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Reflections on the Qanchispatañan

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ Leave a comment

As we close out the year, I continue writing about mystical capacities by addressing what I believe is one of the most important: qaway, which is mystical vision. A qawaq is a visionary or seer: a person with exceptional clarity who can “see” the metaphysical and physical worlds simultaneously. Deep down the two worlds are One; yet qaway allows us to maintain a metaphysical stance even as we “see” our human world just as it is—in all its darkness and light. Qaway helps us understand not only what is happening on the surface, but energies that play into root causes way down in the netherworld of cause and effect.

Although statistics show that across the globe humans live in better conditions than ever before in history—better health, less poverty and hunger, higher rates of education, greater wealth—the predominate perception seems to be that we are living in particularly troubled times. Authoritarianism is on the rise, a climate crisis looms, AI threatens to reduce employment at record levels, the cost of living is rising, and people appear to be less tolerant and more tribal. Can there possibly be a single, core explanation for the heavy state of so much of humanity? If so, what could it be?

The answer is yes, and the core explanation probably is not what you think. The root cause of most of our problems, if not all of them, is not politics, power structures, prejudices, oppressive social or economic systems, and the like. It is a person’s stage of consciousness, and by extension the predominant collective stage of human consciousness.

As I lead you into a brief discussion about human consciousness, I must state the obvious as caveats. Consciousness is an immensely complex and intricately nuanced subject. We will be venturing into only one aspect of it: the evolutionary nature of the development of human consciousness. There are, of course, innumerable reasons for the problems in the world; but the hub of the wheel, so to speak, is consciousness and where we are individually and collectively along the spectrum of consciousness development.

It also is useful to know the core terms of consciousness: state, stage, and structure. Roughly speaking, a state of consciousness is a person’s shifting, transitory phenomenological experience: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, curiosity, envy, boredom, etc. The stages of consciousness are the progressive shifts in the quality of how consciousness functions and thus in how we understand and experience the world differently as we develop. The various theories of consciousness development do not agree on the number of stages, although most identify between four and seven. An example of progressive stages might be pre-rational/instinctual, rational/egoic, relational/social, mythic/spiritual, transcendental/non-dualistic, cosmic/integral/Oneness. A structure of consciousness is the way our consciousness is ordered, and so how we experience our own beingness. In the Andes, we would use the word mast’ay, which means reordered or reorganized. At each stage of development, our consciousness is restructured in such a way that we expand our conception of being.

A sampling of some of the most well-known of these (mystical) models include Sri Aurobindo and his Integral Yoga philosophy; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s four-stage evolutionary consciousness, Jean Gebser’s Integral Theory, Ken Wilber’s Integral Metatheory that builds on Gebser’s and others’ models, Meister Eckhart’s stages of union, Theravada Buddhism’s stages of awakening, and Huston Smith’s four progressive spiritual personality types.

Many theories I have read about agree that collectively humanity is in a middle stage: usually at stage three of a seven-stage spectrum. This is not a highly developed stage, and the condition of the world reflects this. As mystic theologian Willigis Jäger writes in his 1989 book Search for the Meaning of Life: Essays and Reflections on the Mystical Experience: “We seem to find ourselves . . . in the middle of our journey toward full and complete humanness—and it is precisely at this point that we face special danger. No longer animals, we have nevertheless yet to reach full maturity, namely that mystical dimension of consciousness in which the future of humanity evidently lies. Til we get there, we are in a rather tragic stage, as the situation of today’s world shows.” (p 30)

The Andean mystical tradition can be added to the list of theories. In fact, the entire foundation of the tradition rests upon the qanchispatañan, a seven-stage model of the dynamical unfolding of consciousness. As with other models, at each of the earlier stages of the qanchispatañan we can express the characteristics of that structure of consciousness in both heavy (hucha-generating) and light (sami-generating) ways. We can be happy at any stage, but as we move up the spectrum of increasing consciousness, we produce less and less hucha. We broaden our abilities to harmoniously engage the world and our fellow human beings, especially those radically different from us.

Because of space constraints, I am providing only the briefest overview of the zero through second stages of the qanchispatañan, and concentrating on the third and fourth, as these are the stages that most of us have achieved. There are no human beings we know of who currently are developed to the higher stages (five through seven). Although some people display flashes of these stages, no one is fully developed to and consistently at stage five and higher.  

In this model, we all start at the zero stage, that of the purun runa: our raw, natural, undeveloped self. As we age and engage in life, we step up through the first, second, and third stages. Using psychology as a guide, we might think of the first stage as an almost totally egoic stage. Because our priorities are survival needs first and personal status second, a core personality characteristic is victim mentality. We take little responsibility for ourselves and our self-created hucha, believing the world and others are the cause of our problems. At the second stage, we increase our self-awareness and thus begin to own and deal with our shadow (unconscious) needs, drives, and desires. We increasingly take responsibility for ourselves and may even begin a sustained program of self-improvement. Most human beings (and organizations, nations, and other social and human power structures) are at the third stage. Here we engage the world in much healthier ways, although this stage also has a host of pitfalls. The most divisive are duality thinking, tribalism such that others are either with us or against us, heavy judgments on those different from us, and the belief that we have the truth and others (whom we see as our opposition) do not.  We also display our heaviness as either-or thinking, a win-lose mentality, and a drive toward competition rather than cooperation. Our focus tends to be on differences rather than similarities, and so we are more exclusionary than inclusive.

Because the third-level worldview is so dualistic, the most difficult leap to make is from the third to the fourth stage. It is an expansion of consciousness that has dramatic effects on the way we think of ourselves, others, and the world in general. We usually do not advance to the fourth stage unless we have done our shadow work and made significant progress toward self-actualization. The fourth stage is that of the chakaruna: we are bridge builders. Our frame of reference and our daily practice is that of taqe, joining. We respect all traditions, because we see the core, underlying truths and values that they share. So, we move from focusing on what separates us to the commonalities among us. We seek win-win strategies, encourage cooperation rather than competition, and, among many other capacities, strive to see every individual as worthy of respect and compassion. We marvel at the diversity of human expression, while knowing in the physical realm we are all part of one human family and in the spiritual realm we are each an expression of the All That Is.

To understand many of the problems we face in human relations and, thus, in the state of the world, we must acknowledge three fundamental “truths” about any evolutionary model of human conscious development. First, we as individuals, and thus collectively as a species, cannot skip a stage of development. There is no leap-frogging from the second to the fourth stage, or the third to the sixth stage. There is only a steady progression stage by stage.

Second, ontologically (meaning what is means to “be”), we can only understand what it means to be human from the view of the stage we are at. Others might tell us what it is like at a more advanced stage, but we are essentially clueless about what it means to “be” (as in our quality of self, our human beingness) at that stage of development until we have reached it ourselves. As an analogy, there is no butterfly without there having first been a caterpillar. A caterpillar cannot know what it is like to be a butterfly. If it were capable of imagining, mystically a caterpillar might know it contains within itself a butterfly nature, but as a caterpillar it can only be what it is.

Third, although language is linear, we must rise above that restriction, because one stage of human consciousness is not “higher” than another in a purely hierarchical sense. Consciousness is evolutionary in nature, so we could say that all stages exist simultaneously in potential, but display in reality more or less sequentially. We take everything we have developed in previous stages with us as we progress to the next stage. Going back to the caterpillar and butterfly analogy: That butterfly, at some energetic and perhaps physical stage, retains aspects of its former caterpillarness. It is what it is, but also what it was. Thus, a later stage of development is not “better than” a previous one; it is simply “more of” what is possible within the realm of the unfolding of beingness. The new enfolds the old, the current enfolds the former. Consciousness is a process of emergence, an increasing expansion of awareness toward our “God” nature.

Now that we have the necessary context, we can more easily understand that many of our problems arise because of our ignorance, misunderstandings, or outright refusal to live by these “truths.” We end up projecting the values of our own stage of consciousness onto those who have not yet reached our stage. Every stage has heavy and light aspects to it, and we tend to valorize the light aspects of our own stage of development and focus on the heavy aspects of people at stages below us. Thus, instead of understanding that everyone can only “be” the capacities inherent at their stage of consciousness, we see people as willfully and intentionally being ___________ [insert whatever epithets of abuse you want: ignorant, selfish, immoral, hateful, racist, oppressive, misogynist, xenophobic . . .].

They are the problem, we say. But that is not true in the qawaq sense. When we have developed our mystical vision, we “see” that each of us is right where we are. We cannot be anywhere else. While we want to work to increase the good in the world, it is a waste of our energy to shame, insult, demonize, or try to legislate “morality” into people who are expressing the heavier aspects of an earlier stage of development. We cannot speed up evolution. Doing so, as Ken Wilbur wrote in The Post-truth World: Politics, Polarization, and a Vision for Transcending the Chaos, is like “calling age 5 a disease and outlawing it.” (p 69) A five-year-old cannot do anything else but think, behave, and understand as a five-year-old. To expect anything more of that child is to be impatient or unfair at best and delusional at worst.

What is “wrong” in the world is not “out there,” but “in here.” We think things like (and act from these thoughts and beliefs), “Everyone knows right from wrong, right?” “Everyone knows that [X] hurts us, while [Y] helps us, right?” Even if we temper those feelings, we are prone to thinking along the lines of: “At the very least they should know, right? In this day and age, there simply is no excuse for anyone to lie and cheat, to dox and cancel, to support or enable any kind of oppression, to think misogyny or xenophobia is tolerable, to desecrate the Earth and our resources, right?”

Wrong.

Andean paqos and a variety of consciousness theorists remind of us of the obvious: We all start out as purun runa—at the zero stage, which is that of the natural but undeveloped human being. Although some of our development is fueled simply because we grow up and live in the world at a particular time and in a particular culture, much of personal development is a mix of circumstance and choice. As Ken Wilber says: No matter how fast the world is developing socially, culturally, materially, and technologically, “. . . everybody today is still born at square one and must begin their growth and development from there—and they can stop when they reach any [stage]. And thus even worldcentric [i.e., fourth stage] cultures everywhere continue to possess individuals at, for example, deeply ethnocentric [second and third] stages of development—and those individuals possess powerfully oppressive, coercive, and domineering impulses.” He adds, “Human beings are not born at a worldcentric stage of morality, values, or drives—they are not born democratically enthused. They develop to those stages after [passing through several other] major stages of development, and by no means does everybody make it.” (Post-Truth World, p 73)

However, even those at the fourth and higher stages of development face challenges, not the least of which is that they forget that everyone does not see the world as they do. Others at earlier stages may not share their ethical and moral values. Consequently, fueled by remnants of their former third-stage selves, they can be impatient with those they perceive as blocking progress or perpetuating injustices. They then tend to become contemptuous toward people they consider “less developed” than themselves. Because those at the earlier stages cannot know what consciousness at a more developed stage is like, they are clueless as to why they are being blamed and shamed for being who they are and holding the worldview that they do. They then tend to react by demonizing those at the later stages, who they come to see as elites, dominators, privileged, prejudiced, [insert your own abusive epithet]. If those at the higher levels do not right themselves, a viciously divisive cycle ensues.

While light-bearers, change-makers, activists, advocates, and educators at every stage are doing good works and striving to solve problems for the good of all, their efforts often fall short or boomerang in unexpected and unfortunate ways in part because they forget they are not talking to their peers. To be successful in their advocacy, they need to reach out to people at earlier stages of development who appear ready to be guided to the next stage of development. And they need to communicate with them in the “language” of that earlier stage. All of us must meet people where they are, not where we wish they were.

There is a danger of thinking that such a strategy is manipulative or patronizing, but it is not. (Well, it can be depending on the interior stage of development of the communicator.) Remember, when we develop our qaway ability, we “see” reality as it really is. And if we agree with the main premises of many of these evolutionary models of human consciousness development, then acknowledging that people are at different levels, and meeting them where they are and in a way they can understand, is not only realistic, but necessary. Theories of consciousness are stunning in their complexity. They easily can be misunderstood when they are only partially presented, as I have done here. So, I leave you with the advice Ken Wilber provides in A Post-Truth World: “What so desperately needs to be understood, from a developmental and evolutionary perspective, is that each major stage of development becomes a possible station in life for those who stop there, and there is nothing that can be done about that—except to make sure that all means of further development are made as widely available as possible (a core task of the leading-edge), and—just as importantly—make room in society for individuals who are at each station of life . . ., and douse the whole affair with outrageous amounts of loving kindness—and do this by example. (p 11, italics in original)

Beyond the Mirror: Perceiving Spirit and Nature Beings

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ 1 Comment

“. . . with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”

                                        —  William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” 

My guess is that most people who practice shamanism or mysticism would have no objection to my adding another line to this stanza of Wordsworth’s poem: “And they see into us.” The Andeans tell us that everything is a “being,” so if we see into the life of all the things of this world, they see into us as well. In the Andean mystical tradition, this reciprocity is called ayni.

Ayni is neither transactional nor casual. It is about seeing into the heart of another being, whether that is a human being, tree, or mountain. We see through our mystical vision and connect through our feelings—in the Andean way through munay, or conscious caring or even love. Wordsworth description of an “eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy” is a beautiful rendering of the energetics of ayni. He speaks of a perceptual connection that is conscious, humble, respectful, and curious.

Continuing with my blog posts about mystical abilities both within and outside of the Andean cosmosvision, developing this quality of perception into the “life of things” is of paramount importance. A core goal of many types of mystical practices is to develop a perception that can look into the life of things, achieving a direct, unmediated connection to the physical and non-physical reality of this world. This kind of awareness, this contact, is a verifiable reality for mystical practitioners. But is truly unmediated awareness possible?

I believe it is, but only rarely. For most of us, most of the time, the answer is no. This is the great paradox of mystical perception: Our “seeing into the life of things” is, overwhelmingly, an act of seeing ourselves reflected in the things we observe. Our human brain is hard-wired with a perceptual habit to anthropomorphize—to project human abilities, behaviors, emotions, and qualities onto non-human beings. For many scientists, especially evolutionary biologists, we are structurally incapable of doing otherwise. As Reza Aslan writes in God: A Human History: “We are . . . evolutionarily adapted to implant our own beliefs and desires, our own mental and psychological states, our own souls, in other beings, whether they are human or not.” (Italics in original.) We are the ultimate mediator. Our personal experience is the lens through which we apply meaning to the entire universe, blurring the line between pure observation and self-projection.

Let us drill down into a few of the profound implications of anthropomorphization: of projecting human traits onto spirit and nature beings. The core philosophical challenge is the limits of knowledge. We must confront the fact that we can only ever know our perception of the world, not the world itself. While mysticism suggests that everything is connected—for example, that knowing a tree is a deep-down way of knowing ourselves—moments of such “at-one-ment” are exceptional. More commonly, our connections with non-human beings are exchanges that reveal more about ourselves than them. Despite how mystical training can increase our capacity to sense and apprehend non-human beings, I am suggesting that most of the time we cannot know their true nature beyond the lens of our own projection.

As meaning-making creatures, our human perspective is the absolute starting and ending point of all sense-making. Even in moments of perceived reciprocity with a spirit or nature being—when we hear them speak or feel a shared emotional connection—it is impossible to know if the dialogue or feeling originates from the non-human entity or if it is mostly or entirely self-constructed. The mere act of hearing a tree “talk” is, by definition, an anthropomorphism.

Given this limitation, perhaps the term that best defines mysticism is “preternatural.” In its more theological and philosophical definitions, it refers to our apprehension of spirit or nature beings as unexplainable and unverifiable independent of our own minds. That said, mystical experiences are not intellectual; they are phenomenological. Their reality is undeniable to the experiencer, but their meaning and value are inherently personal, determined by our own state of consciousness, feelings, and beliefs.

This dependence on the self does not diminish the worth of mystical encounters, but it requires that we approach them with qaway. This Andean mystical capacity helps us see reality as it “really” is, forcing us to acknowledge the predominant energy dynamic: the inherent tendency to overlay our humanness onto everything. Poetry best captures the essence of this point. Wallace Stevens’s “Tea at the Palace of Hoon” explores the fluid boundary between the inner and the outer, showing how self-realization stems from our own conscious, creative power to shape ourselves through shaping the world: “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself; / And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

Given the inherent limitations of the human perspective, how can we approach mystical communion with spirit and nature beings with less self-projection? How might we achieve greater comfort with the fact that although these entities may possess some measure of consciousness, they may or may not be aware of or even much interested in human beings? While mysticism holds that we and they are expressions of a larger, interconnected web of being, or likely of an uncharacterizable One Consciousness, the question remains: How do we respect that their conscious existence might be profoundly different from our own? Here are three suggestions for easing ourselves into this frame of reference.

Release Agendas

Observe, connect, and be in union with non-human beings free from the expectation that they can, will, or want to act on our behalf. When we seek out connection mostly to have personal needs or wants met (e.g., insight, problem-solving, learning)—or even when we approach making a connection so we can have an “experience”—we are centering the interaction around ourselves. We are being more transactional than we are genuinely reciprocal. We are in danger of making ourselves dominant and even superior to the nature or spirit being. We don’t know the Mind of God, but it is likely that nature and other kinds of spirits do not exist to bring us pleasure or to serve our needs. We are certainly free to ask for counsel or guidance, and our experience tells us that they do assist us. But we must remain aware that the tree, mountain, or other non-human entity is under no obligation to assist, may not be able to assist, and even may be entirely indifferent to us. It is far more likely that what we “receive” from our connection to a spirit or nature being is an opportunity to listen to the voice of our own unconscious—to our own inner knowing, and even inner wisdom. At the very least, we must remain aware that the nature or spirit being may be functioning more as a mirror than as a human-like problem solver or teacher.

Allow Nature to Reveal Itself

Mystically, everything is a being and possesses some measure of consciousness, although not necessarily one resembling human consciousness. Nature may be a teacher (a metaphor), and if we approach a plant, for example, with an openness to receiving its true nature, sometimes information may be exchanged in ways that are currently unknowable. We might receive the inspiration that this plant, when prepared as a tea, aids human digestion or relieves pain. The key is the shift in approach: We do not approach it with an expectation that it will reveal its “secrets.” Instead, we approach it with respect and humility, simply seeking to know it as itself. Sometimes, from that pure knowing, insights into how the plant can serve our needs will spontaneously arise. The crucial attitudinal difference is that this is not an “ask,” but a reverent connection from which a “receiving” may sometimes emerge.

Honor Selflessly

It is a common spiritual or sacred practice to make offerings—such a sage or tobacco, or in the Andean tradition a despacho—to Nature or specific nature or spirit beings. Usually, we do that as an act of ayni (reciprocity): an offering precedes a request or is an expression of gratitude for the fulfillment of a request. While the act of making an offering embodies our respect, we must guard again allowing a genuine feeling to become merely performative. Too often, a ritual becomes centered on the one saying “Thank You” rather than on the one who is due the thanks. The energy dynamic of projection is subtle: In the act of honoring, we can easily connect more with ourselves than with the being. I am making this offering. I am giving thanks. Genuine honoring is a selfless form of connection; it is a way of connecting that moves us beyond the ego.

Trees, mountains, rivers—they existed for millions of years before human beings did. Even if mystically we acknowledge that they have their own kind of consciousness and intelligence, their form of “beingness” is fundamentally unknowable to us. As ancient entities, their lifespans extend across time scales we cannot possibly imagine. Their form of consciousness may have evolved in radically different ways than ours and may take forms bizarrely distinct from human thought. Very simply, they are highly unlikely to be humanlike.

Perhaps a river’s reason for being is simply to flow. A star’s is to shine. A mountain’s is to rise. That is enough; they do not require any more purpose.

They know their own true nature. If we desire genuine mystical connection, these admissions are necessary. Releasing our human projections frees us to be our authentic selves, and allows them to be authentically theirs. This respect for their profound autonomy is the minimal starting point for establishing an ayni connection with spirit and nature beings.

A Mystic Welcomes Paradox

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ Leave a comment

It was the late 1990s, and a party was in full swing—music blaring, drinks flowing, and conversation and laughter filling the rooms. But I was in a quiet corner deep in conversation with Gloria Karpinski, a global teacher of human development. I have no memory of how we got on the subject, but we were discussing what it means to be spiritually mature. We finally agreed on a concise definition: spiritual maturity is the ability to sit comfortably in the lap of paradox. With that weighty issue settled, we rejoined the party and all its merriment. I have never forgotten that definition, and it is the perfect way to introduce the next mystical sensibility on my list: cultivating comfort with paradox.

Drawing from various definitions, paradox is a statement that seems contradictory or nonsensical on the surface but with deeper reflection reveals a profound truth. It often requires us to reconcile two opposing ideas by reconsidering our initial assumptions.

Some paradoxes do not cause us any inner tension; we simply “get them.” We all have heard and used these kinds of statements:

  • Less is more.
  • The only constant is change.
  • The more you know, the less you understand.
  • The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

However, many spiritual paradoxes are designed to create inner dissonance. They make us pause and ask to be taken into contemplation. They challenge our conventional thinking and push us to a deeper understanding.

  • Be in the world but not of the world.
  • You must lose yourself to truly find yourself.
  • If you meet the Buddha on the road, slay him.
  • Nothing is everything, everything is nothing.

One thing is certain about paradox: it is not something to be figured out. In fact, the harder we try to solve the seeming contradiction, the further we get from insight. Determination is not our way in. A classic Buddhist story illustrates this point. A student asks a teacher how long it will take to master his teachings. The teacher replies, “Ten years.” “But,” the student promises, “I will be the most diligent, dedicated pupil you have ever had.” “In that case,” the teacher says, “twenty years.”

While logic often seeks clear, definitive answers, spiritual paradox offers a different path. It is a powerful tool designed to loosen our rigid attachment to logic and cultivate respect for uncertainty. By moving us beyond either/or thinking toward a more integral both/and perspective, paradox challenges the ego’s need for strict categorization and simplistic or superficial meaning. It encourages a more reflective, contemplative, and expansive awareness. Ultimately, paradox helps us cultivate the humility and grace to honor life’s mysteries, fostering a greater tolerance for abstraction and a deeper trust in inspiration.

Words—naming, defining, characterizing—are totally inadequate to mystical pursuits. Among the greatest gifts of paradox is that it teaches us that “knowing” is not intellectual, but phenomenological. We must feel our way toward “truth” and insight. In fact, mystical perception is more a “cloud of unknowing,” as the title of a classic Christian mystical text tells us. Beyond all thought, imagery, and intellectual concepts is the liminal space where the soul meets and experiences the divine.

Most readers of this blog practice the Andean sacred arts. We meet paradox in this tradition, although it makes mostly subtle appearances. Practices such as saminchakuy and saiwachakuy, along with reflection and contemplation, help us perceive the deeper spiritual truths that words and logic cannot express. They are methods that move us inward to the quiet, luminous places where we listen rather than talk, feel rather than think, and absorb rather than learn. The paradox of these practices is that they are both passive and active, and neither passive nor active. Embedded within the stillness are creational energies, what in the Andean tradition we call ayni, or reciprocal interchanges. As Christian mystic Thomas Merton explains, “One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.”

Partnering with life is at the heart of the Andean tradition, and ayni is one of its central tenets. This Andean principle of reciprocity and mutualism is a foundational concept for Andeans within multiple spheres of life: the personal, the communal or social, and the spiritual. At the personal and social levels, it is commonly explained as “today for you, tomorrow for me.” Indigenous Andeans live agrarian lives, and this kind of ayni means that when you need help in your fields or with your herds, I will be there for you, and vice versa. However, even at this personal level ayni is never a purely transactional exchange. It always involves the increase in each party’s well-being. Ayni teaches that our well-being is intrinsically linked to the well-being of others, including that of the natural world. It is a deep-seated worldview that everything is interconnected and that reciprocity empowers both parties.

At an energetic level, ayni’s paradoxicality lies in its dual nature: it is a practical, physical action in life whose roots spring from a profound, non-material spirituality. This paradox includes the understanding that ayni first and foremost is a state of consciousness; however, without action there is no ayni. Ayni involves will, choice, awareness, and intention, yet its deep-down dynamic is the flow of one’s essence within larger energetic fields, from that of the human social sphere to that of alignment with the cosmos. Practicing ayni reveals that we are an integral part of the living universe, not separate from it. In this way, ayni is a conscious alignment with our own true nature.

In the Andean cosmovision, the spiritual and material are seen as two aspects of one reality. The Quechua word for this complementary polarity is yanantin. The concept of yanantin in Andean philosophy presents a powerful and often misunderstood paradox. Western dualisms (such as good versus evil, right versus wrong, me versus you) tend to emphasize a struggle for dominance of one over the other. Yanantin views seemingly opposite forces (such as male/female, light/dark, inner/outer, me/you) as essential, interdependent parts of a unified whole. Yanantin is not about achieving balance, but harmony. In any given situation, one aspect of the yanantin may be more prominent, active, or dominant, but still there is no fundamental asymmetry. The shifting energy dynamics of the yanantin pair create the conditions for growth, change, variety, and novelty. The essence of yanantin is not a focus on its twoness, or the different though complementary aspects of the two individual elements, but on their oneness, on the wholeness are arises from their essential relationship of complementarity. In essence, yanantin is the paradox of being the mirror of itself: of simultaneously perceiving Multiplicity and Oneness, and understanding they are not mutually exclusive. (Andean paqos would not venture into the Buddhist landscape of multiplicity being an illusion, although they would acknowledge that “separateness” is a misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of reality.)

Whatever the paradox, as a spiritual tool it is useful in all kinds of ways. Feeling comfort with paradox, and therefore being willing to embrace it, can heighten creativity. It pushes us to think, feel, and even be in ways that are outside the consensus norm—we wander into the land of creative insight, innovation, and novelty. If we spend any time there, we realize this is an environment of delight, revelation, and even joy. Paradox invites us to be curious and creatively adaptive: when we are face to face with the non-rational and even illogical, we quickly make friends with uncertainty, fluidity, and nuance. Arm in arm, they guide us toward innovative ways to know, understand, ponder, perform, problem-solve, feel, express, and choose. As we seek to harmonize what feels like the tension of opposites, we cultivate the capacity to reframe and reconceptualize: not only about the nature of the cosmos and the world—and our relationship to them—but about our own human nature. We must face our own inconsistencies; and when we do, we are more accepting of others, and even of life in this oh-so-human world. Perhaps the most impactful aspect of embracing paradox is that we open ourselves to a kind of reverence for the polarity in which we are steeped: our simultaneous physical and metaphysical beingness; the astounding complexity and astonishing variety of the world and of ourselves, and their inherent elegance; the stubborn “isness” of mundane material form and the palimpsest of the sacred that informs everything.  As Buddhist philosopher Dōgen Zenji so plainly states this paradox: “In the mundane, nothing is sacred. In sacredness, nothing is mundane.” This is the stance of the mystic, which is why when we befriend paradox, we make a friend for life.

 

A Mystic’s Sense of Wonder

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ Leave a comment

What are mystical sensibilities? A core one is to perceive and feel the sacred in the mundane—to find the joyous and even the miraculous in the everyday. For the rest of this year, I will be exploring how we can cultivate various mystical sensibilities, starting with the simple, profound act of wonder. As Emily Dickinson writes, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant— / Success in circuit lies.” Her words are a reminder that wonder, like truth, often comes to awareness subtly and obliquely. As she says of truth, wonder might “dazzle us gradually.” While wonder can strike unbidden, more often it is a sensibility we actively choose to develop.

The word “wonder” has two core forms and meanings. As a verb, it means to think about, speculate, be curious. As a noun it means to be astonished by or marvel at something. Many of us begin our mystical pursuits because we are curious about aspects of the world that fall outside of consensus or scientific reality. We are keen to experience the supernatural, witness the unusual, touch or be touched by the magical. So, where do we start? Right where we are. As poet E.B. White advised, the key is to “always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” It is good advice. And it is confirmed by generations of wisdom-keepers from a variety of cultures and spiritual traditions who tells us that wonder starts when our attention and awareness are focused on the here and now, particularly on the mundanities of life.

How often do we truly notice the world around us? Williams Carlos Williams’s most famous poem may be “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which although rife with layers of meaning, on its face asks us to simply notice the thereness, the beingness of what is in front on us. In this case it is a well-used wheelbarrow sitting in a barnyard in the rain: “So much depends/ upon / the red wheelbarrow / glazed with rain / water/ beside the white / chickens.” Instead of overlooking the familiar wheelbarrow, if we bring it into awareness, we appreciate its centrality to the harmony of the universe as a farm. From the way Williams deliberately breaks the lines of this poem, we also are asked to notice the rain itself and the chickens, things that normally do not catch our attention but that possess their own kind of marvelousness.

How much we overlook in our everyday lives! Is not the weed that sprouts in the crack in the cement a testament to the ferocity and fecundity of life? Is not the hammock strung between the trees the holder of sweet memories of lazy days and daydreams? When we pay attention, not all of what we perceive is pleasant but still may be profound. Is not the dumpster stuffed to overflowing with trash bags and household cast-offs a container for our causal and even thoughtless relationship to abundance, our voracious appetites, our aloofness to frugality?

When that dumpster image came to me, I almost immediately rejected it, because, really, how can trash provoke a sense of wonder? Then I discovered A.R. Ammons’s monumental book-length poem “Garbage.” He set me straight! He writes, “. . . the bulldozer man picks up a red bottle that / turns purple and green in the light and pours / out a few drops of stale wine, and yellow jackets / burr in the bottle, sung drunk, the singing / not even puzzled when he tosses the bottle way / down the slopes, the still air being flown / in the bottle even as the bottle / dives through / the air! the bulldozer man thinks about that / and concludes that everything is marvelous, what / he should conclude and what everything is: on / the deepdown slopes, he realizes, the light / inside the bottle will, over the weeks, change / the yellow jackets, unharmed, having left lost, / not an aromatic vapor of wine left, the air / percolating into and out of the neck as the sun’s heat rises and falls: all is one, one all: / hallelujah: he gets back up on his bulldozer / and shaking his locks backs the bulldozer up.”

If we have the eyes to see and the heart to feel, wonder may erupt out of the background noise of nature and life and crack us open. I recently experienced the unbidden arrival of such beauty. Last spring, I was sitting in my screened porch drinking my morning coffee when a single bird sang beauty into existence. What usually captured my attention were the green fields, the massive century-old oak trees across the fields, the rising sun. And when I think of wonder and birds, I own my bias toward the hummingbirds, hawks, and owls that I share this land with. But this! A song I had not heard before from some kind of bird unknown to me. It was a wonder! Even as other birds began to sing the same song, this bird stood out; it was the Bocelli of this flock. A capella simplicity, clarity, and purity—the closest sound to angelic I had ever heard. I felt I was in the presence of the holy; that I was being infused with the holy. Morning after morning, this wonder repeated: a single bird’s song like a prayer offered to the sunrise, to the giant oaks, to the green intensity of the fields, and to me. It was a mystical experience made more profound because it was inseparable from the mundane, inserting itself into my routine: me sitting in my chair in a screened porch at sunrise sipping coffee. Then one morning nothing. As abruptly as it had arrived, this wonder of a song ceased. This bird and its mates had moved on. How I miss it! And how grateful I am that I was witness to it and in some way imprinted by it. I eventually identified the bird and its song via YouTube: a white-throated sparrow. Theirs is a rather pedestrian call. But not from this bird. Its variation was at a level of artistry far outside the norm. I can assure you that if you go online to hear the trill of the white-throated sparrow, you will find nothing that compares to the wonder of this one bird’s hymnal song.

It might seem cliché to suggest that we cultivate wonder as a mystical sensibility by appreciating the marvelous in the mundane and, more importantly, feeling that marvelousness. Wonder is more of the body than the mind, and there is  nothing cliché about experiencing it. As poet Mary Oliver declares in “The Plum Trees,” “. . .Joy / is a taste before / it’s anything else, and the body / can lounge for hours devouring / the important moments. Listen / the only way / to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it / into the body first, like small / wild plums.” She asserts this truth again in “The Roses,” “. . . there is no end / believe me! to the inventions of summer, / to the happiness your body / is willing to bear.”

Many of us have lost our childlike capacity for wonder. So, when we are adults, sometimes it takes a child to be our teacher. I remember a lesson I received while visiting some friends. I was drawing with their daughter, who had several severe developmental challenges. We were sprawled on the floor; we each had a huge sheet of paper and a plastic bucket crammed with crayons. When she finished her drawing, she tugged on my sleeve to show it to me. There across the top was a narrow horizontal swath of blue sky. Most of the paper was blank, until down along the bottom was an equally skimpy swath of green grass and two stick figures: her and me. I was taking it all in, so I did not immediately comment. And I admit that my attention was on the blank expanse of the paper. Then our eyes met, and without giving me a chance to speak, she said, “Don’t worry. We’re closer to the sky than you may think.” Whoa! I could not have been more surprised, nor more humbled, if a wizard had hit me upside the head!

William Wordsworth reminds us of the importance of cultivating a childlike wonder (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”): “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream.” When was the last time you felt like this? That the common things are harbingers of delight? That the mundane is magical, such that a simple pine tree can sweeten your body; a white iris can beautify you? (Paraphrase from Wallace Stevens’s “In the Carolinas.”) When was the last time your everyday surroundings and the activities of your common life felt fresh and glorious?

How easy it is to take our lives for granted. It took a friend to remind me that I was so busy, I was missing my life. How about you? Shall this blog post be a wake-up call—a friend’s gentle reminder to take a break from all the “doing” and refocus on “being”? For to choose wonder—to notice the marvelous and even the divine in the everyday—is to choose everything important.

Deep Dive Into Rimay

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ Leave a comment

Quechua is an oral language; there was no written form of it until after the Spanish Conquest. It is a language rich in expressiveness, especially for conveying emotional depths, complexities, and subtleties. Rimay is the primary word for speech. In its various forms it means language, voice, word, discourse, conversation, to talk, to communicate, to express, and to explain.

Within the mystical tradition, rimay gains additional meanings. It is sacred sound and sound as a power. It is in yanantin relationship with yachay (knowledge). They are different but complementary powers that together refer to our ability to share the knowledge and wisdom we have gained through personal life experience. It comes as no surprise that rimay as communication is associated with the kunka ñawi, the mystical eye of the throat. Because of rimay, we can charge our vocalizations—words, songs, prayers—with our personal power to lift them beyond the mundane to the spiritual. In the context of rimay, spiritual not only means holy, sacred, or reverent, but filled with life force. (The root meanings of the word “spiritual” are breath and life). This is not some abstract life force, but our personal life force. Put more simply, rimay reveals our kanay: our beingness. With accuracy, clarity, and integrity, we give voice to who we are as unique human beings living unique human lives.

Rimay is a power of the kay pacha: of the human world. This exchange from the 1970s dark-comedy film Harold and Maude could be about rimay:

“Harold: Do you pray?
Maude: Pray? No. I communicate.
Harold: With God?
Maude: With life.”

Using the power of rimay, we can express anything about ourselves and our lives: our joy and despair, our love and fear, our compassion and indifference. . .  Doing so means that in that moment, through our feelings, we touched a truth about ourselves and had the courage to express it. In this way rimay is more about the self than others. If we are owners of the power of rimay, we mean what we say and say what we mean. Our word is reliable, such that we follow through on our commitments and promises. We take responsibility not only for the content of our speech, but also for its volume and tone, for how we place emphasis, and for explicit and implicit intent and effect. We all have heard what lack of rimay sounds like: the polite put-down, the snarky compliment, the disingenuous assurance, the hypocritical judgement.

Rimay as a power asks us to be conscious communicators. Self-awareness and self-control are at its core, for sometimes our power lies in what we restrain ourselves from saying. Actor and writer Craig Ferguson offers wise advice when he says, “Ask yourself these three things before you say anything. 1) Does this need to be said? 2) Does this need to be said by me? 3) Does this need to be said by me now?”

In its highest vibration, rimay as communication is healing. Victor Zea, a Peruvian photographer and hip-hop artist who seeks to preserve the Quechua language through his music, uses the term hanpiq rimay, which is speech that heals. (Hanpiq is more commonly spelled hampeq, which means healer.) Our words, of course, can lift others up. They can be soothing, restorative, inspirational. But as with all our work, we first attend to ourselves. When we marshal the will to speak our truth with honesty and clarity, we bring healing to those denied or wounded parts of ourselves we previously had kept hidden or protected. Our healing might be as simple (and powerful) as reclaiming our integrity around the words “yes” and “no.” It might be learning to say “yes” to ourselves when for most of our lives our lack of self-worth led us to say “no.” Or learning to say “no” to others when previously we had begrudgingly said “yes” from a sense of obligation or fear of rejection.

The paqos tell us that while our use of Andean practices for self-development is serious work, it is not only that. It also is pullkay: undertaken with a sense of playfulness. This is true of rimay as well. Don Juan Nuñez del Prado reminds us that “our work is cosmic games. It is a mix of munay and rimay. Munay as love and will, and rimay as the ability to express yourself.” But, he says, “rimay is more than that really: it is the ability to manifest yourself. To express yourself in all forms, including expressing and living your destiny and inviting others to do the same. All of this takes you to kanay, the power to be yourself. If you discover kanay, you reach atiy, the power to change reality around you. After you manifest yourself, you can drive kawsay to influence [reality], but not control it; you can [push] energy to follow more harmonious flows in more harmonious directions for you. And then [you can] play in the world of living energy.”

Although rimay primarily relates to communication, in the mystical tradition it is the personal power to express any of our capacities. The evolutionary process don Juan explained above starts with munay—with cultivating it for ourselves. We learn to love ourselves just as we are. We recognize our inherent value and become the owners of self-worth. We express who we are without the need for putting on false faces: without illusions, excuses, apologies, justifications, or explanations. We neither devalue our strengths and gifts nor inflate them. We acknowledge our weaknesses and shortcomings, yet we do not fixate on them. When we accept ourselves just as we are, then we can relate to others just as they are. Our inner state conditions our outer reality.

Mastering this first harmonization of munay and rimay leads us to kanay: I am. Moses asked God, “Who are you?” God replied, “I am that I am.” Kanay confers this level of clarity. When we know “This is who I am” and are unafraid to express ourselves, we gain the power to live according to our true nature. Our Inka Seed—the energetic repository of our full potential—flowers. Although we cannot help but be shaped by aspects of life that are beyond our control, through kanay we also become shapers of life. Andeans aspire to attaining “sumaq kawsay”: a beautiful life, a happy life. I agree with Lucille Ball, who said, “It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.”

Once we expand our understanding of ourselves to include kanay, then we can begin to use another of our primary powers: atiy. Atiy is our capacity for acting in the world. Through kanay we know who we are and what we want from life. Through atiy we begin to manifest that life. It is a short hop from atiy to the final stage of development: khuyay. Khuyay is the passion, the joy of being alive as you. And so we come full circle, back to rimay: the exuberant expression of ourselves in our unique version of this cosmic game called life.