mysticism

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’s Sense of Wonder

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep Dive Into Rimay

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Being a Chakaruna

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ 3 Comments

Chakaruna means “bridge person,” and its meaning is self-evident: one who discerns connections and brings together or harmonizes two things, groups, traditions, ideas, and the like. We tend to think of this as an energy dynamic that occurs out in the world, and it certainly is that; however, the core energy dynamic starts inside of us.

The first bridge we build is within ourselves. The core energy dynamic of the Andean tradition is ayni: reciprocity. Bridge-building is a reciprocal endeavor. It does little good to establish a connection if the party with whom you have connected has no desire or ability to reach back to you and form a relationship. Reciprocity, therefore, is at the core of all kinds of chakaruna endeavors.

Anyi operates on many levels: socially among people and communities; ethically between ourselves and other people; and energetically between ourselves, other people, nature, the spirit beings, and, ultimately, the living universe. We are always in energetic interchange, although the bulk of our energy exchanges are driven by our unconscious needs, desires, beliefs, and such. Bringing consciousness to our ayni is essential personal work, and we cannot even begin to do that until we understand that ayni is a tawantin (comprised of four factors): intention, intention acted upon, awareness that there will be a reciprocal return (feedback) from the other party or the living universe, and then seeing and understanding that feedback when it comes so that we know whether to continue with our intentional action or whether we have to make some adjustments to it.

In addition, we understand ayni as an exchange in which both parties seek and receive fulfillment. The shared concern always is that each party in the interchange receives benefit. So, ayni is not any kind of interchange, but an interchange of mutual well-being. Many people new to the Andean tradition talk about ayni is generalized ways, thinking it is any kind of energy interchange. But it is not—it is special, and it is not so easy to achieve true ayni. In fact, there are plenty of other kinds of interchanges we can make that do not rise to the level of ayni. An example is chhalay. Chhalay is a transaction. It is an exchange devoid of much feeling (munay), and so tends to be based mostly on self-interest. If you see a sweater in the window of a store, you might go in and purchase it. There is a tacit agreement that you will pay whatever price the seller has determined. You pay that price, take the sweater home, and the storeowner pockets your money. That is chhalay.

I will use myself as an example of a more nuanced difference between chhalay and ayni. I teach online, and I set a price for a course. Students who sign up are agreeing to pay that course fee. That is a chhalay transaction between us. The ayni comes into play when I begin offering my service. My ayni is how I teach that course. It is expressed in the ways I devote myself to my students and their needs, in how prepared and engaged I am when I am teaching, in how committed I am to providing a stellar learning experience for my students. The other half of the ayni exchange comes from each student: they either reciprocate in ayni or not (their enthusiasm for learning, their engagement with me and fellow students, and so on). In contrast, if I am robotic because I have been doing this a long time, if I keep my emotional distance from my students, if I rarely interact with them except in class, and so on—that is not ayni on my part. It is chhalay.

I am focusing so heavily on ayni because it is widely misunderstood and too often not practiced. Yet it is at the heart of the Andean tradition and certainly at the heart of being a chakaruna. Ayni is how we bring the quality of ourselves out into the world. It is dependent on many things, not the least of which are our personal values and the acuity of our self-awareness. When we know ourselves and accept ourselves (with compassion even for our flaws and character deficits), we have the ability to see others for who they are and accept them exactly as they are. The inner chakaruna bridge helps us to not stand above others, but eye to eye with them. It is how we overcome the stubborn psychological dynamics of perceiving differences and begin cultivating the recognition of similitude and fellowship. Chakarunas see themselves in others and others in themselves. As the saying goes: as within, so without.

Ayni also is at the heart of being a chakaruna because it involves our will but not our willfulness. We must apply will to put our intention into action, yet we must not willfully impose our own intentions, beliefs, desires, opinions, judgements, and aversions onto others. Too often bridge-building is imposition or, more rarely but not unheard of, it is a disguise for coercion. We tell ourselves we are doing good works, when in reality we may be seeking (consciously or unconsciously) to impress our will upon others. It is a rare person who has no preference for one party or the other, who is not projecting onto one party or the other, or who is not judging one party more worthy, right, good, deserving (whatever) than the other.

Don Juan Nuñez del Prado has advised me and others over the years that our work as “paqos” is to assist those we discern might need our help (usually energetic assistance, if we have the personal power to extend such help), but we do not go around sticking our noses into other people’s business. It is not our business to try to build a bridge without the explicit or implicit consent of both parties. It is not our business to build a bridge because we deem it “for the best” for two parties.

So, what is our business as a chakaruna? It is about our own state of energy first and foremost: building a bridge within from which we can see both shores (both parties) without favor or prejudice. It means getting past any drive to fix or heal one or both parties. A chakaruna doesn’t do anything to others, but acts on behalf of others. In this view, the chakaruna is not the one who builds the outer bridge; the chakaruna holds the space within so that the two parties are able to imagine a bridge between them and begin to build it themselves: one toward the other until they meet in the middle and stand together upon it. 

My friend, former student, and now colleague Katy O’Leary Bagai shared the translation of a discussion she had with paqo don Claudio Quispe Samata that beautifully explains this approach to being a chakaruna. Her gathering of the clusters of translations into cohesive notes includes the following perspective, which provides the perfect conclusion to this discussion: a chakaruna chooses to live within the intersection between spirit and matter, quietly holding coherence between the tension that is often created by humans within that intersection. A chakaruna listens for the alignments and watches for the invitation to bring cohesion into any perceived tension. A chakaruna does not reject action, but understands that wisdom lies in knowing when to act and when to hold. The chakaruna at heart is a vessel of potential. He or she becomes a conduit for the world remembering how to change itself.

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.