consciousness

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.

 

Hucha: A Mundane and Mystical Approach

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ Leave a comment

The goal of spiritual life is not altered states,
but altered traits.
— Huston Smith

I have written many times about hucha—heavy living energy, which only human beings create. Today, I want to look behind the term to tease out nuances of its meaning. I believe this can help us appreciate what hucha is, how we create it, and why our main energy practices address it. I offer a deep-dive class on Quechua mystical terminology and concepts, and one of the terms we examine is hucha. In this blog post I expand on what is discussed in that class.

When the paqos explained to don Juan Nuñez del Prado, who is my primary teacher, what hucha is, they described it as llasaq kawsay, which means “heavy living energy.” Of course, it is not literally heavy. It just feels that way to us, primarily because we are reducing the efficiency and effectiveness of our ayni (which is explained below). To really understand hucha, we must parse several other terms. We start with kawsay, which comes from the root Quechua word ka, which means “to be.” Kawsay refers to existence, to being alive. Thus, kawsay is referred to as “living energy.” The paqos tells us that everything in the created, physical world is comprised of kawsay. In its most refined form as “light living energy,” it is called sami (variously spelled samiy). Kawsay’s and sami’s natures are to flow unimpeded. But we humans can slow down this life-giving and life-empowering energy. That slow sami is called hucha. So hucha literally is sami, just slowed, filtered somehow, or even blocked from flowing through us. We take in less life-force enegy than we could.

The reasons for how and why we block sami, and so create hucha, are varied and beyond the scope of this post. However, core reasons are that we are evolved mammals and we still can be driven by our impulses and survival needs. We may engage in the world and with our fellow human beings in ways that are based in fear, competition, selfishness, and other kinds of unconscious or barely conscious (instinctive) behaviors and emotions. Even when we are engaging from our highest sense of self, this coherent state of being can be upended by all kinds of conscious and unconscious needs, desires, beliefs, and the like, such that we fall out of ayni. Ayni is reciprocity. For our purposes here, we can think of it as the Golden Rule that takes us beyond self-interest to mutuality: instead of attitudes such as “for me to win, you must lose,” we seek ways for everyone to benefit. Ayni is much more complex than that. However, the easiest way to understand why we slow sami down and create “heaviness” for ourselves and others is that we are not acting from ayni.

Ok, so far so good, even though this discussion is by necessity skimming the surface of why we create hucha. But let’s look at the word itself from the perspective of the mundane, by which I mean the common, everyday world. Trying to understand a mystical concept from the viewpoint of a non-paqo can easily can get us off track. But I like to probe into the more mundane definitions of the Quechua terms we use in our mystical practice to get a sense of the fullness of meaning. We must be aware that those mundane definitions usually are analogous and not literally in one-to-one correspondence with the word’s mystical meanings. Hucha is a concept that I think is particularly illuminated by examining its non-mystical, mundane meanings.

Let me say that I have discussed the value of making such correspondences between the mundane and mystical with don Juan. He cautions that I cannot go to Quechua dictionaries and the anthropological literature to find definitions for our mystical terms because the paqos were using many of these terms to mean something different from their more common meanings. This is a caution we must always take to heart. Still, I cannot help but wonder: if the paqos could choose any term they wanted for various aspects of the mystical work, why did they choose a term that is commonly used and that has an already accepted meaning that is different from what they meant by it? I find—and I speak only for myself—that looking at those common meanings does, in fact, help me understand the contexts and even nuances of the mystical use of the term. I often find that the common definition, or what I am calling the “mundane” meaning, of a mystical term provides a world of associations that can be useful and even enlightening to my practice. They help me peek behind the curtain of a language that is not mine, of a mystical cosmovision that originally was foreign to me, and of possible nuances that can help me understand conceptually what it is I am doing when I use many of the practices of the Andean sacred arts in my daily life.

Ok, that is a lot of explanation and more than a few caveats. Let’s get to examining sami and hucha, for we cannot understand one term without looking at the other.

What are the common dictionary meanings of sami/samiy? Sami is defined as good luck, good fortune, happiness, benefit, favor, dignity, contentment, success, and other terms that relate to having well-being. Samiy means benefit, favor, good luck, dignity, and blessing. For me, those definitions reverberate wonderfully through the more abstract meaning of sami as “light living energy.” Kawsay is life, and the goal of life as described by many Andeans is allin kawsay, living a “good life.” Another common term is sumaq kawsay, which in its various meanings describes living a “beautiful,” or “good,” or “amazing” life. So that is our aspiration: to be the owners of sami and live in ayni, and thus to cultivate the most amazing life we can.

Now let’s look at the word hucha. What are its common definitions? Sin, offense, crime, infraction, guilt/guilty, error, fault, transgression. Reducing the flow of sami—creating hucha—reduces our well-being. These terms bring some clarity to the consequences of our creating hucha: We have made some kind of energetic mistake or caused some measure of energetic offense such that we have transgressed the codes of human moral conduct and the universal energetics of ayni. We have reduced our own, and perhaps someone else’s, well-being. It is interesting that the word “hucha” is part of all kinds of Quechua terms relating to justice, law, and even the criminal justice system. As examples, the term hucha churaq means “prosecutor” and hucha hatarichiy means “lawsuit.” From the mystical point of view, I think it is not too much to say that when we create hucha we are at fault or guilty of violating personal, societal, universal, and even energetic “laws.” Hucha (as filtered or reduced sami) weakens our inner equilibrium, lessens our sense of contentment and happiness, and diminshes our dignity and generosity of spirit.

I don’t know about you, but for me, knowing the common “backstory” to the terms sami and hucha brings a lot of “flavor” to their mystical meanings. We all create hucha for our own reasons, most of which relate to our personal shadow wounds, limiting beliefs, emotional proclivities, and such. When we create hucha, we, and not anyone else, have transgressed the law of ayni. That is why we say the Andean mystical tradition is a path of personal responsibility. However, it does us no good to blame ourselves; instead we must be self-aware enough to notice our lack of ayni and the reasons we are creating hucha. Then we can take responsibility for ourselves, and we can use our practices to transform the state of our energy. While there is no moral overlay on energy, we can see how there might be moral overlay on how and why we create hucha—we are all developing human beings and have work to do on ourselves. As don Ivan Nuñez del Prado explains [slightly edited for clarity], “I think hucha is like a [inner] filter. Your personal background, family background, all of that is a filter, [which gets] in the way of the light of your Inka Seed. So, you have a source of light within you and then what comes out will go through the filter, what comes out is a projection of the filter [rather than of your] light.” Our filters are mostly all the unconscious ways we are holding limiting beliefs, living from judgment about ourselves and others, deflecting our pain, projecting out onto others what we refuse to see in ourselves, and running the energy of many other kinds of largely unconscious psychological and emotional dynamics.

As we relate to the world, the state of our own poq’po (think of this as our psyche) is of the utmost importance. We bring self-inquiry to our own state of being, for we can only know the world through our own perceptions. That is why the paqos tell us that what is heavy for you, may not be for me, and vice versa. It is why don Juan says, “If something is heavy for you, you need to trust yourself. It’s heavy for you! Even if your teacher comes to you and says, it feels light. No, it’s heavy for you.”

Reducing our hucha means increasing our karpay: our personal power. Our personal power relates to how easily we can access our human capacities (all of which are held as potentials within our Inka Seed) and how well we use our capacities. Sami and hucha are ways we display and use our personal power. Remember, hucha is sami—life-force energy—although it is slowed, filtered, or blocked. But make no mistake, hucha is a “power” to the same degree that sami is a “power.” Don Ivan provides a good explanation about this: “Power is the capacity to do something. You can use hucha or sami. When you grow, it is good to [reduce] your hucha because you release the [blocking energy of] past mistakes and everything and raise the level of sami in you. Then your actions will be more elevated. But you can do things with hucha. It’s not a moral judgment.”

It’s all energy. What partially, although impactfully, determines the quality of our lives is the proportion of hucha to sami in our poq’po and how we are “driving” either or both of those energies. Our core energy practices are designed to reduce the amount of hucha we have and that we create, and how skilled we are at using our energy in the world. Don Juan reminds us: “You always have the capacity. You can release all the hucha you have. Remember hucha sapa? If you are a hucha sapa, you have a lot of hucha. You focus on your Inka Seed, and you have the power to release it. Your capacity is determined by your Inka Seed, which has no hucha. Your Inka Seed is the place in which you have the potential and capacity to drive the energy.” And this is why so many of our practices—saminchakuy, hucha miqhuy, wachay, wañuy, and others—are focused on reducing our hucha (and thus increasing our sami). By using these practices, we have the means to redistribute our energy by transforming hucha back into its natural state of sami or releasing stubborn hucha to Mother Earth, as she will help us by digesting our hucha and returning it to its sami state. We have spirit assistance and our many energy practices to help us drive energy from our Inka Seed (our highest self), increase our sami, and improve our ability to live a good and happy life—at both the worldy/mundane and spiritual/mystical levels.

The Yanantin of Yachay and Llank’ay

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ Leave a comment

The Andean sacred tradition identifies three primary human powers. They are, in order of prioritization, munay (feelings), llank’ay (action), and yachay (knowledge). I find it interesting that although yachay is at the bottom of that hierarchy of three human powers, it is the first human power that we develop in our training. Our training begins with understanding the Andean cosmovision and energy dynamics, especially the core dynamic of ayni, or reciprocity.

From the Andean view, understanding fuels action. And through that action and the resulting experience, understanding deepens. We tend to translate yachay into English as knowledge, reason, logic, or understanding. However, for the Andeans, and specifically for the paqos, yachay has a more precise definition: our accumulated knowledge as gained through personal action, and thus through direct personal experience. Llank’ay, or action, is embedded in the very meaning of yachay, and vice versa.

In this way, yachay and llank’ay form a yanantin. A yanantin is a pairing of entities, items, or energies that appear to be oppositional or contradictory but are complementary. The two are relationally bound one to the other to create a unified whole, such as night and day, up and down, male and female. If we probe into the yachay and llank’ay human powers, we will see that everywhere in our work with the Andean sacred arts, they are yanantin in nature.

Our training usually begins with learning the core energy dynamic of ayni. In the larger Andean society, ayni is defined as reciprocity and explained using the phrase, “today for me, tomorrow for you.” It is the personal and social ethic of giving and receiving for mutual benefit. In the sacred arts, as in the social sphere, ayni means we do not just think about helping someone or promise that we will, we express our willingness and we follow through.

In the sacred arts, the meaning of ayni expands from a social energetic reciprocity with our fellow human beings to energetic reciprocity with nature, spirit beings, and the world of living energy. Ayni is a two-way flow of energy: a back-and-forth flow between the two entities. But it must be initiated by one of the parties to get the energy moving. That initiating dynamic is what we will look at here.

Our focused awareness—our intention—moves energy, or as don Juan Nuñez del Prado often phrases it, “drives the kawsay.” When he uses the word “drive,” he does not mean controlling energy or willfully forcing energy in one direction or another. Rather, he is suggesting only that our intention can influence energy, gently nudging it here and there in our favor. Despite the maxim that “energy must follow intention,” don Juan and the paqos tell us that intention by itself is not enough to drive ayni. We are not going to think (yachay) the living energy into partnering with us in this dance of ayni. We must act (llank’ay) as well. We want to move energy in an intentional way that is useful to us. This takes both yachay and llank’ay working in unison.

One way to view this yachay–llank’ay initiating dynamic is through the following sequence of practice. Ayni as “intention put into action” arises from feelings and will (with “will” meaning choice). Ayni as intention is informed by our sonqo ñawi (feelings, including munay), our Inka Seed (the seat of our will), and our siki ñawi—an energetic center, or “eye,” at the root of the body, where the capacity is atiy. Atiy is, among other things, how we measure our personal power. Checking in on our abilities through the siki ñawi, we ask, “Do I have the capacities available to realize my intention through action?” Asking and answering this question is process governed by yachay. If we believe we have sufficient personal power to achieve our intention, then we go to the qosqo ñawi, the mystical center at the belly. Ayni as action is influenced mostly by the qosqo ñawi. This is the energy center where we enlist our khuyay (passion, motivation) and follow through on our intention by taking action.

From this sequence, we can see how the prerequisite for engaging in ayni is a well-developed yachay: our knowledge about ourselves. We must be able to honestly assess the state of our feelings, will, atiy (capacities), khuyay (motivation) and karpay (amount of personal power). Ideally, through yachay we undertake a realistic, honest self-assessment. That assessment then determines whether we go on to initiate our llank’ay energy and take action.

This yanantin of yachay and llank’ay comes into play even when ayn is not involved: when, for example, we have a completely spontaneous energetic or mystical experience. During such an event, we will be fully immersed in it perceptually and viscerally; we will not be actively processing it intellectually or analytically. Doing so would keep us from fully experiencing it. Once the event is over, however, we might seek to understand its nature and value. If it has meaning for us, the lived experience itself and its meaning are incorporated into our yachay. Remember, yachay is knowledge gained through personal experience. So, that experience enlarges our yachay. This expanded yachay adds to our kanay—who we know ourselves to be— and increases our karpay—our persona power, which is our capacity to act in the world day by day, moment by moment.

Although yachay literally means to have knowledge of or to know, don Juan reminds us that it also means “to learn, to find out, to have skill, to realize, to have experience, to have wisdom.” Yachay as one of the three human powers is the capacity at the kunka ñawi, or the mystical eye at the throat. It is paired there with rimay: the power to communicate with honesty, integrity, and a sense of the sacred self. Rimay is entwined with our yachay and llank’ay: we express who we are because of what we have learned throughout our lives from our first-hand personal experiences. Ideally, over a lifetime of experience we move from knowledge to understanding to wisdom. Part of what Andean pasqos mean when they say they want to be able to “work with both hands” is to work simultaneously with both the right-side yachay aspect of the sacred path and the left-side llank’ay aspects of it. Working this yanantin fuels their aspiration to be hamuta: a wise man or woman.