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

The Right Side of the Path

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

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

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

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

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

The Left Side of the Path

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. There is an immaterial and a material universe.

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

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

2. The universe is digital, not analog.

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

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

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

3. Everything depends on relations

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

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

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

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

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

You drive the living energy using your intention, don Benito explained, and the primary technique for getting stuck energy moving again is saminchakuy.

–Juan Nuñez del Prado

I get a lot of questions about some of the most basic, but important, energy practices of the Andean tradition. So in this post, and in a series of posts after this one, I want to talk about energy dynamics from a few different perspectives. Today, we’ll look at saminchakuy, a topic I have talked about at length about in multiple blog posts. It’s worth revisiting this subject.

I have said in the past, and continue to stress, that the Andean tradition is a path of joy and well-being. But that joy and well-being don’t just happen. You have to use the practices of the tradition to achieve them. That said, the practices are not “work.”They are joyful themselves, and they don’t take a PhD to understand or use.

Let me own my bias about what it means to claim you are following this path. For me it means you actually know and use the fundamental techniques of the tradition. Yet, it amazes me that so many people who have been on this path  for years don’t know the single most fundamental energy practice of the Andes—saminchakuy. Just about everything “energy” in the mystical tradition is based on this practice.

Everything is made of sami (the most refined kawsay, or living energy) and the very term saminchakuy means something like “making/working with sami” or “taking action with sami.” This practice is the basic “cleansing” practice. Just like the skin on your body needs to be washed in order to maintain your health, so does the “skin” of your poq’po (energy body or bubble) need to be cleaned of hucha. Saminchakuy is like taking an energetic shower. However, it’s important to understand that “cleansing” is a metaphor, because hucha is just slowed or blocked kawsay/sami. It is not dirty or contaminating, but it can affect your ability to be in effective reciprocity (ayni) with the living universe. Saminchakuy gets this slowed kawsay (hucha) moving again, and by doing so tremendously improves your capacity for well-being. You could also say, again metaphorically, that in relation to your well-being, it ramps up your energetic immune system.

The practice is simple. You use intention to draw sami in from the environment or cosmos through the top of your poq’po, and, after connecting through your tailbone or feet (the bottom of your poq’po) to Mother Earth, you use intention to direct any hucha in your poq’po into the Mother. You simultaneously release hucha as you fill and empower yourself with sami.

Saminchakuy pervades the tradition. So much of Andean practice is some variation of saminchakuy that not knowing about it may cause you to miss what is going on around you when you work with the paqos.

When you hear the Q’ero or other paqos sing or pray, you will often hear this word or some variation of it in their songs or prayers, as they petition the apus or Pachamama to receive their hucha. I was recently in Peru as part of a group, and we had the good fortune to spend several days working with a group of Q’ero paqos. During despachos I heard them whispering this word (saminchakuy) as they sought the blessings of the teqse apus. In effect they were asking, “Clean us, clean us.” This makes perfect sense since the despacho is the primary ayni ceremony and the despacho bundle is a great eater of hucha.

When you watch paqos work with their mishas, they most often are running it down a person’s body to release hucha. They basically are doing saminchakuy with the misha (as a result, it is also called mishachakuy: literally taking action with the misha). Like a despacho, the misha is a great eater of hucha. The downward movement of the misha (or a despacho bundle) over the body is a type of saminchakuy. They usually make sure they run the misha or despacho over all twelve ñawis (mystical eyes) and four chunpis (energetic belts), cleansing them of hucha and empowering them with sami. If you don’t know or understand saminchakuy, you might miss the actual intention of what they are doing with their mishas and despacho bundles.

To benefit from saminchakuy, you need only practice it ten minutes once or twice a day. The benefit is more perfect ayni. Everything in the Andean mystical tradition is based on ayni—moving energy through intention in reciprocity with the kawsay pacha. The quality of your ayni is dependent of the state of your poq’po—the more sami, the most effective your ayni—and vice versa. Saminchakuy is the core practice for creating a coherent and “clean” poq’po, so it directly impacts your capacity for ayni (or, to put it another way, your personal power ). It also impacts  the quality of your consciousness. As you cleanse your energy body, you perfect your ayni, which in turn helps you move up the stairway of the seven steps of consciousness. This is why don Benito Qoriwaman said that with saminchakuy alone (often supplemented with the empowering companion practice of saiwachakuy), you can reach the sixth (and possibly the seventh) level of consciousness. Saminchakuy, thus, is absolutely fundamental to your practice as a paqo and your personal development as a human being.

Can you follow the Andean tradition without knowing saminchakuy? Not really. It is simply too fundamental a practice.

Have I convinced you that you need to know and practice saminchkauy? I hope so.

Photo 3 is courtesy of and copyrighted by Lisa McClendon Sims.

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.
― Jim Morrison, The Doors

Many of the prophecies of the Andes are about the runakay mosoq, the rise of the New Humanity. Instead of looking outside ourselves—to our politicians and to activists and others—the revolution as conscious evolution starts within.

As I have said so many times before, a primary goal of the Andean path is to become the grandest human being you can be—to consciously evolve, and by doing so to contribute to the conscious evolution of our species. It is not too grandiose to say that we are seeking to change the world by first changing ourselves.

The truth of the matter is that we can’t change other people, we can only change ourselves. As we reach a higher expression of ourselves, we can become living examples to others of the benefits of doing so, and we may even be able to inspire others to do the work of their own inner growth.

While it is important to be an activist and champion for causes that help better the world, if we focus only on what is wrong in the outer world and with others instead of what is going on within ourselves, we risk losing perspective of how the process of change works.

As writer and spiritual teacher Alan Cohen writes, “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 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 outer change is possible.”

So seeking to be a force for good in the world is not about doing, as much as it is about your state of being. As writer and teacher Marianne Williamson says, every moment is a choice about your “ministry.” Will it be a ministry of fear or one of love (munay)? Does it arise from respect or does it only marginalize or denigrate? Long before Williamson was a public figure, she was a cocktail waitress. She decided that her ministry was to be the best, most life-affirming waitress she could be. The bar where she worked was her “church.” She started right where she was and as who she was—a waitress in a bar at a restaurant—and did not defer her work until she had a larger stage or a different environment. Most important, she started by deciding who she wanted to be, before she started acting on that state of being.

As paqos we know that we are in continual ayni with others, the material world, and the cosmos of living energy. And we also know that if we are on one end of the ayni flow and another person is at the other end, all we can take responsibility for is our end of that flow. For instance, when we do hucha mikhuy, we are not cleansing the other person, we are cleansing the flow of energy between ourselves and that person. Our undertaking will indeed decrease that person’s hucha and increase his or her sami, but mostly we are focused on what the flow between us feels like to us and making it feel better for ourselves, so we can take back our projections from that person. We are taking responsibility for ourselves, not trying to change the other person. That person may indeed change as a result of our practice, but that is not our overt intent. Our intent is to shift the condition of our own life and emotional/energy environment.

This is why we say in the Andean tradition that each of us is at the center of the universe. This is not a statement of hubris or solipsism. It is a practical focus on where the work needs to be done—in the self. We are solely responsible for ourselves and for how we are in ayni with the world of living energy—for how we absorb kawsay and how we radiate it.

Imperfect ayni creates hucha. Like a snake swallowing its tail, by reducing our hucha, we not only increase our own well-being, but we improve our capacity for more perfect ayni. All the beings of the hanaqpacha have perfected ayni, and it is our hope as paqos to one day perfect our own ayni as well. When we do, our own lives will feel more like paradise, and we will be contributing to the shift collectively that can ultimately result in our bringing heaven down to earth.

So while it has become almost cliché to quote Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” that is exactly what our Andean practice is about. Don Benito once told Juan Nuñez del Prado that we don’t have to wonder what God will say next time “he” appears in physical form on earth. We know what “he” has said in the past, and that will be exactly what “he” will say in the future: Ayninaqichis: Practice Ayni.

The medieval mystic Kabir reminds us that when it comes to outward gestures, “Why run around sprinkling holy water? There’s an ocean inside you, and when you’re ready you’ll drown.” The mystical drowning is not life threatening, but life affirming.

In the same way that is it impossible to separate water from ocean, we are both an ocean of self and a drop in the cosmic sea of being. We are both separate beings and inseparable from the All. The Andean mystical practices are first and foremost guiding principles for the evolution of the self, and from the center of the self our energy radiates out to touch the world. So think globally but start the process of change by acting locally—within yourself.

 

 

We are in the time of the Taripay Pacha, the Age of Meeting Ourselves Again, when humanity is marshaling the energy to consciously evolve. It’s a Pachacuti, a potential “overturning” of space-time, when an energetic evolutionary door is opening to usher in radical and beneficial change. Nothing is guaranteed. What our future looks like is entirely up to us. But despite the chaos we see and feel around us, this is a hopeful time for those of us on the Andean path. It’s a time to do our personal inner work, so as we change, grow, and transform we contribute to the greater well-being of the world.

Evolution is very much a part of the Andean cosmovision. It’s interesting that in the Andean tradition, unlike many other traditions, the “wild” is lower down the evolutionary scale than is the “domesticated.” Although the Andean tradition is deeply connected to nature, it values that which grows in refinement, coherence, and organization. You can think of this as moving from the unformed to the formed, from the unconscious to the more conscious. For example, “sacha” is deemed higher on the evolutionary scale than “salka.” Sacha is the forest, but in this case it would refer to domesticated landscapes, where trees are planted and subject to forestry husbandry practices. Salka is the wild landscape, untouched and left to its own. Sacha is the landscape to which human effort has been imparted. It evolves through intent and care. It is not one that has been decimated by humans, but cared for lovingly. It is evidence of thoughtfulness and even munay, and as such is an evolving landscape.

In the same vein, the symbol of the kaypacha, the puma, follows this pattern. In the Andean schema, the otorongo, the wild jungle puma, is lower down the evolutionary scale than is the more domesticated mountain puma.  Paqos work with the mountain cats, not the jungle cats.

This concept of the evolved in nature connects with the continuing development of conscious human evolution. The idea is that things move toward more perfect versions of themselves; they move toward greater capacity; they move toward God realization, which is unlimited potential.

This does not mean that wild things are “less than” per se. They are simply at the lower end of their full “realization.” This is a controversial concept for many Westerners, who may still operate under the sway of archetypes such as the perfection of unspoiled nature and the sentimental valorization of the noble savage. But Andean see things differently. They have a concept of movement toward higher forms of function and increased capacity—greater ayni. To be in reciprocity, in tune with the cosmos, one moves from wild to less wild, from pure instinct and uncontrolled urge to self-responsibility and conscious intent.

There is an Andean concept of the three ages of man, moving from the Age of the Wild Man to that of the Solar Man to that of the Metaphysical Man. This movement toward a more refined consciousness and more perfect ayni has parallels to the spectrum of physical evolution, of humans moving from unthinking apes to thinking, feeling modern humans. We move from being solely survivalists, concerned mostly with our physical safety and well-being, to becoming thinkers, such as scientists, philosophers, and poets. This evolutionary thrust toward more highly evolved (organized, structured, productive, sophisticated) forms includes landscapes and the creatures of nature, which is why Andean see salka, the wild, as less evolved than sacha, the domesticated.

Even the symbols of the three worlds have evolved. They have changed as we have changed, as we have move through these ages. For instance, the old emblem of the upper world, the hanaqpacha, was the condor, who is the great hucha eater. Today, we are moving, or have already moved, to a new symbol of the hanaqpacha, the hummingbird.

The hummingbird is a producer of sami. The entire focus of the age has changed from one of releasing heaviness to producing lightness. We now are expected to make sami. While we still need to release hucha, our focus in the Taripay Pacha, as creatures of conscious evolution, is to increase the sami in ourselves and foster it in others. This is a huge conceptual shift. It is almost like making a shift from carrying the burden of original sin to celebrating ourselves as creatures of original virtue. You can see how massive a change this shift in perspective can engender as we move our focus from releasing to generating, from reducing hucha to actively increasing sami.

We must bridge the lower world—the ukhupacha—in new ways as well. In the Andes, the ancient symbol of the lower world was the frog. Today it is the anaconda, or snake.

The ukhupacha, contrary to common thought, is not only a place where beings go who do not practice ayni; it is the place of regeneration. It is where those people who don’t know ayni go to regenerate themselves, to evolve. This, too, is a massive reframing in our way of conceptualizing our place in the world and in the cosmos. It leads us from thinking of the ukhupacha as a place that is “less than,” and passive, or even a place of punishment (it isn’t) to seeing it as a place of doing, and of potential and possibility. No one is lost. No one is condemned. At the very worst, if you still need to learn ayni upon your “death,” you find yourself in a place of self-regeneration. The ukhupacha is a place of evolutionary movement within. The Andean conceptual landscape is always one of positivity. There is always a path to growth, change, and transformation. The focus is always on achieving wholeness.

The symbols of wholeness are the tawanatin and the chakana. The chakana is the Andean cross, but it is more than a symbol of an empire or a culture. It is a symbol of a living tradition—of a bridge between cultures. As Juan Nuñez del Prado says, we are each a chakana—we are people who are building a bridge between traditions and fostering the shift from one age to another, more evolved age.

What of this world, of the kaypacha? When we conceptualize the entire landscape of the Andes in the Three Worlds—the hanaqpacha (upper world), kaypacha (this world), and ukhupacha (lower world), we see that the whole is divided into three parts, similar to how space-time is segmented into three ages.

You might say that the kaypacha—this world—occupies the most space. It is itself divided into two parts, an upper and lower part. In the upper part of the kaypacha is Pachamama and the stars and galaxies—the material cosmos. The lower aspect of the kaypacha includes the planet Earth (Mama Allpa), the apus, ñust’as and other spirit beings of earth.

Below the kaypacha is the ukhupacha, the place of regeneration for those who don’t practice ayni. Above the kaypacha is the hanaqpacha, which, contrary to common belief, is not the cosmos of stars and galaxies but is that which is beyond the material world, beyond matter. It is a non-material plane of those enlightened beings who always practice ayni.

We work as bridges between these three worlds, empowering ourselves with the sami from the enlightened ones of the hanaqpacha and sending sami to the ukhapacha to help empower the people of the lower world who don’t know ayni. Our practice is inherently evolutionary. We receive from those more evolved from us and we give to those less evolved than us. You might say we take from the sacha (the refined, the evolved) and give to the salka (the unrefined, the wild), although that might be stretching the metaphor a bit.

The value of understanding how we are chakanas—bridge builders—at many levels is that we can deepen our practice and make it incredibly useful. We are not paqos for the fun of it! We are working to further our own conscious evolution and that of the world. We are helping to birth a new and better world, to usher in the Age of the Metaphysical Man/Woman. Our world is one that has evolved through eons from the unformed wildness and narrowed scope of the instinctual and unconscious self to the more refined, responsible, and self-aware self.  Make no mistake about it—as a paqo you are taking on nothing short of the work of the world as you help move us toward realizing our fully enlightened selves—right here on earth in our human form. We are all active participants in the Taripay Pacha, and realizing this can energize our practice as paqos.