The word karpay in the Andean mystical tradition refers to an initiation, but if we dive deeper, the meaning expands to bring light to what an Andean initiation is really all about—and it takes us beyond the initiation itself into the heart of this energy tradition.

As an initiation, a karpay is a transmission or interchange of energy. Thus, it is most often thought of and experienced as ayni—an energy exchange of sami.

For example, in the Karpay Ayni you exchange your finest sami with another person. You place your hands on the person’s head and transmit your finest sami to that person through your makis (the secondary energy centers in the palms of your hands). When you are done, the other person reciprocates by sending his or her sami to you in the same manner.

A karpay does not have to involve ayni as we usually think of it in terms of an energy exchange of sami between people. For example, in many karpays—such as the karpay to the second or third level of the path—a paqo might take you into the mountains to a sacred lake. There you both would strip down and immerse yourselves in the lake, releasing hucha into the water and empowering yourselves with sami from the cosmos and/or from the apu. So this karpay is a form of saminchakuy (a cleansing and empowering) and an exchange with nature and/or spirit beings.

When we take that dive deep into what is going on in a karpay (initiation), we discover the root meaning of the word: it is your personal power.

Your karpay is your capacity for personal power at the current time. It is related to atiy, the capacity at the yana chunpi (the belt around the lower trunk of the body) and the siki ñawi (mystical eye at the base of the spine), where you measure your power at the current time and under the current conditions. You can only energetically accomplish what you have the personal power to do, so your karpay is your capacity for pushing the kawsay at the current time. The quality and amount of energy you transmit and receive in a karpay as initiation is proportional to your own capacity for radiating, absorbing, and using energy—which is another way of saying it is your personal power.

As one example of karpay in its “deep” meaning, consider that when you have a goal or desire you want to accomplish or realize, you can only fulfill that desire according to your karpay—the amount of personal power you have avaiilable to use. Perhaps you want to start a business. But as you do, you find that you are running into many difficulties and making a lot of ill-timed or ill-conceived decisions. You can’t get the business up and running smoothly. Of the many factors that are influencing that turn of events, one may be your capacity to push the kawsay. You just don’t have the personal power to accomplish that goal at that time. Realizing this, you can work to accumulate the personal power—and skills and talents and other factors; and of course, the cleansing of your poq’po and absorption of sami—to help you be successful next time you try.

Here’s another example, which demonstrates a different aspect of karpay as personal power. I remember Juan telling me about don Melchor offering him the karpay to the second level. He, don Melchor and don Melchor’s son, Marco, went up to Apu Ausangate to do the karpay, but Marco got very sick and they had to return home and so did not get to do the initiation. Later, don Melchor expressed the opinion that Marco’s sickness was not due to any physical condition or outside factor but to his inner lack of energetic capacity—he did not have the personal power to deal with the intent and work of the initiation. His karpay was not sufficient.

One final example: When don Benito first saw a new client in his healing clinic, he would assess energetically both his own capacity and the client’s for the healing. He might determine that the client needed to first see a physician before coming back to be treated by a paqo. Or he might see that this client was not “for his hand,” and so refer him or her to another paqo who was better suited to deal with this client’s problem. In certain ways, this process was don Benito’s assessment of his and his client’s karpays—his measure of his own personal power as it relates to this client and the client’s energetic capacity to participate in his or her own healing with don Benito.

We don’t often use the word karpay to refer to personal power, but that is at the heart of its meaning. When you think of karpay as an initiation, consider that at the root of this transfer of energy are two people and their capacities—one must have the personal power to transmit the energy and the other to receive it and use it well. Both are in an energetic exchange based on their measure of karpay (personal power) at the time they are seeking to make the exchange and on their capacity to share that energy.

Now that you have a fuller appreciation for the word karpay and its meanings, you can better assess your own karpay. Pay attention to your root—yana chunpi and siki ñawi—in order to measure your personal power at the current time. Attend to your belly center—puka chunpi and qosqo ñawi—to remain aware of how you are engaging your main power center, the place from which you most interact energetically with the world. Bring awareness to the condition of your entire poq’po (your energy body) and use saminchakuy to cleanse and empower yourself.

Doing so will allow you to better “see reality as it really is” in terms of your kapay. You will more clearly know what you need to do to increase your energetic capacity so that you can more effortlessly push the kawsay to fulfill your goals and desires. Rather than seeking “initiations,” your more profitable work as a paqo is to accumulate personal power so that you can engage fully and wisely in the world of living energy and in the real, action-oriented, relationship-rich human world.

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

– Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

At a recent workshop I was teaching, I mentioned that I think doing some psychological “shadow” work can propel you along the Andean path toward conscious evolution much faster.

If we are striving as paqos to be the grandest human beings, then we have to address all parts of ourselves, the conscious and unconscious. We both address our “wounds” and empower our Inka Seed by doing energy work, but it seems to go faster when we couple this energy process with psychological or emotional work.

What is the shadow? Broadly speaking, it is that part of you that drives your beingness below the level of your conscious awareness. It is everything within that you will not accept or acknowledge—or that you outright reject—about yourself. But it is also a repository for all of your unexamined and unlived gifts and talents.

Jung identifies many layers of consciousness, one of them being the ego. We are most familiar with the ego—the sense of “I.” Jung calls the ego a “field” of consciousness that encompasses all the “personal aspects of consciousness.” It is your experienced self, your empirical sense of self. The ego can both express the contents of self or repress them.

Two other fields of consciousness are the shadow and persona. As Murray Stein writes in Jung’s Map of the Soul, “the shadow is the image of ourselves that slides along behind us as we walk toward the light. The persona, its opposite, is named after the Roman term for an actor’s mask. It the face we wear to meet the social world around us.”

Your ego is usually deaf, dumb, and blind to the shadow, although your ego uses the shadow. As Stein says, “In adapting and coping with the world , the ego, quite unwittingly, employs the shadow to carry out the unsavory operations that it could not perform without falling into moral conflict.”

The shadow, in one sense, is protective. It saves you from yourself. Your moral and ethical conflicts, your self-condemnations and self-reprisals, your fears and trepidations, and so much more of your “unlovable” self gets banished to your shadow so you don’t have to deal with it and can get on negotiating the terrain of your daily life. But even though your shadow is not perceived or experienced directly by your ego, the content of the shadow often finds its way out into the light of day through unexpected behavior and words. Like most of us, you may sometimes be surprised—even shocked—how you act and what you say. What did that come from? you wonder, referring to something embarrassing or hurtful you did or said. It came from your shadow self.

What you won’t or can’t own within yourself often gets projected out onto others. You may see in others, truly or falsely, what you cannot own within yourself. Any blanket prejudice—against a race, religion, gender, whatever—is usually rooted in your shadow. So are other kinds of behaviors. Can’t stand a blowhard who only talks about himself? Maybe you have that same egotistical quality but are too ashamed to own it. Can’t seem to ever make an appointment on time? Maybe there is a “self” inside that gets its satisfaction from deliberately keeping people waiting. Have a reckless sense of courage and daring? Maybe that is a shadow compensation (a gift, in one way) from a “self” within who is cowering in fear.

In so many ways, that which you call your “reality” is shaped by the projections of your shadow. You can see, then, how important shadow work is to your endeavor as a paqo. One of your goals as a paqo is to be qaway—to see reality as it really is. If you are not exploring your shadow self, you cannot easily realize that goal.

Your shadow also is a bestower of talents and skills. As Debbie Ford, author of The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, writes, despite the truth that our shadow is the repository of what we deny about ourselves, our shadow holds “the essence of who we are.” It holds “our most precious gifts.” When we can bring these rejected or denied aspects of ourselves into the light, we can be transformed.

But this transformation can be a messy process. Jung says it can be a “suffering and a passion that implicate the whole person.” From the point of view of a paqo, it can be both a mystical and shamanic journey or rite of passage: mystical in that exploring the secret aspects of the self can be a liminal journey, at once both disorienting and illuminating; shamanic in that it can feel like a dismemberment of the self or even a death and then a reassembling or resurrection. The payoff is that this work can, in the words of Debbie Ford, “give us the blessing of our entire sel[f].”

As a paqo, you want to live as a whole human being. To do that you must accumulate personal power, realizing that personal power is about accessing more of the self. It is an inward driven pursuit of cleansing the hucha from your poq’po to be more of who you really are. Additionally, accumulating personal power is about being in more perfect ayni, which is an outward driven pursuit. It is always about relating to “other,” whether that other is the cosmos of living energy or a person or group. In this way, doing your shadow work can illuminate a series of core dyads: the inner and the outer, the individual and the collective, the human and the supernatural.  These are yanantin energies, the complement of the differences. When you bring harmony to a yanantin relationship, you can better achieve japu, the union of the two into something greater than the sum of the parts. This is the achievement of the fourth level of the paqo path, that of transcending boundaries without erasing them.

In his book High Country: The Solo Seeker’s Guide to a Real Life, depth psychologist David M. Alderman quotes Cal Jung about the value of fostering union with the inner and outer self—the conscious and unconscious selves. As a paqo, you can think of this as a yanantin pursuit that reaches japu. “Through the union of the opposites within us, we are able to discover our true selves beyond what our conscious awareness alone could ever make of us. . . . Through the conscientious union of the opposites within us, the true self emerges spontaneously into the conscious light of day; the conscious ego-based ‘I’ is literally transcended, and in its place arises a real, self-renewing, living being.”

This post cannot teach you the various kinds of shadow work, but you can explore those yourself, as there are plenty of accessible books and I am developing a master class that combines shadow work with the Andean path. However, I hope that this post can help you realize the value of undertaking this work as part of your Andean path, for the bottom line is that you have to walk through your own shadowlands to reach the landscapes of light. . .

Juan Nuñez and his son, Ivan, teach that the Inka Seed and heart (the qori chunpi and sonqo ñawi) have no hucha. Therefore, there is no need to ever “clean” these areas. They are pure sami, and so while you can bring more sami to them for additional empowerment, you never have to clean them.

As paqos we have no problem understanding that the Inka Seed is pure sami. After all, it is our connection with Wiraqocha, or God, or whatever you call the metaphysical first cause of the universe. It is our link with our divinity and encodes our fullest potential, and as such it  always has been and always will be pure, no matter what we do as human beings in the course of our lives.

But the teaching that the heart center has no hucha has met with resistance by some of the students learning the tradition in my classes. After all, who has not experienced heartache or heartbreak? Who does not carry the hucha from failed relationships and emotional hurts of all kinds? This teaching also has caused quite a bit of confusion among those who are healers or work in healing capacities with clients. They know, as do most of us, that a lot of what ails us physically finds its roots in our emotions. How can we not have hucha in our heart center when we are so burdened, consciously or unconsciously, by our emotional baggage?

When Juan and Ivan recently visited me here at my home for a few days, I took the opportunity to clarify this issue with them.

The confusion arises because we all have our emotional scars—some wounds healed and some not—and we are used to associating these emotions with the heart center. In so many Western and Eastern traditions, the heart is the repository for our emotions: love, hate, admiration, jealousy, joy, disappointment, and on and on.

But this is not true for the Andean mystical tradition. In this tradition:

• The heart center is the repository of our feelings.
• The qoqso is the repository of our emotions.

What’s the difference between feelings and emotions?

Feelings are those high-level states of consciousness that are beyond the circumstances of the purely human. They are states of being that include love as agape, joy, generosity, justice, compassion, empathy and so on. Emotions, in contrast, are our individual responses to life circumstances and relational interactions: love as eros, happiness, satisfaction, contentment, worry, rejection, envy, approval, disgust, and so on. I think you can easily see the difference—and that makes all the difference to understanding your poq’po.

The feelings are generated at the level of the Inka Seed and sonqo (heart). Emotions are responses from our gut level, our qosqo. This is the center from which we engage the everyday world, from which we send out seqes that connect us to places and people, and through which we exchange energy with them. It is the place of kinetic action, which includes that often volatile flux of our emotions. Emotions arise in reaction to circumstances and behaviors and are our reaction to and interpretation of them. They tend to be easily influenced by what we are experiencing and they change over time. Emotions, thus, are a major generator of hucha.

Emotions as hucha can affect many of our centers. When our words create hucha, we may accumulate that hucha at our throat (kunka chunpi). When our emotions deplete us of personal power, we may accumulate hucha in both our qosqo and siki (qori chunpi and yana chunpi). But we never accumulate hucha at the heart center or Inka Seed. They are generators only of munay. And while we may not be living fully from munay, we nonetheless have these energetically pure centers by which to generate it.

So when we seek to cleanse ourselves—realizing that hucha is not bad or dirty but only kawsay that is slowed down—we must go to the centers where hucha accumulates, which in the case of emotions generally means the qosqo, although it may be any of the other centers (excluding the qori chunpi and sonqo).

It will be interesting to see how this insight between feelings and emotions might change your approach to cleansing your poq’po. Perhaps you will see progress with emotional hucha that has until now been intractable. When you work on the centers that really matter—especially the qosqo—perhaps you will find your well-being radically increased. As interesting will be the effect in clients for those who work in the healing fields. If you are working at the level of the heart with clients, perhaps your effectiveness at helping them activate their self-healing capacities might be enormously increased through this shift of awareness and focus to the qosqo as their emotional energetic center. I would love to hear from you about this!

And do you see how beautiful and graceful the birds are when they are flying and soaring? The ground has many comforts for them to enjoy . . . But in the sky they are truly what a bird is meant to be. So it is with the human heart.

— Aleksandra Layland, novelist

Birds are common metaphors for the loosing of spirit, for the untethering of an earthbound soul. There is a similar use of this metaphor in the Andes, where there is a bird spirit helper associated with many of the levels of human consciousness. According to the teaching of don Benito Qoriwaman, there are seven levels of consciousness that can manifest in humans on earth, although currently we have manifested only four and are eagerly awaiting the fifth level, which is part of prophecies that foretell the rise of the New Humanity.

While Andeans generally don’t work with totem animals in the way that many Central and North American  indigenous and Native peoples do, they have a concept of spirit helpers that include animals and birds.

There is a specific kind of bird associated with a specific level of conscious, and they can assist you in at least two ways in your personal growth to a higher level of consciousness:

1) If you have already achieved that level of conscious development, you can choose to work with the bird associated with that level as a spirit guide, to learn more about that state of consciousness and to continue to develop.

2) If you have not yet reached that level of development, you can be called by the bird of that level. If you accept that bird as a tutelary guide, it will help you grow to that level of consciousness.

Before discussing the levels of consciousness, however briefly, and identifying the bird associated with it, it’s important to understand that we tend to slip back and forth between levels in our daily lives. We tend to be inconsistent in our behavior and mindset, which change depending on context. Rather like the “persona” of psychology—the face we show the world in order to fit in and be accepted—our “lived consciousness” can be context dependent. We might act from the second level at work and from the fourth level at church. We might slip into third-level consciousness in our politics and descend back to the first level in our love relationship.

Generally, however, we seek to grow and develop by stepping up the qanchispatañan—the Stairway of Seven Steps. This stairway of consciousness starts at the zero level, which is the ground floor from where you step up and onto the first step.

Here are the levels of consciousness and the birds associated with them. It’s a valuable exercise to see which “step” you are on in various areas of your life. If you want to climb the qanchispatañan, then you might consider working with the bird spirit helper of that level.

The 0 level is how we all come into human form as a baby, where we have no sense of a separate self or individuality, no “I.” However, people may be at the 0 level later in life. The qualities of the zero level include having little sense of personal power or autonomy, of going along with the crowd or with the majority at the expense of making up your own mind or finding your own identity. It’s the herd mentality, where you prefer what others prefer, seek to fit in at almost any cost, and are most comfortable being part of a group. In its worst expression, this is the mob. In its more positive aspects it can vary from being almost totally identified with a group (a hippie, a Goth, a war protester, an environmental activist, a Catholic, a humanist) to the extreme of being immersed in oceanic consciousness so deeply that you remove yourself from human interaction or renounce the world (the guru in the cave). There is no bird associated with this level.

The 1st level allows for greater autonomy but your sense of self is still heavily influenced by others, and your own need for others makes you dependent. This behavior includes codependence in all its forms. You are especially invested in those you see as authority figures (doctors, ministers, teachers) and you rely on them (consciously or unconsciously) to help direct your thinking, mold your belief system, and form your sense of self. You can tend to take more than you give, as you don’t have a strong will or the personal power to think you can help yourself. You think you need a teacher, leader, or guide and, in this respect, this is the level of the fetish—whatever the fetish is (a person, religion, organization, ideal) if you lose it or it is taken away, you feel you have lost your power and the ability to direct your own personal destiny. In the Andes, the bird of the first level is the killichu, a small falcon.

The 2nd level can be understood as the adolescent (this can be applied, as can all the levels, to an individual, society, nation, or culture). It’s the power of the “in group” and the clique. It’s the belief that “You’re either for us or against us.” It’s black and white thinking, but also contains the element of group-think. You can put your teacher or authority figure on a pedestal (hero worship), but then complain about the authority figure or teacher behind his or her back while not having the courage to face that person and speak your truth. It doesn’t feel safe to upset the apple cart of your belief system or threaten your status as an insider. You are making an effort to learn, expand, and grow, but you may quickly latch on to one truth at the expense of other possibilities, because you are less open to testing or questioning. This us-versus-them mentality can create discord and foster jealousy, incite conflicts of ego, and promote unhealthy competitiveness. The Andean bird associated with this level is the waman, the royal falcon.

At the 3rd level, you have more personal power and autonomy, are more open to acquiring diverse knowledge, and tend to at least listen to or consider the views of many teachers and authority figures. However, you tend to  eventually attach yourself to or identify with the power of one tradition at the expense of others. You feel an exclusive connection and think you have found the “right” path; all others are wrong or misguided. Whereas people at level two are more group minded, the people at level three are more single minded, although the “single mind” is attached to a specific group or a particular belief, etc. It’s the “There is one truth and I have finally found it” mentality. This is the level of consciousness most common in the world at the current time. It drives the most common religious and political agendas. It displays as stubborn nationalism (democracy is the best system, the U.S. is the best country), narrow views of spirituality (“X” is the only path to salvation), and intensely committed political affiliation (the rabid communist, socialist, Libertarian, Republican, Democrat). Very often this mindset drives one to become the “savior” of others, who don’t yet have the truth and so must be shown the way. The anka, or eagle, is the Andean bird of the third level of consciousness.

At the 4th level, you move toward what may be called the mystical mindset: you trust your personal experience, have the capacity to transcend symbolical and ritual patterns, and can overcome boundaries. You can find common cause and connections. You develop a sense of harmony with self and cosmos. You can, for example, experience the power of the “God” connection in a church, mosque, synagogue, teepee, or cave because you can look deeper than outward appearances, symbolic constructs, and particular doctrines. You take responsibility for your autonomy, so that at this level you understand that authority figures and teachers can be guides but can’t solve problems for you—you need to find the answers through your own personal experience and insight. A fourth-level teacher guide students but allow students total freedom; they teach so the student can leave and walk their own walk. While you find your own way and see beyond boundaries, this is not an “anything goes” level of consciousness. You choose your personal beliefs and have opinions, but they are subject to change as you change. You stand up for what you believe in, but you don’t insist others believe as you do and you never belittle or ostracize others who hold different views. You are totally yourself and allow others to be totally themselves. The kuntur, or condor, is the Andean bird of the fourth level.

At the 5th level, you are so in tune with nature and have acquired such personal power that you can push the kawsay to dramatically influence the material world, especially as a healer. This is the level of the infallible healer, who has the ability to heal any disease or condition every time. This is the level of the “miracle.” Healing examples would include those found in the Bible in the Book of Acts, including raising people from the dead. At the fifth level you can also manipulate matter in others ways (such as manifesting a gemstone out of thin air) and can overcome the constraints of time and space as we know it (such as by teleporting or bilocating yourself). You can move in realms beyond the current known laws of physics. The bird of the fifth level is the q’enti, the hummingbird.

The 6th level is that of the Inka Seed and the Taytanchis Ranti, where you become nearly the equivalent of the God of the seventh level. At this level of consciousness you are recognized by others as an enlightened being, literally as one who glows. This is the divine potential within each of us, but sixth- level beings are living that power in the human world. They are “awakened.” Buddha and  Jesus are examples. There is no bird associated with this level.

The cosmovision of the Andes does not provide information or description about the 7th level of consciousness except to say that this is more than a level of god-consciousness. It is a level where god is actually in human form and humans are gods. It is my personal speculation that this could be the level where we live in the human world as pure energy beings. It might also be what happens to humans when, in the words of Terence McKenna, we evolve such that we experience an “exteriorization of the soul.” There is no bird associated with this level.

There is a clear path to personal development in the Andean tradition as I have learned it and teach it. It’s a path of conscious evolution, both for each of us individually and for us collectively as a species. According to the prophecies of the tradition, we are accumulating the personal power to birth a grander self and the “new humanity.”

As metaphysical as this goal seems, it is actually a path of sobriety. It requires that we do our sacred inner work. And that begins with a commitment to our practices as paqos.

Let me review some of the core practices.

1) Ensure your energetic “cleanliness.” Bring coherence to your energy body to accumulate personal power, perfect your ayni, and increase your ability to push the kawsay on behalf of yourself and others. The practice is saminchakuy.

2) Practice ayni. Your responsibility as a paqo is to use your personal power on behalf of yourself and others. If you see others in need, address that need, whether that is to foster healing, empowerment, or something else. The practice is saiwachakuy. If you feel hucha in your relations with others, cleanse that stream of energy. The practice is hucha mikhuy.

3) Harmonize the three human powers. To be in harmony within, you must master the three primary human powers—llank’ay, the ability to do work and make an effort; yachay, the ability to reason, use logic and intellect; and munay, making a choice for love, compassion, empathy and non-judgment. The supporting powers are rimay, kanay and atiy.

4) Live your life as the treasure that it is, and live fully and passionately no matter the outward circumstances. Seeing the world as a awe-inducing creative experience is a point of view that comes from the inside and can change everything about the outside. As some Hindu mystics say, you are not in the world, the world is in you. You project awareness out into the world and into your experiences, which colors all the meanings you give to what is happening around you, to you, and through you. In the Andean tradition, the goal is to engage all of life with passion, and the power is khuyay.

To live these principles is not about seeing through rose-colored glasses or living a fairy tale. It is about being the passionate yet sober energetic warrior who lives from his or her Inka Seed. Expanding your personal power may not be easy or comfortable. For whatever reason, we humans tend to learn and grow through challenges. As paqos we strive to “see reality as it really is,” and sometimes reality appears to be a opponent rather than a ally. Our work as paqos is to look beyond appearances to what physicist Bruce A. Schumm calls the “deep down things.” The power is qaway.

Gloria Karpinski, a wise friend of mine (and a gifted author and international teacher and lecturer), provides a pithy way to understand one of the common ways spiritual and energetic intention (ayni) works in the real world. She writes, in her book Where Two Worlds Touch, “Once we start paying attention to what’s happening in our own environment, we begin to see that the universe is giving us all sorts of clues about our path. If we believe in love and we are making a commitment to being love, there’s a good chance the universe will send us thirty people in a row whom we don’t love. Our assignment: Love those thirty people.”

The law of ayni can be surprising! Using Karpinski’s example, as we develop munay, we may indeed draw to us those we can easily love. But we might just as easily draw to us those whom we struggle to love. Both results fulfill the law of ayni, although the latter is decidedly more difficult a lesson in the ayni of self-awareness and growth. No rose-colored glasses here! But no need for them either, as you, as a paqo, have all the practices and tools you need to meet the challenge (or, more accurately, the opportunity) the kawsya pacha has seen fit to offer you.

You don’t need to be a philosopher to be a paqo, but I do think that you can more easily and quickly master the practices of the tradition if you dive down into the deeper levels of what you are doing and why. When you seek those deep, down things, then you must take off the rose-colored glasses because will not see your life as a paqo as one-dimensional or single-hued. The kawsay pacha is rich in creativity and blessings beyond your wildest imaginings. Why would you think that your life, and indeed our human world, would be any less so? Even your cruelest challenge can be turned to good if you approach the world “as it really is,” which is under the guidance of your munay and ayni.

The whole point of this post is to urge you to pay attention to more than the surface roads of your work as a paqo along life’s journey. Your destination is certain—you will one day return the gift of your life back to the kawsay pacha. The question is if you will have evolved as much as you can through your practice. Have you discovered and then used all of your gifts? Have you shared them with the world?

I love this quotation from Erma Bombeck: “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’” An Andean paqo can speak no truer words than those!