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Category: Andean Cosmovision (page 4 of 9)

Book: The Andean Cosmovision

Front CoverAbout the Book

My book “The Andean Cosmovision: A Path for Exploring Profound Aspects of Ourselves, Nature, and the Cosmos”  is a how-to guide for exploring the Andean Cosmovision. The Andean Cosmovision is a way of perceiving and interacting with reality that is found in the indigenous culture of the high Andes. It is fundamentally different than the Western worldview. This Cosmovision is not a set of concepts or beliefs. It cannot be described or encompassed by words. It can, however, be experienced and it can be explored. This exploration is carried out through meditations which serve as portals for exploring new facets of ourselves and the Cosmos. These meditations also nourish a more loving and mutually-supportive relationship between ourselves and nature. Within this relationship we begin to blossom into the essence of who we each uniquely are.

The book presents both the Andean (salka) meditations and the concepts that help us to integrate this path with our life here in the West.  It is the loving product of my 22 years of studying the Andean Cosmovision under the tutelage of my mentor and friend don Américo Yábar of Peru, and Gayle Yábar, and the many other paq’os (Andean mystics/shamans) and healers with whom don Américo has arranged for me to work.


Where to Purchase

Printed copies of the book may be ordered from:

eBook copies may be purchased from:


Reviews and Award

Award: Shaman Portal Book of the Month

A Very Nice Email:

Hi Dr. Gordon,

I just wanted to thank you for writing your book.  I´ve read so many books on Peruvian mysticism/shamanism etc. and I think yours is really perfect. I appreciate you taking the time to write it and always recommend it to others when I am guiding them in Peru. Peru is such a sacred place…I feel like my most magical and also my darkest moments have been experience en la sagrada tierra Peruana….you can probably relate.  🙂

Reviews on Amazon:

Wonderful, open source information on Q’ero mysticism. I love this author’s simple, easy to follow approach and his open-hearted gift of this information to other serious students of Earth based wisdom. He’s not trying to sell you a spiritual retreat or a $2400.00 training program. He’s just sharing his passion for this way of life. Bravo!

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With an arm around our shoulders, Oakley leads us up and into the high Andes, introducing us to her majesty, her divinity, her heart, her people, and her mysteries that touch the Infinite. Exquisitely written as a narrative of self-discovery, The Andean Cosmovision is a must read for anyone interested in, or already deeply in love with, Andean mysticism.

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Oakley has spent years opening to the understanding of the wild culture that still lives in the high Peruvian mountains. These beautiful people have retained an innocence and a power that is truly sacred. The very real movement insights that are given here are precious and integral to our connection to nature and our heart. This may be the key to the preservation of the important elements of humankind.

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Oakley Gordon, a long-time student of the wisdom of the High Andes, does an excellent job in delivering the message to us, city dwellers of the western world. Very clear and practical examples of connecting to natural energies and of balancing ourselves in a respectful way. His autobiographical tone combined with the understanding that all of us experiences the World around us differently makes it even more useful and credible: “Here is the path, here are my experiences, it is working for me – maybe it will for you too. Find your home in Nature, experience and grow!”

The book also documents in a very readable way the wisdom of the people living in the High Andes. It is the icing on the cake. Thank you!

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Anyone interested in understanding Peruvian philosophy and wisdom, a precursor to curanderismo, should read this book. don Americo Yabar came to lead a workshop on Salka at my school and he was very kind and full of life. This is a great book with lots of information with short and easy to read chapters explaining how the people of the Andes see reality, much different than some of the major religions today and Western society.

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Good! Gave me an idea about andean spirituality before my trip to Peru. I just wanted to have my opinion about it. I follow eastern philosophy and practice some advanced pranayama techniques, found a lot of similarities to my surprise

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(The title of the following review was “I keep this book strapped to my body.”)

I love this book. It is so well written and is a great guide to the simple everyday practices of loving nature and loving each other.

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This is a beautiful little book, based on Mr. Oakley’s blog entries, about the Andean Cosmovision. He beautifully captures the essence of many of the teachings and practices that one can learn while studying with a Peruvian paqo. Many of the meditations are those also given to me by my own teachers in Peru, and they are described with ease and economy; anyone can follow them.

It is sometimes difficult to write about this subject, but Mr. Oakley does so simply and cleanly, and in a way that cuts through confusion. Don’t be fooled: this is a slim volume, but it contains much. If one were to read and follow this little volume, it would keep you busy for a few years! Highly recommended.

(Note that this is a common mistake, my last name is Gordon, first name Oakley)

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Thread A: The Other Side of Reality

I began to weave this thread of thought in the post  New Threads.

We don’t consciously experience reality directly, we experience the firing of neurons in our nervous system. Our retinas detect patterns of light and color and movement and angles. This information is then sent to our brain to be processed. Our nervous system figures out the boundaries of the various objects in our visual field, how big they are, how far away they are, and most importantly, what they are…for the objects are then given meaning (e.g. that object is a chair, that one is uncle Ralph). Our conscious mind then experiences the end result of all of that processing. We look around and see chairs, and friends, and computers, and so on. We think that we are perceiving reality but we are actually experiencing a representation or interpretation of reality that has been constructed by our brain.

The distinction between reality and our experience of it would be unimportant if our brain was actually creating an exact replica of reality in our head for us to experience. This, however, is far from the case. Our neuronal representation of reality is as different from reality as a road map is from the actual world, as a description of a strawberry is from an actual strawberry, as a photo of your loved one is from your actual loved one.

Let’s consider the road map analogy. Road maps do correspond to the territory they represent (otherwise they would be useless), but consider the immense differences between the map you have in your glove box (or on your phone) and the actual world in which you live. Before continuing with this post, I invite you to spend a minute thinking of all the aspects of reality that are missing from road maps.

The processes that go into making a map, transforming the world into paper and ink, are the same processes our brains use when transforming reality into the firing of neurons (I will  be describing these processes in Thread B). These processes involve both the hard-wiring found in our sensory organs as well as our concepts and beliefs, for what we pay attention to (of the myriad of things we could pay attention to at any one moment), and how we then interpret what we attend to, are dependent on our values and beliefs and the concepts we have about reality. The resulting interpretation of reality is what we actual experience, and we naturally mistake it as being reality itself, much like a person who walks around their whole life with a road map in front of their face would think that the map is reality. Reality itself, however, is inconceivably greater than our brain’s representation (map) of it.

Our maps generally work so well that we think that our concepts about reality simply reflect concepts that somehow exist out there in reality. Our concepts, however, are purely mental, they are part of the map-making process, they don’t exist in the reality from which our maps emerge. Even really basic concepts, such as the existence of time, and the idea that the world consists of separate objects, are just (massively) useful concepts our brain uses to help us navigate through our lives. Time and objects are concepts, they don’t exist in the reality that lies beyond all of our concepts of it. So what is out there? What is reality like beyond all of our concepts about it?

We will never know, if by “know” we mean know conceptually. There are many things we do know (e.g. the earth is round) and there are many things we don’t know yet but will eventually know (e.g. whether there is life on other planets) and there are things we can never know (e.g. the true nature of reality beyond all of our thoughts and perceptions).

But there is a really big but here. There are ways to dampen, or even turn off, our mind’s map-making process. When that happens we experience reality directly, outside of any concepts. We pull the map down from in front of our face and experience…the ineffable mysteries that are the Cosmos and our existence within it

Beyond all concepts…there is a field. I will meet you there.
Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)

This field beyond all concepts has been known by many names in many places across time. I list a few of the names below.

  • I often refer to the field as “the other side of reality”. I first heard this term from don Americo. I don’t know if this is exactly what he means by the term but it is exactly what I mean by the term.

  • In Buddhism the essential “suchness” of reality, which exists beyond our thoughts, is called “tathata”. I rather like calling it the “suchness of reality”. I first encountered the term in the book Nature, Man, and Woman by Alan Watts, which I highly recommend, particularly pages 1 – 69.

  • A reference to the essential nature of reality appears occasionally in poetry and literature, as “things as they are”. The phrase does not always have that meaning, but at times it does. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson refers to this usage and explains its significance in the essay “The Creature and Its Creations” in his book A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. This is an amazing essay and I plan to draw from it again in a later post (please see the subsequent post The Creatures and Its Creations).

  • According to the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, the “yonder realm” or “the far away land” visited by the hero in many of the world’s mythological stories refer to the other side of reality. The hero returns from that land with a boon for her or his society, after an adventure that is arduous with many perils. The essential nature of this journey was laid out in Campbell’s landmark book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The book was written in 1949 and is a little too Freudian for my tastes, but he returns to the basic theme in many of his later (and more palatable) books, including The Power of Myth.

  • And then there is “the land of Faërie”. Fairy-tales have been around as long as mind and language. The tales have changed dramatically in our culture with the advent of the industrial revolution, being delegated to children and rewritten in the (often mistaken) adult perception of what appeals to children’s tastes. In his remarkable essay On Fairy-Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien, an Oxford professor of philology and of ancient European literature, describes the land of Faërie in the following way. “I will not attempt to define [the land of Faërie], nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.” I was stunned when I read that in Tolkien’s essay, for I had been describing the Andean Cosmovision as something that could not be encompassed with words, something that was indescribable, though not imperceptive, for many years.  Before I noticed the connection I thought that the only thing that Tolkien’s work and the Andean Cosmovision had in common was me (my love of them both).  In the essay Tolkien describes the old fairy-tales as being stories of humans who enter that territory or journey along its borders. I plan to return to this idea in a later post as well.

The idea that there is a layer of reality that exists beyond all of our concepts goes back millenia, and perhaps much further. At some point we evolved the ability to think rationally, to analyze the world (i.e. break it into separate parts), and conceive of ourselves as being separate from the rest of Nature. Are the ancient myths about the Fall of humankind, when we ate of the tree of knowledge and were ejected from the garden, an echo of an ancient, ancient, memory of what things were like before our rational mind arose? I find this fascinating to ponder, but as there is no answer, I ponder only for a little while. In any event, I don’t want to take this metaphor of The Fall too far, for I consider our ability to think about the world a wondrous thing, and certainly not the original sin.

By whatever name we refer to that-which-is-beyond-names, there exist well-established paths that head towards that field (although the paths are long and not without peril). But the endeavor is not really about reaching a destination, it is about walking the path, and that I have done to a sufficient degree to share the following. Just walking the path opens me up to having my experience of the world, my map, shaped and informed by the other side of reality. Information flows in that does not fit my existing concepts and beliefs, and I change. Into my map flows more joy and love and a sense of meaning and belonging in the Cosmos. As near as I can tell this is the underlying nature of reality.

Walking a path into the other side of reality, however, is not an easy task. It is an adventure, and an endeavor, and at times a trial. Looming before for us to block our path as we begin, and appearing over and over again as we proceed, is The Guardian at the Threshold (next post).

Post thoughts:

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New Threads

In this post I would like to set the stage for where I will be going next in this blog. First I would like to backup a bit and review where we have been.

I have been exploring the Andean Cosmovision for the past 21 years under the tutelage of my mentor don Americo Yabar of Peru. Several years ago don Americo began encouraging me to write a book about the Andean Cosmovision, but I had a hard time getting started. It was such a huge project. Then I created this blog and began publishing pieces of what I could share. After I got all the pieces expressed in posts I rearranged them, rewrote them, and published them as my book The Andean Cosmovision. It contains both instructions on how to explore the Cosmovision through various salka meditations, and it also provides a poetic/conceptual framework for integrating what we find in those explorations with our life here in the West.

After my book became available I added a few more meditations here in the blog that did not make it into my book, primarily the meditations that involve more than just ourselves. Then my posting rather ground to a halt. I realize that I have expressed just about everything I can at this point of my own journeying about how to explore the Andean Cosmovision. How to explore the Cosmovision is the most important thing I can share, for the Cosmovision cannot be understood through concepts or ideas nor encompassed by words. It can only be understood by experiencing what is available through the various Andean meditations.

I still have a lot I would like to share, however, about the Andean Cosmovision. I would like to turn my writing now more toward the yachay (our intellect). This will be a different type of discourse, more philosophical. I hope you find these posts to be useful, or at least interesting (I wouldn’t share these thoughts if they weren’t both useful and interesting to me). I still may, at any moment, turn back to how to explore the Cosmovision, when I have new information along those lines that I feel capable of sharing.

There are two threads of thought I would like to develop. I would like to be free to switch from one thread to the other as I publish my posts . To keep this from being too confusing I will call the two threads of thought Thread A and Thread B (rather like Dr. Seuss’ Thing One and Thing Two). With each post I will identify, in its title, to which thread it belongs.

Thread A: In this thread I would like to share more of my understanding of the Andean Cosmovision within the context of considering other paths that lead to the same territory. This allows me to step back and consider what all these paths (and reality) are about.

Thread B: My strategy in life has been basically to surf the waves of my interests and see where I end up. Much to my delight, and to the great satisfaction of my heart and soul, I ended up in the high Andes of Peru. Recently I was invited to give a presentation about my work in Peru to my department (the psychology department at the University of Utah). As I was preparing for the presentation I looked back over my decades of work and I was surprised (in retrospect I should not have been) to see that everything that has engaged my interest in academia has led up to what I am doing in Peru. With this thread I would like to share that history as I weave a large conceptual tapestry that has the Andean Cosmovision at its heart.

After a long break in writing I now anticipate the posts coming out in a rather steady flow. The first post of Thread A is entitled “The Other Side of Reality“.

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Initiations

The Andean Cosmovision cannot be described or encompassed with words. It can, however, be experienced and thus it can be explored. The two essential pieces of this exploration are; the various meditative processes that take us into that territory, and the special relationship with nature and the Cosmos that this path nourishes. That is all you need. The meditations, and the relationship, open a portal into profound, new, unbounded territory. Your life and the Cosmos become a great mystery that you will never solve. The path leads nowhere. It doesn’t make sense to try to go as far as you can. The beauty and the value are in the walking of the path. Distance traveled fades in favor of making our walk through life a work of art.

The meditations are great and wonderful. They have effects that are apparent immediately. They are new steps in our dance with the Cosmos. The real magic, however, comes from our relationship with nature and the Cosmos. When we connect to the Pachamama, or to the Apus, or to the stars, or to Mama Tuta in a relationship of ayni, directed by our munay, and stop our “doing” and begin to “not do“, then everything changes. If the time is right, then a deep facet of our own Being gets into cahoots with the Cosmos, and we change. It is an initiation, not in the sense of joining a club, but in the sense of being initiated into another way we can be in the world.

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Peru Trip: 2015

Another great trip to Peru!  This time I went with 11 waikis to work with don Americo and Gayle Yabar, and other paq’os and healers with whom they arranged for us to meet.

11986993_1492555424389890_2733276932443929310_nPart of the beauty of following a path of heart is the company I get to keep. Here we are at Molino, Gayle’s place in the Andes that he has converted from an old mill into a wonderful setting for groups to stay and connect to the river and the Apus and the stars and the Cosmos.

IMG_0485Our first meeting of the trip with the Q’ero, here the men are creating a despacho (offering).

working with the female paqos from Qero.
Our second meeting with the Q’ero (at 15,000 feet) focused on the  ñustas (powerful feminine energies).

12006116_1492556284389804_7585939602780060350_n A special moment.  We passed this old man carrying a large sack up into the mountains. Americo stopped to connect with him and give him some food.  Things like this happen a lot when we travel with Americo, what a path of heart!  Photo by Pia Ossorio.

Barbara connecting with the energy of an Apu.Connecting with an Apu.  We were at 16,000 feet, the Apus tower much higher still.

I have a much more comprehensive slide show of the trip which I would be delighted for you to see.  If you would like to view it go to the Andean Cosmovision (the Facebook page for my book) and scroll down to the album.

This trip had a big effect on me and I have returned with some information that I would like to share with you.  I am still struggling with how to organize what I want to say, but that is what this blog is all about, to give me a place where I can play around with how to get the information out.  I will be tackling this in subsequent posts.  My intent is to help us refine our understanding of how to explore the Cosmovision back here in the West, for as much as I love going to Peru, it simply isn’t necessary to go to Peru to explore the vast, mysterious, and beautiful territory that is the Andean Cosmovision.

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