Posts on the Andean Cosmovision
In the Andean tradition an alto mesayoq is a very high level paqo. They are usually described as paqos with incredible abilities. While we were in Peru last summer my friend Karen asked Gayle Yabar (don Americo’s son and a great paqo himself) to tell us about the alto mesayoqs. He replied by saying that they were paqos who spent their whole lives in service to an Apu. Then we had lunch…and Gayle served us our food. Service is not servitude, it is a gift born of love.
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I continue to work on my book and occasionally post something new on this blog (see the previous post). The nice thing about a book, compared to a blog, is that there is a better chance that readers will start at the beginning and thus will have essential experiences and information under their belts for the later material and meditations. For today’s post I would like to assume that you have read through a lot of the previous material so that I can skip having to provide the conceptual framework. If you haven’t, then I recommend that you first read at least the posts on the Andean Cosmovision, Intent, and Salka.
The essence of the Andean approach is to connect with Nature, connect with Nature, and then connect with Nature. Connect with the Pachamama, with the Apus, with the stars, with the trees, with the rivers tumbling down the mountain side, with the condor riding the thermals up into the clouds. In this post I would like to share with you how to connect with Tai Tai Inti, the great Being of conscious energy who is our sun.
Begin by taking a sun shower, let the sunlight flow over you like water, and with your intent (sincere pretending) wash your outer body and energy in the sunlight as if you are taking a shower. Then, stand facing Tai Tai Inti and let the sunlight flow into your Being. With your intent be like a flower soaking in the sun. Let the sunlight fill your body until it starts coming out of your pores (you may find that it will take your hucha away with it).
Connecting with Tai Tai Inti in the morning can fill you full of the active energy you need to get through the day; to do chores, go to work, chop wood and carry water. Connecting with Tai Tai Inti later in the day, shortly before sunset, prepares your energy for the evening. The energy of the evening is for turning inward, moving into the mysteries that lie in the night and that other reality of our dreams. Connecting with Nature puts us into harmony with the cycles of Nature, in this case our Being goes into harmony with the cycle of the day.
There is also a very special and beautiful meditation that can be performed at sunrise. Go someplace where you can be in nature to watch the sun rise. Arrive in time to settle down and meditate before the sun rises. Notice your energy, how it feels to be you, when you first sit down. As you are waiting for the sun to appear over the horizon turn off your internal dialog and let your energy merge with the world around you, the trees, the birds, and particularly the Pachamama. As the sun gets nearer and nearer to rising get in touch with the energy of Pachamama as she slowly turns her head to greet the arrival of her loved one. Then, experience the glory and beauty of the arrival of the sun from the first bead of light until the disk has risen completely above the horizon. When you are finished notice how the energy of the natural world around you has changed from the time you first sat down. Notice your own energy and how it has been affected by this experience. As with all of the Andean meditations, the only meaning of the meditation is the effect it has on you, so notice it and decide whether it is a beneficial experience worth repeating.
Note: Some people refer to Tai Tai Inti as Inti Tai Tai, “I’ve heard it both ways” (Shawn Spencer). ‘Inti’ is the sun, ‘Tai Tai’ is a title of greatest formality and respect.
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When we look back at some of the Andean meditations I have shared in this blog–connecting with the world through our llankay, munay, or yachay; operating from our left side or our right side; opening up our energy or withdrawing into ourselves–what emerges is our having a choice in how we interact energetically with society and the Cosmos. Often this is not just a choice of which behavior to exhibit, or how strongly to be connected to what is going on around us, but a choice of which facet of our Being to face towards the Cosmos. Each facet giving us a different way of interpreting reality and a different set of abilities for responding.
So, what ‘part’ of us makes that choice? We could turn to our intellect to make the choice but that may not be our best approach. The intellect is great at understanding pieces of the Cosmos, but it is curiously inept at understanding the larger patterns from which the pieces at drawn. The intellect is skilled at accomplishing goal-directed activities, but with its analytic skills it lacks the ability to select those goals wisely or with beauty, for wisdom and beauty come from the picture as a whole. This makes the intellect a great servant but a poor master. The intellect is ultimately and inevitably limited by being only a part of who we are.
So what ‘part’ of us can best make the choice of which facet of ourselves to turn to face the Cosmos at any particular time? The answer is that aspect of our Being that is meta to (above) all of our facets, i.e. that aspect of us that is not a ‘part’ at all, it is not a facet of our being, it is the diamond that has the facets. Who or what is this aspect of ourselves? It is our ‘intent’.
Up until now, in the earlier posts, I have defined ‘intent’ as ‘sincere pretending’, a definition that works for me beautifully in many ways. That definition is also the surface of something much deeper. Don Americo Yabar has described intent as the conscious Cosmos expressing itself through our Being. The more I have played with intent in the various Andean meditations, and the more I gain awareness of that aspect of myself which guides me down this path, the more I glimpse the depths of intent.
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In the Andean Cosmovision the Cosmos does not play by the rules of Aristotelean logic where everything must be either A or not A. An example of this can be found in the various ways in which the Andeans conceive the difference between the energies found on the right and left side.
In the previous post (Right Side / Left Side) I described how in the Andes the right side is our ability to operate in everyday life while the left side connects us to the ineffable mystery of the Cosmos. This distinction, and the meditation I provided that goes with it, come from what I learned from don Americo Yabar. Don Americo, however, also draws a different distinction between the right and left side, that of the mystical and the magical.
Our right side is our mystical side, it involves our ability to connect with and learn from the larger Cosmos of which we are but a part. This is the path of knowledge, to follow it we must leave our ego behind and seek the at-one-ment with the Cosmos as a whole. Our left side, on the other hand, is our magical side, it involves our ability to work with the energy of the Cosmos to accomplish our goals, goals that may be wise or not, benevolent or not, loving or not. These goals may be driven by our ego.
Another view of the right/left side distinction in the Andes is provided by the anthropologist Douglas Sharon in his description of the relative roles of the right and left side of the paqo’s mesa (Shamanism, Mesas, and Cosmologies in the Central Andes, 2006). A mesa (from the Spanish word for table) is a woven cloth that serves as a portable altar. A paq’o spreads the mesa on the ground or on a flat rock and arranges upon it sacred objects. The objects are placed upon either the right side or the left side of the mesa depending upon their attributes. On the left are placed objects associated with ‘hot’ energy, with the past, with the undoing of energies related to sickness and misfortune. On the right are placed objects associated with ‘cold’ energy, with the future, with the energy of good fortune. The paq’o then works from the center of the mesa, transcending both energies.
Besides being interesting on their own merits, the point I want to make is that these various distinctions between the energies of the right and left side don’t necessarily boil down to being different ways of saying the same thing. The right and left side are like this…and they are also like that…and they can be like this other thing entirely. This may not be logical, but who says the Cosmos is logical? Logic is but a part of our ability to think, and our ability to think is but part of our experience, and our experience is but part of the Cosmos, and a part of the whole (e.g. logic) cannot subsume the whole (i.e. the Cosmos). Another way to say this is to point out that our ability to think in a logical way arose out of the evolutionary processes of the Cosmos. That logic works as well as it does in understanding the Cosmos is due to it being a product of the same Cosmos it is trying to understand. Logic cannot, however, be expected to be able to understand the processes from which logic itself emerged. For a really nice exposition of this I recommend Alan Watts’ book Man, Woman, and Nature.
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The Andean Cosmovision draws distinctions between various aspects of our Being in many overlapping, non-mutually-exclusive ways. In an earlier post we looked at the Three Centers of Being; the llankay, the munay, and the yachay. In this post I would like to examine the distinction between the quality of energy we have on the right side of our body and that on the left.
Our right side (called paña) handles our activities in the everyday, ordinary, realm of our life, in other words, that aspect of our reality which is created by our society. We tap the abilities of our right side when we work, go to the store, get to our kid’s soccer game, balance our check book, watch TV, buy airline tickets to go to Peru, and so on. Our left side (called ‘lloqe’) handles our connection to the vast, ineffable, mystery that is the Cosmos. There is no way to describe that part of the Cosmos, for it is exactly that aspect of reality which exists beyond all the words we have to describe it and beyond all the concepts we have for understanding it. The Andean meditations move us into our left side.
Whether or not we develop the skills and perceptions available on both sides, we all do have both, for they are part of our heritage as human beings. It is my experience that in my western technological culture we place a heavy emphasis on the right side, and we are hardly aware, if at all, of what is available on the left side. If we want to explore more of who we are, and who we can be, and the full potential of our relationship with Nature and the Cosmos, a rich place for us to explore is the vast territory of experience available through our lloqe, the left side of our being. If we want to have dinner, hold a job, raise children, not get run over when we cross the road, enjoy our technology, and get to Peru, then we need to honor and nourish the skills we have on the right side.
Our paña and lloqe are complementary opposite aspects of our Being. In previous posts I’ve written about the role of complementary opposites in the Andean Cosmovision (Yin/Yang of the Andes) and their role in the relationships between women and men (Warmi-Qhari), and between communities and individuals (Remember to Wave Your Warak’as). The distinction between our right and left side takes us into the complementarity of opposites within ourselves. We find that the principles which became evident in the earlier posts apply here as well.
Our right and left side are not two, independent, things but instead are mutually defining aspects of a unified whole (our self). As in the post Yin/Yang of the Andes I will use a Taoist symbol to represent this: 
For these two mutually defining aspects of our self to exist we need to keep a clear distinction between the two, otherwise we end up with:
The Taoist symbol for Yin/Yang usually contains small circles that convey the concept that each opposite contains a small seed of the other:
This implies that when we are operating on our right, social, side it is good to have a small connection to the great, ineffable, mystery that is the Cosmos, and when we are operating on our left, mysterious, side to have a small connection to the everyday world. I’ve never heard anyone in the Andes say this nor can I speak from my own experiences. This idea arose as I was writing this post and I offer it as something to consider.
Back to the main point. The first principle is to keep a clear distinction between our paña and our lloqe, between our ability to work in the everyday world and our ability to connect with the great ineffable mystery that is the Cosmos. The second principle is to bring these two aspects of our self into yanantin, a state of harmony with each other . When complementary opposites are brought into yanantin then something emerges that is greater than the sum of the two. This something is recognized in the Andes as a new life force, and it is meta to (above) the complementary energies from which it emerges (see the post Warmi-Qhari)
The Andean meditations move us into our left side, as we do the Andean meditations we become more familiar with that facet of our being. Interacting with our society and everyday world moves us into the right side, a facet of our being with which we are very familiar. Instead of being blown by the winds of circumstance into either our right side or our left side, we can choose from which side to operate at any moment, and the ‘you who can choose’ exists at a higher level than either. As we choose one or the other we become more aware of that higher level of our self that can make that choice. That’s really all it takes.
Meditation: After you have some experience with the Andean meditations and have noticed how they affect your experience of the world, and your energy, and how you feel, then there is a simple way you can move into the left side directly. Stand with your weight evenly balanced on both feet, then with a hand, or in your mind’s eye, draw a line down your body from your head to your feet that divides you into your right side and your left side, and while doing this use your intent (sincere pretending) to feel it divide your energy into your right side energy and left side energy. Then, just step sideways to your left and with intent step into your left-side energy and its connection to the non-ordinary, vast, mysterious, Cosmos. Being on the left side is a learned state, this ‘stepping into’ the left side can evoke an experience that is commensurate to what you have experienced in the other meditations.
Source: This differentiation between the right side (paña) and left side (lloqe), and the meditation for stepping into the left side, are from don Americo Yabar.
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