—to thought, reason, logic, intellect. More specifically, it refers to what we learn through personal experience—not just through any experience, but from first-hand experience. Our yachay is not what we learn through second-hand sources such as conversations, books, lectures, YouTube videos, blog posts (such as this one!), and the like. It is what we know because we have experienced it or perceived it directly.

As a consequence, it is obvious that yachay and llank’ay are tightly correlated. Llank’ay is action. You know because you have experienced something. Of course, we can accumulate all kinds of valuable knowledge from secondary sources, but they are not yachay. We may know all kinds of things about starting and running a successful business, but until we actually start and run a business, we won’t know if we have the capacities available to us to be a successful businessowner. Although there are all kinds of factors that affect the success or failure of a business, a major one is our access to our Inka Seed. If we succeed, then that likely means that we have accessed and learned to use the necessary capacities from the vast store of capacities held within our Inka Seed and to capitalize on other factors outside of ourselves that helped support our business. If the business fails, it would be remiss not to bring self-inquiry to ourselves by asking how our lack of ability might at least partially have contributed to the demise of the enterprise.

Both success and failure can be amazing teachers if we use each as feedback about how intention and action work together. For example, sometimes we want something so badly (the intention) that we rush to do it before we are truly capable of doing it. We misjudge our atiy, which is a capacity at the root ñawi (siki ñawi) where we “measure” our power. The Quechua word atini (or in one variation, atinim) means “I can” or “I can do it.” But the truth is that sometimes we cannot do—or are not ready to do—what we set out to do. Sometimes we passionately want to do something, but a barely conscious or completely unconscious belief prevents us from taking action. Or, if we do act, we sabotage ourselves. Perhaps we procrastinate starting a business or we unconsciously undermine our own efforts because somewhere deep down we are running the limiting belief that we are not worthy of success. Each of these dynamics tell us something about how we are in relationship with our Inka Seed. If we go within and pay attention to the flux of energies we are running, we are being shown how we have or have not yet accessed the qualities and capacities of our Inka Seed that are relevant to manifesting a specific intention.

In this context, atiy is how much of our Inka Seed we have so far realized and are capable of using. It is our karpay, our personal power. And personal power is what we are accumulating in our walk through life. We move from mostly unconscious base impulses to directed intention, and ultimately to conscious action. The journey of self-development is the unfolding process of accessing more and more of our Inka Seed’s potential and bringing it through our atiy and out into our lives and into the world.

Self-development itself is a conscious choice, and as such it takes us to the very heart of the Inka Seed, because the Inka Seed is the repository of our will. Will is an energy dynamic. Don Juan Nuñez del Prado explains self-development, especially as relates to atiy and will, this way: “Will in a certain way is the center of the other pathways, according to don Melchor. Will is something conscious. Like the saying, ‘where there is a will, there is a way.’ Will belongs to your conscious mind. Atiy is more from your unconscious, and it is very basic. It is what we call an impulse. An impulse is something very basic. . . . It’s a spark, but it is a tiny spark that comes from a very basic part of you. Yet because of that it can trigger a lot of things. When you use that spark, you can trigger anything! But to move beyond that basic spark, you need another path. This is the will, and it is related to your Inka Seed. The Inka Seed contains all your potential. The Inka Seed is your Spirit, which drives everything—your impulses and everything. It owns your being, your Spirit does. Your potential is everything you can become, everything you can realize in your life. This potential is a driving power in itself. Because this potential [as a thing in and of itself] wants to develop—it is willing to be expressed or manifested. It triggers every possible thing that can happen or be expressed through and by a human being. Through the will of the Inka Seed, you move the living energy. You learn to express what is in you, what is in your own Inka Seed, and to send that out into the world. That is the whole goal of the Andean path—to express your whole self, all that is within you.”

Don Juan and don Ivan call the Inka Seed our inner compass, which is always pointing to true north. We can think of our Inka Seed as our truth-meter, because, as don Juan also says, “Your Inka Seed will always tell you the truth.” Your true north is how you bring yourself to the world:  what you are here to express and contribute. Your true north is different from my true north, or anyone else’s. We are each unique in that way. But the process of discernment of our personal true north is the same for all of us—we perceive it through our body. Remember that our wasi—the house or temple of the self—is comprised of the poq’po (which we think of as the psyche, the mind both conscious and unconscious), the physical body, and our Inka Seed. In don Juan’s words, our Inka Seed is the owner of our wasi. To discern what the “owner of the wasi” is trying to tell us, we listen to our body. The mind informs the body. The body then records and transmits through feelings how our psyche, especially our unconscious, is either aligning us with or deflecting us from our Inka Seed.

It is almost always our psyche that causes us to create hucha. We may be running scripts in largely unconscious ways that undermine what we consciously intend. These scripts can run the gamut from “I am so talented that there is no way I can fail” to “Dad always told me I was a loser, and I probably am.” We have all kinds of limiting beliefs, and this subject is much too complex to do to justice to here. But these are the kinds of energies deep down within ourselves that are difficult or impossible to access directly. We perceive them indirectly. And the body is one of the best ways to read the inner script to reveal how our hucha can steer us away from aligning with the true north of our Inka Seed.

Knowing this, we can now turn all of these concepts and energy dynamics into a practice. By developing a perceptual sensitivity of our body, when we set an intention or are about to take action, we can drop into our body and viscerally feel whether we are in alignment with our Inka Seed. Do we feel inner resonance? That is our Inka Seed pointing to true north. Our truth-meter is pointing to “Yes.” Do we feel inner dissonance? That is a clue that we are acting contrary to how our Inka Seed is telling us to drive our energy. When we feel an inner dissonance, we would do well to bring self-inquiry to our intention and delay any action until we can achieve some measure of insight about what is causing the dissonance. Exactly how inner resonance and inner dissonance feels will vary for each of us. But if we learn to discern the difference between the two states, there will be no mistaking one for the other. So, while it takes time and practice to develop the perceptual sensitivity of how our body is revealing our alignment or not with our Inka Seed, it is well worth the effort.

In terms of the energy practices related to our Inka Seed, a related question is “How do I access and express more of my potential?” The primary answer is that every practice we learn in the Andean tradition is devoted in the most fundamental way to helping us more fully, deeply, and easily access our Inka Seed. We have more than thirty practices that are each designed to help us develop. Each one is in some way helping us open to the greater potential of our Inka Seed. If we know and understand the specific goal of each practice, then we will be able to choose and use the perfect one for a specific situation. And, practicing the entire protocol of the Andean training multiple times will help us develop a greater mastery of our inner state.

Using all of our Andean practices, we initiate the process of phutuy—the flowering of the Self. In this case, it is the flowering of our Inka Seed. The tradition tells us that our practices are enough, but I believe that coupling our energy techniques with some form of insight-related psychological work (such as Jungian shadow work) can supercharge our perceptual awareness and self-development. I have found that using both approaches—energetic and psychological— speeds up the process of increasing our karpay so that we can truly express our kanay. We can more robustly know who we really are and have the power to live as who we really are. After all, kanay—which is the expression of our Inka Seed—not only is the promise of the Andean paqo path, it is the realization of it.