inkamedicine

ALBERTO

VILLOLDO

Praise for THE HEART OF THE SHAMAN “The Heart of the Shaman is absolutely extraordinary. It grabbed me from the first paragraph. What a monumental and uplifting contribution to the planet at this critical turning point in our history.”

— Christiane Northrup, M.D., #1 New York Times best-selling

author

“Dr. Alberto Villoldo’s wisdom shines again. The Heart of the Shaman is a straightforward, priceless guide to achieving balance and joy in our lives. Truly a must-read.”

— Mark Hyman, M.D., #1 New York Times best-selling author

“The Heart of the Shaman takes us on a deep and meaningful transformative journey, providing a map and showing us a way to discard the conditioning of modern society and embrace a new means of co-creating our reality. Highly recommend for all modern seekers on a path of spiritual and personal discovery.”

— Colette Baron-Reid, internationally acclaimed oracle expert,

spiritual medium, and best-selling author of Uncharted

“This book is an honest and powerful blessing for the struggling soul in all of us. It summons our courage to leave the hell of our illusions

and follow the way to genuine freedom.”

— Sonia Choquette, New 'York Times best-selling author of

Waking Up in Paris

“The Heart of the Shaman takes you into the depths of what it means to be truly alive. Alberto Villoldo has given us a sacred key to open the gateway into the mysterious and wondrous realm of the shaman.

Highly recommended!”

— Denise Linn, best-selling author of Energy Strands

“Don Alberto’s great book is a true doorway into the deep reality of the universe, the infinite light in which we can become the luminous warriors of love and joy and peace we have always wanted to be. Just reading the book is going through that door, as we are inspired and instructed by his shining example and practical wisdom. His voice calls us from the high Andes of the spirit to come home to the beautiful continent of the enlightened heart!”

— Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies, Columbia University; President, Tibet House US; and author of Man of Peace

THE

HEART

OF THE

ALSO BY ALBERTO VILLOLDO

Courageous Dreaming*

Dance of the Four Winds (with Erik Jendresen) The First Story Ever Told The Four Insights*

H ealing States (with Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.)

The Illumination Process*

Island of the Sun (with Erik Jendresen) Millennium Glimpses into the 21st Century One Spirit Medicine*

Power Up Your Brain* (with David Perlmutter, M.D.) The Realms of H ealing (with Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.)

Shaman, Healer, Sage Soul Journeying*

Y oga, Power & Spirit* *Available from Hay House Please visit:

Hay House USA: www.hayhouse.com® Hay House Australia: www.hayhouse.com.au Hay House UK: www.havhouse.co.uk Hay House India: www.hayhouse.co.in

ALBERTO

VILLOLDO

THE

HEART

OF THE

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HAY

HOUSE

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HAY HOUSE, INC.

Carlsbad, California • New York City London • Sydney • New Delhi

Published in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com® • Published in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.:

www.havhouse.com.au • Published in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk • Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

Cover design: Amy Grigoriou • Interior design: Nick C. Welch

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Villoldo, Alberto, author.

Title: The heart of the Shaman : stories and practices of the luminous warrior / Alberto Villoldo.

Description: 1st Edition. | Carlsbad : Hay House, Inc., 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018016393 | ISBN 9781401952983 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Shamanism.

Classification: LCC BF1611 .V55 2018 | DDC 299.8/1144--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016393

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4019-5298-3 E-book ISBN: 978-1-4019-5299-0

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: Dreaming of a Different Sort Chapter 2: The Nature of Time

Chapter 3: Ancient Dreamers and Mysterious Civilizations Chapter 4: Creating a Dream, Creating a Legend Chapter 5: Waking from a Bad Dream

Chapter 6: Transforming the Dream of Security. Discovering I Am

Chapter 7: Transforming the Dream of Permanence. Discovering Infinity

Chapter 8: Transforming the Dream of Love That Is Unconditional. Discovering Fearlessness

Chapter 9: Dreaming the World into Being

Conclusion: The Daily Practices of the Luminous Warrior Endnotes Acknowledgments

Continue Y our Journey with Hay H ouse

About the Author

To La Loba Warrior Goddess Keeper of Dreams

When I look at a star in the sky I see the fires of ancient

civilizations,

Courageous men and women on a journey to infinity.

In beauty we dream new worlds into being.

ALBERTO VILLOLDO

INTRODUCTION

The shamans of the Andes know and serve a sacred dream, one that guides planets across the heavens and our human destiny here on Earth. The sacred dream is a map to the future, but has no paths you can follow and no trails other than the ones you blaze yourself. It is ephemeral, changing every instant, surprising you at every turn, as in a dream.

Men and women who serve and protect this sacred dream are known as luminous warriors. They have no enemies in this world or the next. Their resources are vast.

The sacred dream reveals the implicate order of the universe. It is evident in the seasons, in how the bees pollinate the flowers, and in how all living beings are connected and related to each other. With this wisdom, the ancient shamans of Peru bred and crossbred their corn to produce more than 400 varieties of maize; they gazed at the night sky and forecast eclipses decades into the future. Meaning and purpose arose naturally in their hearts because they understood they were part of a plan much greater than they.

When we become aware of the sacred dream, we recognize that the universe is not made of dead rocks hurling through space, of lifeless energy, or of the dark matter of science. Instead, we understand that the cosmos is pulsing and conscious, longing to create beauty, birthing blue-green planets, spiral galaxies, and more than 20,000 species of butterfly on our earth.

Each one of us is given a fragment of the sacred dream to hold and express in our own way. When we forget that we carry an essential and necessary part of the sacred dream, our lives begin to spiral into disarray, our personal dreams become nightmares, and our lives descend into chaos.

Many people have replaced the sacred dream with a dream of fame and fortune, power, and Facebook likes. Meanwhile we are facing global crises—from climate change to species extinction to war, famine, and disease—all of which are calling us to dream a new dream for ourselves and the world.

The sacred dream is calling us. This book will show you how to wake up from the slumber you are living in and dream with your eyes open so that all the possibilities of the future are available to you.

You find your sacred dream by transforming three common dreams many of us are convinced are true and cannot seem to wake up from. They are the dream of security, the dream of permanence, and the dream of love that is unconditional. When you transform these dreams—when you accept that life is ever changing, that your mortality is a given, and that no one can liberate you from a life of fear and insecurity except you—the chaos in your life turns to order, and beauty prevails.

When you find your sacred dream, the creative power of the universe, known by the shamans as the Primordial Light, becomes available to you to create beauty in the world, and to heal yourself and others. You become a luminous warrior. You live fearlessly, know the answer to “Who am I?” and know the ways beyond death into infinity.

Like the shamans of the Andes—the Laika—you are a luminous warrior. You dare to speak the inconvenient truths, uphold universal values that honor all life, and perform daily acts of courage.

That is what you will do in this book. The practices in the pages that follow will help you to forge a sacred dream for yourself. They will help you craft a destiny infused with courage, and driven by vision.

These practices of the luminous warrior are essential in a time when dreaming happens only when we sleep, where cowardice is honorable, where hindsight seems wise, and where spirituality is spineless.

They will help you bring light and peace to your world, and to find your part in the greater sacred dream of humanity.

Alberto Villoldo

CHAPTER I

DREAMING OF A DIFFERENT SORT

There are three kinds of waking dreams: the nightmare, the daydream, and the sacred dream. Of these, only the sacred dream can help you fulfill your mission here on Earth. To live within a sacred dream requires that you understand that daydreams can feel pleasant but will turn into nightmares as the circumstances of your life change. As for the nightmares we all wish to avoid, they always begin as daydreams, but have since reached their expiration date and gone bad, like cheese left in the refrigerator for too long.

The daydream that turns into a nightmare can be the relationship or job that was so seductive but that now has become a dark hole you cannot get out of or change. A friend once told me, “My job is like a bad dream. I would like to wake up from it, but I need the sleep.” The nightmare does not offer you much hope for things to be different. When you are trapped in it, you come to believe that the poor health you are experiencing is just part of getting old and you may as well get used to it, or that the boredom and frustration of your job or marriage is the price you have to pay for security. Or you might believe there is nothing you can do to change the divisive political climate or the violence happening in the world. The nightmare keeps you paralyzed. When you have a friend who is depressed, you can be nearly certain that they are caught in a nightmare they do not know how to wake up from, and that they are confusing for reality.

If we are trapped inside a toxic relationship, we begin to fantasize about what it could be like if things were different, and we start to use all of our powers of concentration to create a new reality. We imagine someone light and cheery coming into our lives, another chance to live the life we have missed out on. Then one day we run away with our new love, only to discover that this new daydream also has a sell-by date.

A daydream keeps you looking for something outside of yourself to make you feel complete.

The next daydream can masquerade as your hopes and aspirations, as your goals for getting your life in order. Writing down your success list, planning to improve your relationship, or strategizing about creating circumstances you tell yourself will be good for you and make your life better—all of these seem promising yet can turn into a nightmare. When you change the job or the partner, when you buy the house or the car, you might well find that you are still not happy or fulfilled. You get the picture. All that list making and hard work led you right back to unhappiness.

The daydream keeps you searching out of the corner of your eye for your true soul mate even after you are in a relationship. It has you continually looking for a new guru, a new diet, a new health regime— and wondering if there may be something out there in the world you are missing out on.

I have lived this daydream turned nightmare. In my 30s, I met someone and we thought we were in love. We believed love would make us happy and solve all our problems. I thought: When I find my soul mate, then I will be happy. I believed she was the one I had been waiting for all my life. Then one day I woke up and asked myself, Who is this person in my bed? It’s certainly not the one I married, is it? The daydream had turned into one of my worst nightmares. Fortunately, there were no children involved, and we parted ways grudgingly, each holding the other responsible for the failure of the marriage. Perhaps you have experienced your own version of this nightmare.

The daydream may seem benign or even quite pleasant but is almost always a formula for disaster. And while daydreams sometimes do not turn into nightmares, they can keep us comfortable but not growing—and soon our lives feel stale and purposeless. Sometimes daydreams fool us, mimicking yet forestalling the courageous dreams that are most rewarding. We think we are leading a life of meaning, and then one day we realize it doesn’t seem that way at all.

How do you recognize when you are living under the spell of a daydream?

Daydreams always contain a contract or agreement you make with life that goes like this: “When . . . then.”

“When I have more money . . . then I won’t be anxious.” “When I am happy . . . then I will be grateful.” “When we have new leadership . . . then we will be able to have a truthful conversation.” Or perhaps, “When I find my true love, or my true calling in life, or the perfect house, or job . . . then I will .”

A few years ago, I received a challenging medical diagnosis. In my travels through the Amazon I had picked up a dozen varieties of parasites. Until then, I was convinced that other people got old or sick but that surely would never happen to me. Now I was sick and in danger of dying, and feeling like an old man. In my prayers I said to God, “When I get well, then I will dedicate my life to being in service and helping others.”

But God does not like these bargains. I began to wake up from the daydream when I turned the “When . . . then” agreement around.

I discovered that:

When I am grateful, then I am happy.

When I dedicate my life to service, then I become well.

When I speak truthfully, then I become a true leader.

I had to rededicate my life to a mission greater than myself before I could recover my health. I had to transform the nightmare of ill health to discover my sacred dream that would allow me to experience a new sense of purpose and meaning, even though I had no guarantee I would survive my illness or how long I would live.

A sacred dream launches you to a destiny beyond simply not dying, or of being reasonably happy as you strive to avoid discomfort. It encourages you to explore the mysteries of life and of love, to glimpse a reality beyond death and discover a timeless truth for yourself. It demands that you act boldly and courageously, and not collude with the consensual—that which everyone agrees on and no one questions—even though it is a popular story that traps us in daydreams that become nightmares.

How do you know when you have found a sacred dream?

Because it is much larger than you, and it feels impossible to accomplish all that you hope to achieve. A sacred dream launches you on a mission, as it did with Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi. “But I am not Gandhi,” you might say. True, you do not have to set a goal to lead a billion people to freedom. But what if your destiny is to do something far greater than you have imagined until this moment?

When you are ill, or sad, or depressed, it is hard to think of finding a sacred dream. Your dreams are smaller then. Getting back to where you once were seems “good enough.” I remember when I was in my healing crisis and could not take more than 50 steps before becoming exhausted. My dream then was to be able to walk around the block without feeling spent. Yet I was called to the greater dream, to be of service to others in whatever small way I could. How would I do that when I could hardly get out of bed and my doctors told me I would never hike in my beloved mountains again? I discovered that when you hold a sacred dream, the universe begins to actively conspire on your behalf to make the impossible doable. It offers you energy and skills that you never had available before. Soon I was able to walk around the block, and today I travel around the world bringing a little more beauty to everyone I meet—practicing the giveaway of beauty, which you will learn about later in this book.

Discovering the sacred dream requires courage. You can no longer be a passive (and anxious) bystander watching others have a meaningful life. The sacred dream will not come knocking at your door: It requires that you leave the familiar and embark on a quest. It requires that you not compromise your integrity. It demands that you not allow yourself to be seduced by the “easy path.” It calls you to fight the lie that your daydream is adequate and will continue to keep you comfortable.

This is why it is called the way of the luminous warrior.

BREAKING OUT OF THE DAYDREAM

The following exercise will help you break out of the “When . . . then” equation and stop wrestling with a daydream that is slowly turning into a nightmare. You do this by flipping the contract you have made with yourself that stipulates when you will be happy or healthy or at peace. What you wish for should not be conditional on anything.

Fill in the blanks for yourself in a notebook so you can discover three core agreements that you have made with yourself and that need to be broken today:

When I , then I will .

If this were to be a book to help you feel better about yourself, we would stop here. You would have a simple formula for being happy. But this book is not only about daydreams and waking up from the nightmares you are living. It is about discovering your sacred dream.

Look again at the agreements you have made. Were you conscious of them?

Now, cross off the beginning of each sentence so that it starts with “I will”:

I will .

You have new goals now—ones that you can achieve in this moment. I discovered my goals were:

I will be grateful.

I will dedicate my life to service.

I will speak truthfully.

Unlike other goals, these do not require you to plan how you will bring them about. Instead, you commit to them and take advantage of every opportunity to make them true today. You practice gratitude. You dedicate your life to service. You speak truthfully—and so on. Your excuses for delaying the life you wish to lead are to be left behind now.

Do not skip this first exercise; it frees you to recognize and transform the three nightmares that will help you discover your sacred dream.

ENDING OUR SHARED NIGHTMARES

• The daydream of security turned into the nightmare of insecurity—how do you stay safe in a dangerous world?

• The daydream of permanence turned into the nightmare of death—why does everything, including your life, have to end?

• The daydream of love that is unconditional turned into the nightmare of conditioned love—how will you find the one you love, and who will love you as you are?

The three nightmares I have just described are not only personal —they are at the heart of our modern society. Safety, health, and love are things we all want yet cannot seem to find enough of. We end up feeling scared and insecure, trying in vain to secure safety for ourselves in a world that is not under our control. We fear death and the signs that we are slipping and sliding toward the finish line, desperately wishing that we could ignore signs of aging and deterioration. We fear being rejected by others and ending up alone and unloved. We try to hedge our bets in relationships so we feel we are getting as much as we are giving—and we end up ruining them. These are the nightmares we fall into despite our efforts to avoid pain and experience happiness.

When we begin to explore each of these nightmares, we are launched on a journey of discovery that can lead us to the sacred dream—which is what each of us most seeks. Like Parsifal in the time of King Arthur, we can discover our Holy Grail—our sacred dream—but we must be brave and follow the unmarked trail to the castle, not the path that has been left by others after their unsuccessful quest.

If you are true to the quest, you are shown your sacred dream. You become a luminous warrior. You find that whatever the challenge, spiritual resources are available to you—which allows you to find your courage and step forth into your destiny, allied with Spirit in the task of dreaming a new world into being.

The sacred dream you will be shown is made from light. It is light at its purest, devoid of any form yet the source of all forms that we see around us. In the sacred dream, the real nature of water is light, just as the nature of earth is light, of fire is light, and of wind is light. As you explore the sacred dream, you realize that even the planets, the sun, the trees, and the whales are made of light wrapped tightly into matter. Light is the primordial “stuff’ of the universe, which the sages can mold into form when they “dream the world into being,” similar to how the potter kneads clay and works it into a bowl.

The light of the sacred dream is known as the Primordial Light, and the Andean sages called it Ti (pronounced tea in English).

I know this sounds complicated. So let’s review.

Our daydreams can turn into nightmares. Even the best of them eventually sour. The first exercise to transform the nightmare is to break the “When . . . then” contract we have made with ourselves.

I invite you to do the “When . . . then” exercise for yourself now. Begin to wake up from your daydreams by declaring “I will.” Then continue reading.

Freeing yourself from the old contract launches you on a journey to find your sacred dream and discover the power of Ti.

Well, you say, this sounds like a winning proposition. I discover my sacred dream and have the keys to the unlimited power of creation. I become a luminous warrior, with no enemies. Sounds pretty good . .

And then you realize that it comes with a mandate to create beauty, to heal suffering, to dream worlds into being—beginning with your world.

THE POWER OF TI

When I was a student of anthropology, I learned that the Inka believed they were the children of the sun. Later I discovered that this was not accurate: a mistake had been made by well-intentioned academics. Ti is the light, and the sun god of the Inka was called In¬Ti. The name means the sun at midday, when the light burns at its strongest, not the young light of the morning or the fading light of dusk. The sun is the source of light, but it is not the light. The flashlight is not the light beam. Remember that until recently we did not know that the sun is a ball of burning plasma that could hold 1,333,000 Earths within it. For many native people, the sun seems like a hole in the sky through which the light of the heavens spills and illuminates our world. The Inka believed they were children of the Ti.

Ti is different from the sun, just as the firelight is different from the log even though it is released from burning wood. You find the name Ti associated with ancient places like Titicaca, the sea on top of the world; Paititi, the lost Inka city of gold; and Tiwanaku, the most ancient Andean civilization.

According to lore, the power of Ti can create beauty, or heal the sick, or fabricate galaxies. This is the source of the power of the shamans. But it can also destroy if it is not used properly.

The sacred dream is said to be made with the light of Ti, and all you need to do to be reminded of it is gaze at the sun at daybreak, or at a shimmering star at night, or into a bonfire. It is a plan for the destiny of the cosmos and of every living being within it. It is a template for invisible cities of light and for peace and beauty throughout the cosmos. But this outcome is not written in stone; it is not guaranteed. It requires that each one of us hold our part of the dream of the possible future and endeavor to create it.

When Pachakuti, the ninth ruler of the Inka Empire, was a young man, he went on a vision quest into the mountains. On his way to the city of Cusco, he stopped at a magical well known as Susurpuqio. When he reached in to fill the pail with water to quench his thirst, he was blinded by a light and a voice revealed his destiny to him. He would extend the Inka territory into the greatest kingdom the Americas would ever know. It would be known as the Empire of the Sun and usher in the dawn of a millennium of peace in the Andes. But he would face great challenges. On his return to Cusco he discovered that the ancient enemies of the Inka, the Chanka people, were about to invade the city and his father and all the able-bodied people had abandoned the city of Cusco.

Pachakuti understood his destiny. But he had no idea how to fulfill it. The only people remaining in the city were the old and some urchin children. He assembled them into a ragtag army and the following day before sunrise attacked the unsuspecting Chanka, who were camped on the citadel of Sacsayhuaman above Cusco. The legends say that the stones came alive magically and hurled themselves at the invaders, who were driven away to their lands on the other side of the Apurimac River. Not a single life was lost.

Pachakuti would become the model of the luminous warrior, who has access to spiritual resources that come to his aid when he is fulfilling the destiny scripted in his sacred dream.

As it did with Pachakuti, the Primordial Light reveals to us our sacred dream and our destiny. And like Pachakuti, we must face apparently insurmountable challenges. And then we are asked to trust that the Ti will offer us the extraordinary help we need.

The shamans know that everything living is made of light that is tightly bound and packaged into matter. The more the shamans share their light with others, the freer they became from the nightmares that plague those caught in a limited dream of personal enrichment or comfort.

Early peoples were tempted to worship Ti because of its infinite generosity. But the Inka realized that you can’t worship the Primordial Light as a god, for that would mean denying your own nature as light bound into flesh. When you understand your nature, you shine with your own light, like the sun. And like the sun, which is the only thing that does not cast a shadow, you no longer project your dark sides and the unhealed parts of your psyche onto others.

In my own healing journey, I understood that like all people, I am made of the Primordial Light. Every cell in my body relishes this. And when I forget this for a moment, I contract. I begin to wonder who I am, what I am doing in this situation, and where I am going with my life. I see battles all around me that I feel I have to fight. When this occurs I try to be quiet and find the light within, and remember that my nature is identical to the Primordial Light. I am the light.

The Primordial Light holds boundless resources that are now available to you and allow you to create beauty in any way you choose. Some do it by healing the sick, others by teaching, others by comforting the dying or those who are suffering. Others do it by creating beautiful ideas, by dreaming of cities in the clouds like Machu Picchu, and by learning the movement of the stars.

RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS VERSUS SPIRITUAL WISDOM

Shamanism is a spiritual tradition that existed before religion, and its wisdom is very ancient. Some scholars consider today’s religions as a codification of the teachings of the ancient shamans. All spiritual traditions, including shamanism, are founded on lived experience, not on sacred texts or the experiences of others. Religion, on the other hand, is founded in faith and belief, not on experience. Still, the wisdom of the Buddha and the teachings of Christ have survived the centuries because they have great truth within them. The Buddha’s lessons on compassion, on alleviating suffering, and the practice of meditation remain as valuable today as when they were first taught 2,400 years ago. Christ’s teachings of loving your neighbor as you love yourself and the practice of prayer are as important today as they were 2,000 years ago when Jesus preached by the Sea of Galilee.

These two great religions have thrived for millennia because they offer a way to transform the three daydreams-turned-nightmares that keep us suffering. Christianity provided a clear and comforting solution to the nightmares of insecurity and of death. In the Book of Psalms, or songs to God, it says that we are protected by God, “for even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .” Growing up in the Christian church, I was assured by its teachings that I could earn eternal life through my actions and the Grace of God. The true love, explained the church, was the love of Christ, whose love was completely unselfish and a model for all humans to follow.

Christianity, like many of the world religions, is founded on the existence of a forgiving and compassionate God. Yet over the centuries Christianity changed from encouraging the experience of the Christ as the way to freedom (becoming Christlike, or attaining Christ consciousness) to the belief in Christ as the way. The early church was founded on experience. The modern church is founded on belief.

Buddhism doesn’t espouse the existence of a god or gods. In his meditations, the Buddha is said to have met numberless divine beings, but no one single Creator. According to the teachings of Buddhism, you have lived many lives before this one and you will continue to be reborn as a human. As for true safety, it comes when you discover the answer to “Who am I?” for yourself. And as far as love goes, the Buddha is credited with stating, “Radiate boundless love toward the entire world . . .” The practice of meditation is founded on your experience, and Buddhism disdains any kind of canned belief in reincarnation, encouraging you to explore the possibility through your own meditation practice. In this way, Buddhism also offers a solution to the nightmares of insecurity and of death.

As an adolescent, I rebelled against Christian dogma. I felt that it lulled me into an even deeper slumber instead of helping me wake up. I grew tired of asking God to keep me safe from the bullies at school, using that special formula every Catholic boy knows of making the sign of the cross three times over my chest. I became tired of praying to my angels that I would wake up the following morning alive, repeating the prayer “and if I shall die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” And I longed deeply for the love of God or the love of another, anyone really, who could see me and love me just as I was.

Recently a group of well-intentioned missionaries knocked on the door of our home to ask me if I believed in Jesus. “Of course I believe in Jesus,” I replied.

They then asked me if I believed that Jesus was the Son of God. “Of course,” I said. I then explained that I was raised Catholic and had recently gone to holy communion with my mother and eaten the wafer that becomes the body of Christ during the Eucharist, and had felt my entire body become the Christ and a deep sense of peace come over me.

This seemed to disturb them quite a bit and they promptly took their leave.

After becoming disenchanted by Christianity as a young man, I studied Buddhism. I discovered that it seemed to have gone the route of the intellect, with many texts in many libraries to argue a simple truth about the experience of meditation. After years of finding meditation uncomfortable and maddening, I learned to enjoy it. Yet still I found myself searching for something sacred. I was hunting for a treasure I could not explain.

I began studying shamanism as an anthropologist, and discovered that it also grapples with the core questions about love, security, and survival after death. The shamans do not practice prayer as we know it. They do not meditate. Instead they go on vision quests and practice journeying. They go into nature and fast, drinking only water. After a few days of not eating, once they have burned through all the sugars in their system, they slip into that state between sleeping and waking, where reality ceases to be objective and becomes fluid. In this realm time seems to stop, to warp and fold onto itself, just as it does when we are dreaming. You could be at the foot of a mountain one moment, and next magically on a beach, the warm sand beneath your feet. An ordinary person might experience this as a mild hallucination induced by starvation. But shamans retain their awareness and focus in these states, so they can meet masters devoid of physical form who offer their wisdom to them. These beings are made of light, since their nature is identical to that of the Primordial Light, and they offer their boundless generosity to anyone seeking help. The closest image we have of these beings is that of the angels we read about in the Bible—numinous, translucent, heavenly.

In my vision quests in the Amazon, I learned to enter these dreamlike states and within them felt more awake and alive than I did in my ordinary life. I recognized how in the past I sought love partners who made me feel safe and did not challenge me. How terrified I was of death and how that was the reason why I went into the jungle on journeys that were death defying (at least, in the eyes of my friends, who are a sensible group on the whole).

Then I learned that I could transform the three daydreams that had held me captive for so many years and had turned into nightmares. This awareness was the real treasure.

In the Amazon, shamans learn to track in the invisible world of the Primordial Light: just as a hunter can track a jaguar through the forest, you can track the masters who can help you find the answers you seek. In a state of non-ordinary awareness, the shaman enters the lower world, which is the time-past. Here, the ancestors can help you find where you came from, or help a patient recover a soul part that they lost as a result of trauma long ago in their past.

Similarly, the shaman will enter the upper world, which is future¬time. Here, the masters of tomorrow can help you discover who you are becoming, and help you perform a destiny-retrieval, to assist someone who is ill by finding a future healed state that can guide them toward health.

In the high mountains of the Andes, you learn to transform your nightmares through the experience of the Primordial Light. The

Andean path is arduous, because the Indios there had to learn to transform the nightmare of the Spanish Conquest into a gift and an opportunity. They had to learn to forgive their enemies, the ones who had raped their mothers and grandmothers.

The Amazon path requires a living teacher who can help you to navigate through the realms of the ancestors and the unborn. The beings you meet along the way can help you discover the Primordial Light and find your sacred dream. They can help with experiences that oftentimes contradict the beliefs you have been taught.

I have a friend who is a Buddhist master, a Roshi. One Sunday at his monastery we sat in cross-legged meditation for an hour. After a short while, I entered a peaceful reverie, following my breath in and out of my chest. In my shamanic training, I have learned that meditation is a platform from which to explore the Primordial Light. As I scanned the room with my inner vision, I noticed a half-dozen luminous beings along the walls of the hall. They were dressed like monks in silken robes and were joining us in meditation. Occasionally, one of them would waft to the center of the room and reach out to someone in a gesture of blessing or of healing. They seemed amused that I was observing them.

After the session, when we were alone, I mentioned this to Roshi, and he replied sternly, “In Zen we do not pay attention to phenomena. We consider it a distraction.” I felt myself gently rebuffed and moved on to other topics.

A year later, Roshi accompanied me on one of my expeditions to Machu Picchu. I was friends with the chief archaeologist, so we had access to the citadel at night, when no tourists were there. We were accompanied by a shaman who worked with the San Pedro cactus, and who offered his visionary brew to us to drink. We were also with Don Manuel Quispe, one of the great Andean shamans. I had discovered him in a 1962 National Geographic magazine article in which he was interviewed as part of a feature on Inka villages at 16,000 feet altitude. He was one of the last known readers of the quipu, a quipu-camayok. And he remembered the stories of when time was young, of when the children of the light first came from

Lake Titicaca, the sea on top of the world—and he became a mentor to me.

At night, Machu Picchu slips outside of time. When the tourists leave, the numinous dwellers of the city of light roam the citadel. With the help of visionary plant medicine like the San Pedro, you understand the place is inhabited. Our visit coincided with the waning moon and by that dim light we made our way to the main temple, a courtyard with three large windows on one side and no roof. As soon as we arrived, Roshi came to me trembling, even though the night was warm.

“This place is full of spirits,” he said. “Look at the one over there, with the chest-plate, and the four spear-carrying guards to either side of him.”

I turned to see Don Manuel, the old shaman, engaged with the one who had the golden disk on his chest. Over the years, I had become familiar with the invisible residents of Machu Picchu and saw them as friends who welcomed us. But it was Roshi’s first encounter with them, and I could not help myself.

“We do not pay attention to phenomena in shamanism,” I said, barely able to contain a laugh. “They are just a distraction along the path.”

CHAPTER 2

THE NATURE OF TIME

We can journey in our imagination to a magical realm where time flows like a river to the future. Upstream lies our source, in the past. We can see ourselves splashing at the shores of this river in the present. We drift gently to the future when the waters are calm, or in whitewater when we are caught in a rapid. If we believe that the river of time flows in one direction only, the past is a matter of history, of facts and events that we cannot revisit. Then the future becomes simply an extrapolation of the present. We can believe that tomorrow will be a slightly better or improved version of today—this is what we call progress. Yet there is no guarantee that tomorrow things will be any better, much as we would like to believe that will be so. Not too long ago we were convinced that soon we would win the war against cancer and eliminate world hunger.

In the sacred dream, time does not obey the rules that our logical minds subscribe to and that we teach our children in school. If you wish to experience the sacred dream, set aside for now what you know about the passage of time and its linear nature, its path from past through present toward future, so you can discover what the ancient civilizations knew about time and timelessness.

THE CYCLES OF TIME

For millennia the sages of the Andes had been careful observers of precessions in the stars, the slow, predictable change in the heavens. They understood cycles and believed that everything has a season: human events, like heavenly ones, would follow cycles of expansion and contraction, of creation and destruction. In the late 1400s, the Inka astronomers noticed that there were signs in the night sky that foretold of a great cataclysm befalling on their people. The Laika journeyed to the future along the rivers of time and confirmed what the stargazers observed written in the heavens—and prophesied the imminent collapse of their newly consolidated empire.

The Laika spoke of men who were half animal and half human (horses were not known in the Americas). These soldiers had “sticks that spoke with fire” and hair on their faces. They would bring pestilence and disease to the people. Soon after the divining of the prophecy, 170 Spaniards landed in what is now Peru and proceeded to conquer the mightiest empire in the Americas. They brought with them germs and viruses including smallpox that were unknown to the New World. These would eventually claim the lives of millions of Native Americans.

Over centuries, the Laika continued divining the prophecies in secret, witnessing the spread of Western civilization from their mountaintop sanctuaries. They noticed that the fate of their people was increasingly connected to the fate of the earth. Their concern turned to the deforestation of the Amazon, the drying of the high mountain lagoons, and the extinction of species that had been abundant only a few decades earlier. From their hideaways, they could witness the impact of climate change on the glaciers and on the jungle flora and fauna. Certain frogs were no longer singing at dusk. Condors that had once been abundant were becoming rare. And disfigured llamas were being born, as these peoples lived underneath the tear in the ozone layer above the Andes.

An update of the prophecy a few years ago announced the possibility of climate collapse, where finely orchestrated weather systems would become unhinged and create extreme climate events

such as the ones that we are witnessing today.*

You do not need to be a Laika to understand that the dream of progress is becoming a nightmare and that humanity is behaving like a parasite on the earth. We are committing a kind of matricide, slowly killing our own mother. The sky gazers suggested the tipping point would occur after a great astronomical alignment in December 2012. If we did not make difficult lifestyle choices by that date, they explained, it would be very hard to change the course humanity seemed to be set on. Shortly thereafter, the earth passed through the critical 400 ppm level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that marked the beginning of a kind of domino effect of irreversible climate change.

The Laika set about searching the river of time for a more desirable and sustainable future. If they could find that possible future for the earth, they could affirm it with their prayers and install it in our collective destiny. It was proving to be difficult, as the fate of humanity seemed to be cast. I remember an old Amazonian man saying to me, “You know, we are going to miss our white brother.” He believed that his people would endure the tremendous change at hand but city dwellers, exiled from nature, would suffocate in their own pollution and waste.

The Laika were pessimistic about the fate of humanity but tremendously optimistic for those willing to explore a new way of being on the planet. This meant that we would have to discover our own sacred dream—one that is interwoven with the destiny of Earth and all her inhabitants.

Pacha, or Space-Time

For the Laika, time is intertwined with space, very much like the concept in physics known as space-time. The shamans call it pacha. It is the basis of the word Pachamama, or Mother Earth, our home in time and space. Since space and time are deeply connected in Andean cosmology, it is not out of the question to imagine that one could traverse time just as one can travel through the landscape.

If this is difficult for you to imagine, try the definition of space-time in physics. The essence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity is often described as follows: matter tells space-time how to curve, and curved space-time tells matter how to move.

It’s like a river.

I have traveled the Peruvian rain forest and camped by the edge of the Amazon and the Mother of God rivers. Later, I studied with the shamans of the high Andes, in villages near bubbling brooks that later merged into tributaries of the Amazon. For the Indio, the river is a good metaphor for many things, including time. They speak about mysterious currents beneath the surface that can take you back to your birth and beyond, before the moment of your conception and to earlier lifetimes, and to the beginning of time itself. The currents of the river of time do not flow from the past toward the future only. And you do not have to fight the current to swim upstream like the salmon do. You simply have to find the right undercurrent that can take you as far back into the past as you wish.

I was fortunate early on in my travels in the Andes to study with Don Manuel, whom I mentioned earlier. He was in his late 60s when I first met him, and we hiked together through the Andes for nearly 30 years.

On one occasion, I asked Don Manuel if the Inka notion of time, of pacha, meant that I could be born again in the past. I had thought that if reincarnation existed, we would always take rebirth in the future. Could I be a soldier in Alexander’s army 2,000 years ago in my next incarnation?

“It’s like a dream, where the past and present swirl into each other,” he responded. “Children are always born into the future, but the Laika can visit the past at will, and even return there for a brief period or for an entire lifetime. It depends on your personal power.”

“What do you mean?” I asked the old man.

“Some people do not have enough personal power even to be in the moment fully. They are here, but absent in some strange way, not living in the present. They are stuck in the past, victims of their childhood, of how they suffered, or they did not get what they feel they deserved. They pray for a better, more comfortable future.”

He continued: “Your personal power is the product of your communion with the Ti. If the Ti is strong within you, and you are unencumbered by your past, you cannot be seduced by the daydream of a different future. Then the past opens up to you.”

I learned with Don Manuel that one can enter the river of time to discover treasures hidden by ancient masters inside the currents and eddies of the past and in the turbulent whitewaters of the future. You could journey to explore the currents of tomorrow to find opportunities for yourself and your village. Once you did so, you could stop searching and get on with the job of creating it with the power of Ti, the Primordial Light.

At first, shamans explored the river of time to ensure the success of the hunt. If you were a medicine woman in the American Southwest, you had to lead the hunters to where the buffalo were going to be the following morning. If you arrived and there were fresh buffalo tracks in the snow, you were out of a job. You had to track forward along the river of time to find where the buffalo were going to be, and make sure that the hunters were there as well.

The story of the Osage Nation is one of my favorite examples of tracking forward along the river of time. The Osage were once owners of much of the Midwest of the United States. President Thomas Jefferson called them a great nation and promised to keep their treaties. But this was not to be the case. The Osage were shuttled off to Kansas and then in the 1870s were evicted and told to find a new homeland. Their chiefs and shamans promised to lead their people to a land where Mother Earth would look after them and their children, and where they would prosper. They acquired a vast territory in what would later become Oklahoma. It was a dry and barren land, useless for farming. But they had been promised a good future by their shamans. It turned out that the Osage land was sitting on top of the richest oil deposits in the United States.

The Osage had managed to negotiate all the subsurface mineral rights for themselves. And every Osage man and woman received a royalty for the oil that was extracted from their homeland. In the year 1923 alone, the few thousand remaining members of the Osage Nation received the equivalent of more than $350 million in royalties, making them the richest people in the entire world.

These shamans had learned to navigate the whitewater rapids of the river of time, to scout and select a rich future. Unfortunately for the Osage, their success doomed their people, who were swindled by the government and opportunistic whites in the wild American West.

The Laika do not track for the economic well-being of their people. In fact, the Q’ero Nation that Don Manuel belonged to is located in some of the most barren and inhospitable land in the Andes. Like the Hopi in North America, the Q’ero chose desolate peaks from which they could observe the machinations of the world and wait for the moment when they would deliver their prophecy of peace. The Laika want to dream the world into being with the power of the Primordial Light—to create beauty and peace where there is conflict and strife.

They are luminous warriors dedicated to creating heaven on earth. They know that scouting the currents in the river of time in order to find beauty is their task in the sacred dream.

WHICH TIME IS IT, AND HOW LATE DOES IT REMAIN OPEN?

Shamanic wisdom is not written in texts, and even to this day remains an oral tradition. The early Americans used a form of pictographic script primarily to chronicle military campaigns. Thus the Inka did not produce a Torah or Bible like the Jews and Christians, or a Koran like the Muslims. There are no texts like the Buddhist Sutras. There are no rules and regulations, written on a stone tablet or elsewhere.

This makes it challenging for a young shaman in training today, after the conquistadores and the Catholic Church pursued the Laika wisdom keepers as heretics and destroyed their mystery schools. There was no centuries-old guidebook that offered clues about how to dive beneath the swells of the river of time, to swim upstream to the place where you were spawned or downstream to discover who you might become 10,000 years from today. The student had to enter that state between sleeping and waking unaided, and in that baffling realm where time did not run in one direction only, find treasures that had been hidden by powerful masters for future generations—treasures that would be discovered long after the tsunami of the conquest had settled into a ripple in the eddies of time.

Before the arrival of the Europeans, young men and women trained under the tutelage of masters. Machu Picchu is said to have had a school for women known as the Virgins of the Sun. But the Spanish invasions left the mystery schools in ruins. Shamans were now on their own to discover the fluid nature of space-time. On occasion, they relied on the visionary plants to show them the doorway to timelessness. With practice, they learned to journey into the future to hide their wisdom where no conquistador could find them, inside the folds of time itself. The Laika hid their wisdom in the future, for a time when it would be ripe to be rediscovered and shared, like a bird set free from its cage.

I learned the practice of journeying through time from Alejandro Kahuanchi, a Huachipaeri shaman from the lush highland jungle near the city of Cusco, and a brilliant tracker. His last name came from the Quechua word meaning “seer.” I was in my late 20s when I found him.

Kahuanchi showed me how to hide a spiritual treasure to discover on my deathbed many years from now. This medicine would help me cut through the fear and chaos that occurs when the storm of death approaches, and would bring me the courage to leave my body behind and return to the world of Spirit consciously, with grace and dignity.

“But you must be careful not to witness the moment of your death,” he insisted. “It is for God to decide the details. You cannot choose the moment of your passing. But you can choose to meet it with courage, to surrender to your death like one does to a lover, and take your awareness with you into the beyond.”

It was an irresistible offer, and I followed his instructions and buried a time capsule to discover in the last days of my life. Someday, I will see if it worked.

There are dangers lurking in the tides of time. It can be turbulent enough when you drift along in it during the course of everyday life.

But when you rush into the future or the past in a shamanic journey, it is hard to tell what is real. Here fantasy and illusion are intertwined. What is true and what is magic, trickery, or deception? When we dream during the night, wherever we find ourselves—in a train, or speaking with our deceased father—seems absolutely real and as tangible as our waking reality. Yet when we wake up the details fade from memory in an instant. How do shamans know if their spirit journeys through space-time are true?

You have to train to retain clarity during a journey and to prevent yourself from becoming terrified by the ghosts of the past that inhabit these realms, or seduced by temptations in the future. Communication with the formless beings can be tricky—many are hungry ghosts masquerading as spiritual masters. And we are easily seduced by the answers that make us feel most comfortable and self-important. In retrospect, I now understand Roshi’s comments about how these beings can become a distraction from the path.

When I started my shamanic training, I would ask myself, “Is this real, or am I making all of this up?” During one lengthy stay in the jungle working with the Ayahuasca vine, I began to learn the territory shown to me by the plant medicine. I was no longer thrashed about by the visions, taken from the holiest heavens to the deepest hells, but able to guide them. But before that happened, I had a terrifying encounter with an Amazonian anaconda. In one ceremony with the medicine plants, we were inside a maloca, a circular thatched hut raised on posts above the ground. We were working indoors because the Amazon River had overrun its banks and flooded the area. Halfway into the evening, I felt a need to pee . . .

I leave the maloca and go down a couple of wooden steps. I am peeing contentedly, the sky above full of stars, when I notice a ripple in the water coming toward me. As it draws near I realize that it is a serpent, a gigantic anaconda that opens its mouth when it reaches me, showing me the webbing inside the roof of its mouth. I am terrified by the beast and run back inside and hide my head under my poncho, praying that it will go away.

A few months later I am leading a workshop in the Swiss Alps. After the evening program ends, I walk to my cabin and stop outside for a few moments to admire the stars. The cabin is set deep in the woods, and the evening is warm and clear. All of a sudden I notice a ripple cutting through the air like a sound wave, except everything remains silent. And then I see the gigantic anaconda slithering toward me from the forest. This time I hold my ground, feeling my heart pounding in my chest. I realize that the snake is coming for me, and I watch how it opens its jaws, and I observe the webbing on the roof of its mouth. Then I hear a voice that says with absolute clarity, “You know that I am going to eat you. Your choice is to either go through me and come out the other side as serpent poop, or become me as I digest you.”

I realize that fighting is futile and nod to the great creature. I feel myself being swallowed and all my bones being crushed as my light, freed from my body, seeps into every cell of the great snake and I become one with it.

In that instant I had a perfect understanding of what it meant to be a luminous warrior with no enemies in this world or the next. The anaconda was not my enemy. It was a test, a friend who freed me from the fear of losing my life.

It took me a moment to come back to my body, standing at the edge of the forest, gazing at the stars once again. I pinched myself. There was no anaconda, and I felt vast and expansive, bathed in the Primordial Light, part of a great emptiness that was cognizant and alive.

A few weeks later, I returned to California to my job on the faculty of the university. After a day of meetings and committees, of grading papers written by students made to take my course in order to graduate, I recall asking myself, “Is this real?” And in those hallowed halls of learning, I could not find anything real.

There was no longer any truth there for me.

This meant leaving the faculty of a prestigious university and the comfort of a monthly salary. I had worked hard to secure my job and position, and woke up one morning to realize that the security I had longed for had become a golden cage. I was like an eagle whose wings had been clipped; I looked impressive sitting on my perch, but could not fly far no matter how hard I flapped my wings. It was time for the professor to die, to let go of the love, the money, and the identity that the position offered me.

I decided that it was time to stop hiding behind my degrees, and to begin teaching adults who were dedicated to becoming modern shamans. By then, I had a young family to support and no income, title, or position, but I knew who I was and where I was going. It’s not as if I had a destination in mind. It was a vague calling, and a sense of destiny, that made me walk away from a daydream.

I had woken up from the dream of security. I would still have to wake up from the dream of permanence and the dream of love that is unconditional. But I had my first taste of the sacred dream and of Ti, and I knew that nothing would be the same after that.

THE TREASURE SEEKERS

In the Himalayas, there are explorers of the realm between sleeping and waking known as tertons who can unearth spiritual treasures buried long ago. The sage Padmasambhava is said to have hidden a body of advanced teachings known as “The Perfection of Wisdom” that the world was not yet ready for. He concealed these texts in the ocean depths, guarded by fierce sea serpents known as nagas. Six hundred years later, they were discovered by Nagarjuna, whose name means “the one who has power over the nagas.” The sea serpents that Nagarjuna encountered and mastered are similar to the terrifying monsters that the shaman must face in order to discover the deepest buried treasures.

Nagarjuna’s name offers us a clue as to how we can do this. How do we master these demons and defeat these monsters that can be so terrifying? Many of us have spent years in therapy and counseling to help us find a way to bring peace to our inner struggles. We know that battling our inner demons only makes them stronger, like the hundred-headed hydra that Hercules faced: every time Hercules chopped one head off with his axe, two more would grow. The shaman understands that no axes are needed, for all of these “nagas” are shadows that dissolve in the presence of the Primordial Light. Remaining in this light, the luminous warrior observes how the shadows gradually dispel. This is because none of these demons are true, despite the fact that they seem totally real. They are only reflections of the demons within us that are turning our job or our relationship or our health into a hell.

Since the advent of psychology, we no longer refer to demons but to the unconscious beliefs that orchestrate our reality. The Laika does not spend years wrestling with these limiting beliefs. Instead she transforms the three daydreams of safety, permanence, and love that is unconditional, and discovers the treasures of the Primordial Light.

THE DEEPLY BURIED TREASURE

We often settle for the spiritual treasures that we find nearest to the surface, the ones we discover during a weekend retreat or in therapy. We get a new epiphany about our family of origin, or a revelation about a behavior pattern or belief that is causing problems in our lives and in our relationships. These insights are valuable, but after harvesting these for a while, we find that our search has only mimicked the much deeper exploration we long for.

It’s ultimately disempowering to remain fascinated by the revelations that keep us working on our faults for the rest of our lives. After a while, we become bored with the acquaintances who gladly offer us the maxims that would make us happy but that only serve to keep conversations shallow and safe. We grow tired of the unique formulas for success or enlightenment we thought we had discovered. We begin to understand that they are daydreams that will last for only a short while until they become yet more nightmares.

As a boy, I was raised with the specter of death around me. There was a revolution happening in Cuba, and it was not unusual to see pools of dried blood on a driveway or sidewalk on the way to school. Later during my 20s, while in college in California, I became fascinated by tales of reincarnation from India. I became convinced that life after death was inevitable, and shared this with my fellow students in my graduate program in psychology. I refused to consider the possibility that I had been so fearful of death as a child that being obsessed with rebirth was a way of compensating for my dread.

Then, on my first trip to the Amazon jungle and during my first Ayahuasca session, I had a vivid experience of my death. The name of this plant medicine means “the vine of death,” and it is common for persons to experience their deepest fears when they imbibe it. My experience was terrifying. That night, I gazed at my reflection in a shallow pool next to the shaman’s hut where we were working and saw a gigantic bird, a condor perhaps, sink its beak into my face and begin ripping out my flesh, starting with my eyes. The pain was excruciating. And it did not stop until the great bird had consumed my entire face and eaten my brain.

The next day I asked the shaman, Don Ramon, what had happened. “Sometimes the plant will do that,” he replied. “It will summon your fears, so you can see them and let them go.”

He seemed pretty nonchalant about the experience. But then again, I was the one who’d had his brain eaten last night. Probably not a bad idea to face my fears, particularly of death, I thought after a while. But if I could avoid it . . . after all, the experience had been terrifying.

“Once you flush death out of your system, the plant gives you beautiful visions,” Don Ramon explained.

The next evening we held the ceremony again. I noticed he poured an extra-large cup for me.

“For good visions,” he said.

In my visions, I was in a beautiful green field—then, I was startled by the smell of rotting flesh. I opened my eyes and realized that my body was decomposing. Maggots were crawling out of my arms, worms were eating my legs, and my rotting belly was releasing an unbearable stench.

I tried calling the shaman, but my lips had already decayed and were gone, and my mouth would not work.

Finally, I fell asleep, my nostrils filled with the stink of putrid meat. When I woke up on a mat in the maloca the following morning, I was relieved my body was back to normal.

Later that day, Don Ramon said, “You are trapped in the nightmare of death. We must exorcise the death that lives within you.”

The following night he had to convince me to take the foul potion again. I was terrified, but determined to face my fear. The shaman began to chant and whistle, and I heard him calling my death to my side, asking it to show itself to me. After a few moments, a dark figure with a dark hat appeared and sat beside me. He seemed to be smoking a pipe.

“I am your father,” it said. “You are all the children of death.”

And then the figure took off its hat and there was no face, only a light bright as the sun. Then everything around me turned into light, and I understood that there was death in life and life in death, and that death also is part of the Primordial Light.

That evening I began to befriend death. I did not have to live with the nightmare of being stalked by death any longer. Death would be there to remind me how to live fearlessly, in infinity. This was just the start. I had to transform the dream of death, and this required deep soul searching in my ordinary waking state. I am always suspicious of someone who can only see God (or death) when they are high on some exotic plant medicine.

You can experience death as your ally after you wake up from the darkness of the nightmare of permanence. I invite you to examine whatever seems to be “killing you” in your life—your finances, your health, your relationships, your children, your parents, your job—and consider every one of these challenging circumstances an invitation to discover a demon that you can befriend. Let death help you claim the infinite generosity that is the nature of the Primordial Light.

FROM ANCIENT DREAMERS,

WE TAKE OUR CUE TO DREAM THE WORLD ANEW

In the Andes, long before the conquistadores arrived, the sages, or Laika, were honored. But the Spanish soldiers and the Catholic Inquisition turned the common folk against their own sages, much as they did in Europe with the wise women who were branded witches and burned at the stake. Soon it was hard for the Indios to distinguish them from the sorcerers who cast spells and took advantage of others. The Laika did not fare any better in the hands of the Spanish priests. While the Europeans kept the midwives (who were helpful in the birthing of mestizo children the conquistadores had with the native women) and herbalists (who were invaluable when the Europeans got sick and needed healing), they persecuted the sages because the native religion was so contradictory to their own. According to the Laika, the Indios had never been cast out of the Garden of Eden, and they still spoke to God and with the rivers and the trees. Shortly after the conquest in the early 1500s, the vast majority of the Laika were driven out of the cities into hiding in the highlands.

The Laika were astronomers, architects, physicians, and seers able to read the signs of destiny. They believed that every great creation in the physical world is first dreamt into being, like an architectural blueprint drawn in the invisible world. They dreamt of cities in the clouds, and their architects built Machu Picchu. They dreamt of turning the dry deserts into fertile fields and their engineers built aqueducts to achieve this. Their dreams fostered peace and the science of healing with plants in ancient civilizations like Monte Verde, in Chile, that thrived approximately 16,000 years ago, before any of the early Americans could have come across the Bering

Straits from Eastern Siberia.1

Later they dreamt of Caral, a metropolis in the Peruvian desert that flourished 5,000 years ago. Before the great pyramids at Giza were built, Caral was a thriving citadel with more than 20,000 inhabitants. No trace of battlements, weapons, fortifications, walls to keep enemies at bay, mutilated bodies, or other evidence of warfare have been found at Caral. The Laika conjured a civilization dedicated to pleasure, art, wisdom, commerce, and worship. The inhabitants of Caral were poets and musicians. They lived a dream of peaceful and profitable relations with their neighbors.

There is a story that illustrates how each one of us plays an important part in creating a dream. A traveler arrives in Paris during the Middle Ages when the Cathedral of Notre Dame is being built. He stops and asks two stone workers what they are doing. The first one responds that he is squaring out a stone. The second one, who is doing the exact same thing, replies, “I am building a cathedral.”

When you find your sacred dream and taste the power of the Primordial Light, you are compelled to share it, to give it away freely. The Primordial Light grows within you only to the degree that you give it away to others. I call this the great giveaway, and we will learn about it at the end of the book.

Sacred dreams spawn great civilizations. The dream is given away freely and everyone has to contribute their part to bring it to fruition. Inevitably its treasures are squandered by later generations.

Few sacred dreamers remain today. People are hoarding the flicker of the light that they have, afraid that someone might steal their fire. Many of today’s teachers are reluctant to share their secrets. The giveaway is hardly practiced anymore.

In contrast, the village people of the Andes live the principle of the giveaway in their everyday affairs. The word used to describe it is ayni, which scholars loosely translate from the Quechua as “reciprocity,” meaning “today for you, tomorrow for me.” Yet ayni is much more than a business transaction between humans. In its most profound sense, it means sharing the generosity of the Primordial Light, which is boundless and expects nothing in return. And while folk wisdom establishes a practical mutualism between people, its higher sense is one of giving without expecting anything back.

The giveaway is what makes the shaman a gifted healer. She is not giving of herself and her medicine in measure to what she is paid for her services. She is giving all of herself, employs all of her power, and uses all of her medicine, and when at the end of the healing session the patient asks how much is owed, the answer of the Laika is always, “Whatever you can offer me.” This is the shaman’s understanding of the giveaway that expects nothing in return and gratefully accepts whatever is offered.

I share with you something that Don Manuel shared with me. This quote is from my book Island of the Sun, which I wrote with Erik Jendresen:

We begin by making ayni out of primitive superstition—to “please the gods.” Later, we make ayni out of habit, as part of a ceremony. These forms of ayni are performed out of fear or convention, not out of love. Eventually we make ayni because we must, because we feel it here—he touched his breast. They say that only then is ayni perfect, but I believe that ayni is always perfect, that our world is always a true reflection of our intent and our love and our actions.

IN SUMMARY

Many people are trapped in a daydream that has become a living nightmare. The first step to waking up from the nightmare is breaking the “When . . . then” contract we have made with ourselves.

There are three nightmares that have haunted humans for millennia and that we must transform to discover our sacred dream and the power of the Primordial Light:

The nightmare of insecurity—how do we keep safe in a dangerous world?

The nightmare of death—why does everything, including our life, have to end?

The nightmare of love that is unconditional—how will I find the one I love?

When we transform the nightmare of false security, we know true safety and peace. When we transform the nightmare of death, we discover infinity. When we transform the nightmare of love that is unconditional, we become fearless.

Follow the practices in this book and you will not get a bigger house, a better job, a smarter or prettier or more handsome partner. It’s not about becoming rich and famous. It’s about dreaming a sacred destiny for yourself.

It’s about becoming a luminous warrior in these dark times.

This wisdom is so simple and straightforward, yet it has been hidden for hundreds of years. But now is the time. Here is the place.

CHAPTER 3

ANCIENT DREAMERS AND MYSTERIOUS CIVILIZATIONS

According to legend, the first Inka was called Inkari, born in Lake Titicaca, the sea on top of the world, and his destiny was to create the greatest empire in the history of the Americas. The Laika did not record the history of Inkari and his partner, Collari, years after they founded the Inka Nation, however. They recorded it before the fact. Their prophets and seers called forth the destiny of their people from the future.

For a long time I struggled to understand the Inka myth of creation. Who was Inkari? Was he a man? A god? Was he summoned from the future by the Laika? Don Manuel set out to teach me, a teaching I share here with you.

THE MAN AND THE MYTH

Don Manuel explained to me that the Inka were born on the Island of the Sun at Lake Titicaca, at the beginning of time itself. We were sitting on the rim of a gigantic archaeological monument, at a site named Moray in the Sacred Valley of Peru. While most temples go up into the air, this one went down into the earth, in a natural depression in a valley. Three adjacent bowls had been carefully terraced in a cleft between the hills, the largest nearly a half mile in diameter. Each of the seven or eight terraces was built with soil that had been carried on men’s backs from distant regions of the empire.

This was a vast agricultural laboratory where the Inka would breed and crossbreed their wisdom with their corn in order to adapt it to the different ecosystems of their empire. The Inka had managed to domesticate over 400 varieties of corn—black, blue, yellow, white, red, and so many others—with different qualities and growing seasons. Moray was a temple where magic and science met.

Don Manuel continued, “The first father was named Inkari. He was a being with supernatural powers. He could change the course of rivers with his hand, he could flatten hills with his feet, and his breath was as powerful and terrifying as the winds that blow over the lake on top of the world, Titicaca.”

Inkari was a flesh-and-blood human with a heavenly father, the Sun. His mother was the dark void of space, the cosmic womb in which the stars are born. Shortly after his birth, Inkari set out to search for a fertile valley where he was to found a new civilization. The Sun had given him a golden staff to test the soil. The staff would sink into the soft fertile earth only on “the navel of the Earth,” the future city of Cusco.

The first time Inkari threw his staff, it landed in the Andean highlands, but the soil was too hard and would never bear much fruit. Yet the landscape was so beautiful that Inkari made this the home of the Q’ero people and delegated to them the task of protecting the wisdom and the rites of initiation. The Q’ero would be the ones who remembered the story of creation and the prophecy that Inkari would return to found a second empire based on wisdom and not on military might.

As I listened to Don Manuel, I thought how uncannily similar this story was to the story of the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest, who had been ordered by the Great Spirit to found their villages on the barren mesas that they call their home. Hardly anything grows in that desert landscape, yet the Hopi are also the keepers of an ancient wisdom and prophecy. There’s a ring of universal truth to this—the wisdom keepers keep the wisdom safe in remote places where no one in their right mind would go looking for them.

The next time Inkari hurled his staff it landed in the fertile Sacred Valley of Cusco (the word qosco means navel), and he determined to establish the Empire of the Children of the Light there. Inkari longed for his partner, so he traveled back to Lake Titicaca to find Collari, the first mother, with whom to cofound the Inka kingdom.

“This is the malady that we inherited from our father, Inkari,” Don Manuel lamented. “A man has to travel a rough road through the mountains to find the woman with whom he can discover happiness. Man cannot find his reason for being by himself, and he hates to be alone. On the other hand, a woman must discover her nature by herself. If she waits for a man to discover her, she will find herself through his reflection only, and will never be happy. A woman is a whole being without a man, but a man is only half a person without a woman.”

I wondered how Don Manuel had reached these fantastic conclusions about men and women. It certainly seemed applicable to me, as all my life I had looked for the right partner to accompany me on the next leg of my journey, and many of my male friends were lost and floundering without a partner. But I don’t think that’s exactly what Don Manuel was talking about.

I thought probably it was his experience searching for the mother of his children. I remembered that the Q’ero Nation had fewer than 600 inhabitants spread out over six villages. In order to avoid marrying any of your cousins, you must have had to travel outside your own village, accounting for the long journey a young man had to embark on in order to find his mate. I shared my theory with the old man, satisfied that there was a logical explanation for Inkari having to journey so far to find his woman.

Don Manuel seemed amused by my explanation.

“We are all related,” he explained. “Even you and I. We are the children of the Pachamama. All of us are distant cousins. The man has to find the right mother for Inkari to be born through. But it is the woman who chooses her mate, as her instinct is much sharper than ours, for a man’s judgment is always clouded by desire. Every woman suspects that she will have a divine being born through her, and for our people, every child that is born is a miracle, a gift from heaven.”

He continued, “We are waiting for Inkari to return once again, to complete his work of establishing a new Empire of the Light. This will not be a military empire like the last one. This new empire will be founded on generosity, on ayni, on giving rather than on greed. This is what our first father wanted, but he failed to accomplish.”

THE VALLEY OF CUSCO

Inkari and Collari were the first mother and father of the Inka Nation. When they arrived in the fertile Sacred Valley, it was already densely populated. Inkari promised the chiefs that they would not take their lands, that the mountains would provide their corn. Thus the Inka began to terrace the sides of the hills. They built irrigation canals to water the terraces, and prepared soils that absorbed moisture to water the plants from their roots.

I continue to be amazed by how the Inka carved terraces into rocky slopes and made the barren mountains fertile, and how they built cities like Machu Picchu in the clouds.

When I first met Don Manuel, I was touched by his statement that Inkari’s experiment had failed. I knew that the Inka Nation in its early days were great integrators. They assimilated the various warring neighbors, respecting their customs and honoring their local deities. Yet later, after the death of the great Inka Pachakuti, the grand architect of Machu Picchu, the Inka became increasingly militaristic and bent on conquest, building an empire larger than the United States.

Their military power helped the Inka to become the undisputed rulers of a vast and rich kingdom, until the arrival of the conquistadores. In a few short years, Spanish guns, horses, armored men, and steel blades decimated the greatest empire the Americas have known.

I had read about the Spanish Conquest but had never heard the view of the Q’ero. History is written by the winners, not by the

vanquished. So Don Manuel’s perspective was new and profound for me.

The experiment of the man-god had failed. Greed and military might had eclipsed the founding principle of generosity. Yet Inkari would return. There would be a second chance.

And the Q’ero, the protectors of the wisdom and keepers of the prophecy, had a part to play in this.

I turned to Don Manuel and asked, “So your people’s reason for being is to provide the breeding stock for Inkari to be born?”

“No,” he replied. “Inkari could be born anywhere, even to an American mother. He could even be a child of yours. We simply hold the wisdom of ayni, of generosity, of the giveaway. This is what will permit the new Empire of the Children of the Light to rise, and mark the beginning of a millennium of gold and peace on Earth.”

Frankly, I did not like hearing this. It sounded a bit too messianic, too much like the Christian dogma I had been raised with, announcing the second coming of Christ and establishing the kingdom of heaven on Earth, together with the banishing of the forces of darkness by legions of angels with flaming swords.

Yet I know that Don Manuel had not been exposed to Christian dogma and had never been inside a church.

“Maybe he is already here, Viracocha,” Don Manuel said. He was addressing me with the title the conquistadores demanded that the Indios call them. Viracocha. God.

Except Don Manuel used the title in a slightly derogatory way, teasing me.

“You see, you could wake up one morning and discover that you have become Inkari. We are not waiting for a child to be born, but for a person to become like a god. This requires that you make perfect ayni, that the universe reflect back perfectly the condition of your love, of your actions, and of your intent. That you practice the great giveaway, that you hold on to nothing, not even your name or ideas about who you are and what you own.

“For example,” he continued, “you have everything a man could want. You have shoes, a house, even a car and money. You have a title of doctor and people respect you for that.”

He looked down at my fancy leather hiking boots and then back at his sandals and bare feet. He wore these sandals winter and summer, in the heat and the cold.

“On the other hand,” he said, “I own nothing, but have the snowcapped Andes and the fertile valleys. I belong to them, and I guess in a way they belong to me as well. But I do not own them. This is where the experiment of Inkari fell apart. The Inka wanted to own the people and the land, even their stories and their gods.”

“What is the experiment?” I asked. “The one that failed in the Inka Empire?”

“It’s the experiment of k’anchaypa wawankuna. The children of the light. You see, the first Inka started in a good way. Then they were seduced by power. They stopped giving and began taking. They took people’s lands, their young men were forcefully drafted into the Inka armies, the young women were taken from their families to the temples as servants.”

He continued, “They called themselves the children of the sun but forgot that the light is all giving. It asks for nothing in return. It warms the rich and the poor alike. Every morning the sun rises faithfully and is the source of the life of our plants. When we put a log into the fire we are setting free the sunlight that is trapped inside the trunk and branches of that tree. Every season, a bit more light is stored in every tree as it grows strong. But with men it is different. We are born filled with a heavenly light. But then the older we get the more our light diminishes, until we are wrinkled and gray and have very little light left. And then we flicker out like a candle that has burned down all the way.”

Don Manuel explained the difference between other people and shamans. “I am a shaman, and the only difference between me and an ordinary man is that my light becomes stronger every day. When a shaman dies, our light is set free again like that log in the fire, and we return back to our father, to the sun.

“And then all of us, shamans and ordinary people, come back in at another time, and we get a chance to make things right.”

“How do we do that?” I asked Don Manuel.

“Why, the same way you did,” he explained, grabbing a handful of dirt. “You were once of this land, you loved these mountains and this soil, and this is why you keep returning. Now you are a white man, a white Viracocha.”

He grinned as he repeated the name of the ancient Andean deity.

“You were most likely a peasant in that hacienda that you now own. Remember that the white landowner also owned our people until not too long ago. I was a boy when I had to come down to work on his fields once a month. But don’t think that you can own us anymore. You cannot be the lord of Q’ero.”

I was floored when he said this, for I had just purchased the old Hacienda Yabar, now reduced to 12 hectares, or about 30 acres. But once it was the seat of a much larger estate of the powerful Yabar family, owners of the entire territory that included the Q’ero Nation and to whom these Indians had been indentured. Every month they would come down from their mountains to prune the trees of the mad botanist owner, who had imported so many exotic flowering plants that the locals called his place the manicomio azul, the blue madhouse.

I had inadvertently become the owner of a former slave plantation!

I understood now why the Indios of the hacienda had taken me to the chapel on my first day in the property and sat me on the altar while chanting Christian songs and kneeling around me. I had to push my way down the altar to sit on the ground with them and chew the ceremonial coca leaves.

I had purchased the hacienda for very little money, as this was a time of political instability in Peru. My friend Americo, a descendant of the original “lord of Q’ero” (senor de Q’ero) had convinced me to buy the hacienda and make it a place where the shamans could gather.

This must be karma, I thought. But how did the old man know this?

The former masters of the hacienda had inflicted great damage. The Q’ero traditionally wore their hair long, designating their stature as Laikas, and the landowners had cut off their long braids. They had been converted to the religion of the occupiers and made to renounce their own gods.

I asked Don Manuel what I needed to do to make things right, and he responded in the Quechua language:

“Llapanta saqesun k’anchaypa makinpi jayk’aqpas

saqewasunchu.”

“Let’s leave it all in the hands of the light. It never fails!”

THE WILD MAN OF THE JUNGLE

The myth of Inkari appears for the first time in the Q’ero villages. The legend says that after founding the Inka Empire, Inkari and Collari left Cusco and returned to the Amazon. But they made a stop in the Q’ero hamlets, and the first father and mother promised to return when the time was right. The Q’ero are perched in the highlands above the jungle, and villagers regularly make the 70 kilometer trek down to the lush Amazon to harvest coca and other foodstuffs.

The myth explains that the first parents abandoned the ornate stone edifices in the city of Cusco for the wild and pristine rain forest. Inkari did not return to the Sun, for he had not perished. He traveled to the verdant jungle, where he would lie in waiting until the time was right to return to the world of humans.

The Q’ero remembered this promise by embroidering the figure of the “wild man of the jungle” in their textiles. This being is known as the chuncho, who represents the “first being” who inhabited the world and who emerged from the Amazon garden. While it might seem contradictory to us that the chuncho represents the ancestor beings and also the promise of Inkari to return, this does not present a contradiction to the Andean dwellers, who have a less linear understanding of time. In the mind of the Andeans, time can turn like a wheel, and the past will return again, albeit in a different yet distinctly recognizable way. Inkari will return, perhaps not even as a child, but as you and me.

The chuncho is a V-shaped figure that has four rays emanating from it, representing the four corners of the earth. It is a mark of the royal house of the Inka, and the Q’ero are the only peoples in the

Andes who use this motif in their textiles. The pattern not only establishes the regal ancestry of these people; it also serves to remind all peoples of the Andes of the return of their founding father.

The return of Inkari also serves to explain the belief that we return again lifetime after lifetime, sometimes born black, other times born brown, white, Native American, European, or African. But only the shamans who mapped the territory beyond death, who knew the landscape and the trappings in the realms between the worlds, were able to be born in the place of their choosing. Only they were able to be born again in the land of Q’ero, a forbidding place where very little food grew, at altitudes that would take an ordinary man’s breath away. This was the nest of the eagles, where they could come to a life undisturbed by those who preferred the comfort of the pigeon coops or the city.

And they would come back with a mission: to usher the return of Inkari.

CHAPTER 4

CREATING A DREAM, CREATING A LEGEND

One way to think of a sacred dream is as a story that brings meaning and direction to your life. This story is like a map with trails that can lead you on an epic journey to a worthwhile destination. If your map has you hiking along a parched desert, you can come up with a better narrative that takes you through a shady forest or a fruit orchard.

On the desert trail we hurry along, encouraged by the hot sand beneath our feet. On the path through the shady forest we sometimes forget our destination. There are gifts and trappings to whichever road we take in life. But we want to be able to choose the story that is right for us, and not always the well-beaten path selected for us by fate or by society or caste.

I love the part in Alice in Wonderland where the Cheshire Cat essentially tells Alice, “If you don’t know where you are going, just about any road will take you there!” This is what happens when you do not have your own story—you end up at the same boring destination as everyone else.

A sacred dream is always bigger than you are and it has a destination that is mysterious. So be sure that you select a great dream, for your story will inevitably take you there.

When I work with a client, I ask them to write a fairy tale that begins “Once upon a time . . .” and that includes a prince or princess, a warrior (or warrioress), and a dragon. The psychologist Carl Jung said that the unconscious speaks through dreams and fairy tales. This story offers me a window into my client’s unconscious maps and the challenges they will find as they travel along the trails defined by their story. Sometimes my client’s story will fail the test of destiny. The story is too small, and the horizon it sets is too close and cramped, or the map it provides is too fuzzy and it’s hard to get their bearings. I know then that this story is not part of a sacred dream and will in all likelihood soon turn into a nightmare, as in the story that follows.

I met Roger, a man in his early 60s, shortly after he was divorced from his wife of many years. A successful engineer and entrepreneur, Roger was searching for the next adventure his life might take him on. He came to me for guidance, for a compass and map that would let him explore the next chapter of his journey creatively.

Here is what Roger wrote:

Once upon a time there was a young prince who traveled through the countryside until he found a castle with a very large tower. He noticed that at the top of the tower there was a beautiful princess who was only allowed to step out once a day onto the deck of the tower, which was her prison. The princess immediately fell in love with the prince and he became determined to rescue her. But the castle was guarded by a fierce dragon chained to the base of the tower. The prince called on his faithful servant and asked him to go to the castle and test to see if the dragon was friendly. He was to measure the length of the dragon’s chain and the distance to the nearest tall tree. When the servant returned, he reported that the dragon indeed was very fierce and that the length of the chain was 30 paces.

The prince ordered his servant to secure a rope 30 paces long, and to tie it to the trunk of the tall tree after making a noose at one end. He then collected a bag of jewels from his father and returned to the castle to rescue the princess. He dangled the shining jewels before the dragon, and as we all know, dragons are very curious creatures. The beast fell for the trick, and as he drew near the sparkling jewels his head got caught in the noose. With the dragon no longer blocking his way, the prince called the princess to jump from the tower. He caught her in his arms. He was surprised that she was light as a feather. He helped her onto the back of his horse, and they rode to his father’s castle. His father was very happy to meet his future daughter-in-law, he arranged a sumptuous wedding for them, and they lived happily ever after in his father’s castle.

When Roger read his story, I was immediately struck by the gifts and traps that it announced.

This seemed to be a love story, yet it was devoid of love. The prince was more concerned with the engineering details that went into trapping the dragon and rescuing the princess than in getting to know her. This approach would not bode well for his next relationship. And while it is perfectly valid for a young man to make sure that his father approves of his bride-to-be, a mature man would want to make sure he ended up with a bride he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. This might not necessarily be someone everyone approved of.

You also want to make sure you offer your jewels to your beloved, and that you do not spend all your treasures in having to rescue her from jail. I pointed out to Roger that he would have a lot of educating to do with his new bride, who had been imprisoned for the better part of her life. Did he really think he could be happy with a woman who had been locked up all of her youth and probably had very few social skills?

I asked Roger how the prince knew that the princess wanted out of the tower. And even if she did want to escape, how could he possibly know that she wanted to live with him forever, even if she was grateful for his rescuing her? As it turns out, princesses often have minds of their own, a character trait sometimes overlooked in traditional fairy tales.

Roger’s story described a road to disaster. This would be a very short-lived dream of love. It would quickly turn into a nightmare, and it would leave him without a sense of who he was at this stage in his life and where he was going next.

THE WORLD AS YOU DREAM IT

The physical world arises from the Primordial Light of Ti by the power of dreaming. This teaching is being lost, even in the Andes, where many young Indios are more connected to their smart phones than to the ancestral traditions. Some villagers still practice a traditional giveaway—a dreaming practice done by preparing ornate offerings from the seeds and grains from their fields, decorated with flowers, candy, and colored strings. These beautiful mandalas are to thank the earth for her bounty, or to ask for healing for a villager or for fertility for their flocks. Villagers will pray for hours, softly blow their prayers into a kintu of three coca leaves, calling on the spirits of the mountains and the ancestors, and place their offerings on a large piece of paper. All of the elements of daily life are placed into this bundle, called a despacho. Objects that represent musical instruments, kitchen tools, the seeds they plant in their fields, and even symbols of the clouds and the rainbow are placed in exactly the right order in the bundle. It is as if the world is being set right once again, and order prevails over chaos. Later, the bundle is placed into the fire. Legends say that as the offering burns, the spirit of the mountains and of the earth come to feed on the villagers’ prayers.

Everything that is of value to these men and women who live high in the snowcapped mountains is symbolically placed inside the bundle. While for many of the Indios who live in the city or the lowlands, the despacho is a way of asking for help or good fortune, for the Q’ero it remains an offering, a giveaway of everything that is beautiful and valuable. Only the very finest grains are offered, and the prayers are all of gratitude. At no point in the ceremony does anyone ask for anything for themselves.

I’ve observed hundreds of despachos prepared over many years of living and studying with the shamans of the Andes. Early on I thought it was a childish game that everyone agreed would be fun to play. I could not understand when two of the elders of the community argued about where a flower or a coca leaf or a pile of quinoa should be placed. Later, I understood that it was a form of dreaming with their eyes open—they were setting their world in order, they were banishing chaos and installing beauty in the villages and their lives. The anthropologist in me identified it as a magical act, and all great magic, whether in the Q’ero despacho or the Catholic mass where the wine and the wafer become the blood and the body of Christ, is symbolic in nature. I had been to mass as a child often enough to sense the mysterious moment when the ordinary elements of the wheat and the wine were transformed into a holy sacrament. The priest raised the host high above his head during the elevation, and the light of the Christ entered all those gathered for the Eucharist.

After a few years with the Q’ero ceremonies, I developed a fine sense of the mystery when the offerings became the reenactment of the creation story, with Inkari and Collari bringing order out of chaos. This is the way it had happened in the beginning, from chaos to cosmos. And it was happening again before my very eyes. Except there was no priest, everyone was officiating, and everyone was a participant. And no solitary flute or pile of sugar or coca leaf could be placed anywhere unless everyone agreed with the order of the world that was being dreamt into being at that instant.

Later, as the fire is consuming the despacho, when the Pachamama and the holy mountains are feasting on the villagers’ prayers, the dream is revealed. I saw it happen many times when all of us gathered with our backs turned to the fire as the mountain spirits and the Pachamama were summoned. A sense would come over everyone present that the world had turned out exactly as it needed to, and that everything was all right. Our hands were joining the hand of the divine to create perfect beauty in our lives.

A petition for help, often with a prescribed ritual or offering, is very different from dreaming the world into being, where you co-create with the divine. When you ask for help you are pleading with a higher force to intervene. When you are practicing the sacred dream, you join your hand with the hand of Spirit to create.

To make a despacho you can prepare a beautiful mandala of seeds and flowers, or make an arrangement with ordinary stones on the ground, or simply close your eyes and invite the forces of nature to reveal reality to you in a new and original way. You plead for nothing, ask for nothing, and offer gratitude. You give your heart and your love in the giveaway. And then on your way home you help whomever you meet along the road. If someone is hungry you feed them. If they need guidance you offer it. The more you practice the giveaway the more life force and beauty and abundance flows through you, until you become an unstoppable torrent of beauty and healing, and the Primordial Light shines through you like the sun itself.

I know that it is hard for many of us to imagine what the giveaway looks like or feels like. How do I practice it? Do I make an offering of the grains and seeds in my pantry and place it in the fireplace? For many of us who do not have gardens or grow our own food, the symbolic power of the seed and the flowers is lost. We would simply be imitating a traditional form from the Andes and missing the essence behind it, which is the practice of dreaming the world into being. Another way of looking at the giveaway is to think of not withholding your love, your wisdom, your forgiveness, or your blessings. Whatever it is that you are afraid to lose, you set free. You do not hold anything back.

Practicing the giveaway reconnects you to the Primordial Light and its boundless generosity. This allows you to write a new story for your life with authenticity and originality. You are no longer like a cork bobbing in the waves, drawn by the current of your culture, your gender, your skin color, or your genetics to a destination you would not have selected. You do not have to use a traditional form like the despacho that is used in the Andes, or the mandala of the Himalayas. It is important that you find a form that is yours, and that you can practice. Without a form, it is only a mental exercise.

I encourage you to try this simple exercise. Stop reading for a moment, go to your kitchen, and find a large container of salt. Empty the contents onto a plate, and tap the plate a few times until the salt pile becomes even and flat. Take a toothpick and draw a circle on the outermost edge of the salt. You are about to make your own despacho. Place a few flower petals in the salt bed, and draw images with the toothpick, whatever inspires you. Accompany each with a prayer of gratitude. Be grateful for all of the blessings in your life. Give thanks for all of the challenges and tests that you may be going through at this time. Ask that their lessons and gifts be revealed to you. When you are finished with this exercise you can place the salt and the flowers in your bathtub and enjoy a nice warm bath as you soak in your own prayers.

You can also do this exercise in nature, drawing a circle on the ground and decorating your despacho with leaves and stones, and then erasing it at the end of your meditation. We want to give form to our prayers, to reengage that playful part of ourselves that creates through art, just like when we were children. The logical and reasoning faculties we spend so much time with will not respond to the giveaway in the same way. These faculties can write a check to a charity or a note to a friend in need. But to give form to a sacred dream you have to create something with your hands—a mandala, a poem, a meal.

The shamans place a piece of gold foil and a piece of silver foil in the center of their despacho. These are called the golden book and the silver book. Lore says that we are all born with these two books, one in each hand. One tome comes already written with the destiny selected for you by your family of origin and by your social standing: If your parents suffered from heart disease and poor health, your destiny is to live and die like they did. If you were born poor, you will live and die poor.

The other book is blank, inviting you to write your own original story. Granted that we all have to do some editing on the volume that came inscribed with our genetic and psychological fate, but we should not spend our entire life mending our childhood wounds or repairing our chronic bad health. We can take up the pen and become the storyteller of a life infused with health, meaning, and joy instead of a character in the recycled old story we inherited.

Begin to write in the blank book, begin to dream your own sacred dream. That is what I was called to do, what we are all called to do.

Wanting to do so is not enough, because you cannot write your new story while living in a nightmare of insecurity, of fear of death, or of lack of love. When you begin writing the new book of your life, you will open a world of abundance. Otherwise you will simply write another story of not having enough love, enough time, enough health, or enough courage.

HOW THE GIVEAWAY CAME TO BE HIDDEN

When the Inka Empire was at the height of its glory 500 years ago, the imperial astronomers noted that the heavens foretold the arrival of men who would covet their gold and destroy their people. The Inka kingdom was the mightiest empire in the Americas but had become increasingly warlike. Neighbors who had lived peacefully for centuries began to covet each other’s land. The Inka had a standing army, something unheard of in the days of Inkari, well trained and ready to go to battle on short notice.

Soldiers had officers who had commanders who had generals who reported to a king. Society became stratified and hierarchical. Men trained in the art of killing became the new heroes. The Laika, the explorers of the visible and invisible worlds, became second-class citizens. The armies were draining the resources of the outlying villages, and the people were being taxed to exhaustion. The Inka legions had to engage in continual military campaigns lest they become restless and revolt. And some of the Laika had begun to abuse their knowledge to accumulate power and wealth at the expense of others.

As the collective dream of the Inka started to become a nightmare riddled with violence and conquest, the Laika decided to hide the wisdom they had inherited. They concealed their knowledge of the Primordial Light. They realized that the best place to hide a wisdom such as theirs was in plain sight—in the future. The keys that would unlock the secrets of time were in the quipus, the “talking knots” made from colored strings spun from llama wool. The quipus were rings made of fine wool threads with many strands hanging from them, and knots could be used to represent numbers—if you were an accountant—or stories, if you were a Laika. In these mnemonic devices the Laika knotted maps to treasures that could only be “read” by someone initiated into the art.

The Laika abandoned their homes in the fertile valley of Cusco and fled to ice-capped peaks 16,000 feet in altitude. They disappeared from the town squares, and the annual festivities of the Inti Raymi, the feast of the sun, were now led by Inka priests. They exchanged their red and black ponchos with the designs of the Royal House for plain vanilla garments that showed no sign of their provenance or stature. When they traveled to the markets in the lowlands, they did not reveal the location of their villages in the heights. From their high and holy peaks, they witnessed the world they had helped dream into being now being ravaged by the conquistadores.

WHAT IS TRUE? WHAT IS REAL?

When the Laika fled to the mountains of Q’ero the sacred dream was forgotten. Inkari’s experiment had failed. Meanwhile, ordinary people began to believe that their everyday daydreams were real, even when they were not true.

The Laika know that the daydream seems real but it is not true, and that only the sacred dream is true, even when it seems utterly unreal.

The void left by the Laika was taken over by the Casters of Spells, who convinced people that the daydream they were living was not only real, but was actually true. They hawked their services to the gullible, telling them that only potent spells could help their families, or heal their sick, or improve their lot in life. Since humans are by nature superstitious, people started to believe that they could not become the authors of their own destiny, that they needed the help of the Casters of Spells to find them a better dream.

The minute we believe that we are not the authors of our lives, we become trapped in the daydream. We are no longer the director of the play; we become characters on the stage. And our dreams cease to be sacred. They become small and personal. They no longer include other people and nature and even the stars above. They become only about us. It becomes all about me.

When we become trapped inside a daydream, reality ceases to be a fluid story kept alive by the telling of it around the fire and becomes fixed and immutable. Story becomes history, and dreams slowly turn into nightmares because they are not renewed in the retelling. Only the Casters of Spells remain, selling their charms and invocations to the needy.

When the Laika left for the highlands, only the healers, the herbalists, and the bonesetter were left behind. Not a single dreamer remained. Gone were the mystery schools that taught the profound wisdom of the Primordial Light. Only the simplest formulas persisted, in the hands of shamans, who continued the everyday job of tending the sick and helping the dead return to the world of Spirit, and the midwives who delivered the babies of both Indio and Spaniard. No one remembered how to read the magical quipus. The colored threads became silent. They no longer spoke about when time was young and of the coming of the first plants and the animals.

And hundreds of years passed.

DON MANUEL AND SHARING THE AYNI

The Laika knew that sacred dreams and the ability to newly dream the world into being would be needed at another time, when the conditions were right.

They looked for a sign that would announce the dawn of a new dream for their people and for the world. This happened in 1950. On May 21 of that year, a gigantic earthquake struck the city of Cusco and destroyed the Dominican monastery. The Dominicans were the enforcers of the Spanish Inquisition and masterminds of the vicious persecution of the Laika. Hidden inside the monastery was the holiest of Inka shrines, known as Koricancha, the temple of gold. The temple was concealed by the monastery that now lay in ruins. The

Inka built their structures with cantilevered walls that made them earthquake proof. The Dominicans built their monastery like they built their houses in Barcelona, with vertical walls that could not withstand a tremor like the one that struck the city.

Archaeologists had been searching for this temple for 200 years, and here it was, hidden in the belly of the Dominican church. For the Laika, this was the beginning of the righting of the world. The most sacred Inka temple, lost for 500 years, emerged from the ashes of the temple of the Inquisitors.

The Laika descended from their eagle nests to mark the beginning of the time when the world would be set right once again. The secret of the Primordial Light and the art of dreaming the world into being could be released, like a bird set free from its cage.

In June of 1950, the lost lineage of the Laika appeared in the holy mountain of Ausangate. During the annual feast of the Snow Star, tens of thousands of supplicants gather to pray and receive the first light from the Pleiades, which is considered the sacred light of Ti. The Laika hike to the top of the glacier at 21,000 feet and carve out a piece of ice to capture the first light from these stars as they rise above the equator in June. This light is as close to the Primordial Light as one can get, because it comes from a distant sun that the Laika feel is their original home.

Legends say that when the Laika appeared wearing their ponchos bearing the signs of the Royal House of the Inka, an aisle parted down the throngs of people gathered and the oldest shamans said to them, “Welcome, brothers and sisters. We have been waiting for you for five hundred years.”

The Last Laika

When I met Don Manuel, he had already lost most of his front teeth. He was 60 years old, to the best of his recollection.

Shortly after we met, I offered to buy him a set of dentures. He was furious that they had to pull out his remaining front teeth in order to anchor his new ones. It was a painful process, as the dentists in the Andes were not the most skilled.

Not long afterward, he asked me to bring a small group of my students on an expedition to Mt. Ausangate. We were to take part in a rite that calls in a sacred dream for the future, and the highest possibilities for the time to come. The Laika understand that as the fate of the earth goes, so goes the fate of humans, and that we are part of a luminous web that involves all creation. As the old man explained it to me, we were going to summon a sustainable future for planet Earth.

Don Manuel explained that while most of us only sought to better our lot in life, a Laika was called to dream the well-being of all creatures and the earth itself. We would be journeying into the future after the great upheaval humanity was about to go through. What we discovered could change our lives for the better, and the fate of humanity.

I was happy to accept the invitation. I knew that the Indios desperately needed a new dream because they did not participate in the Western dream of progress. Most of the Andean peoples continue to live in poverty, with little hope of breaking out of the cycle that keeps them destitute, even as the children of the conquistadores thrive. A new dream would also be good for us Westerners who had exhausted the old daydream of raping and pillaging the earth for our exclusive benefit.

A shaman can perform a soul retrieval, journeying in their mind’s eye along a person’s timeline into their past, to discover a traumatic event that derailed their destiny. The past offers three coordinates of space and one of time to travel along. Shamans know it is not difficult to revisit the past, as it is engraved in the collective memory of humanity.

Journeying to the future requires great skill, as there are thousands of alternate futures and there is only one dimension of time to journey along. When you travel along one of the many destiny lines available, you are not a tourist; you are also giving it energy, potentiating it, and helping select it. The act of finding a desirable future for one person in the interconnected web of countless possible destinies is an art form. The shaman can help a patient select a future healed state or they can upset the destiny of an entire village by altering the future of one of its members.

Don Manuel was proposing we journey to visit the future for the benefit of all people, of all nations. I had no idea how we were going to do this, but understood in some deep and inexplicable way that my group and I were somehow also part of an ancient prophecy. My mind boggled at the possibilities. They were, literally, limitless.

Little did I know that the birds the old Laika was setting free from the cage would be myself and my group. We would become the dreamers of a new time for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for the “white man.”

We arrived at our campsite next to the Blue Lagoon on Mt. Ausangate, at 15,500 feet altitude. I thanked Don Manuel for having invited us to be present for this ceremony. It was a great privilege that he had trusted me to bring our group to meet with the 60 shamans who had gathered for this occasion. He smiled as he explained that he had not invited us because of our great spiritual achievement. He needed to have the conquistadores, which the white man represented, so this ceremony would be truly universal.

Oh dear! I’d told my group we’d been invited because we were such diligent and dedicated students.

I could not believe what I was hearing.

But it was about to get better.

Don Manuel pointed to a nearby lagoon, a shallow pool no more than 10 feet deep, where you could see the blue of the glacier at the bottom.

“It’s customary for one of the leaders to jump into the ice water and kiss the glacier,” he said, looking at me.

“I’m just an anthropologist,” I complained. It was late in the afternoon, we were near the snow line, and I could feel the chill of evening approaching.

The other Indios in the group nodded in agreement and turned their gaze downward to give me privacy as I stripped down to my shorts. I walked to a rock that jutted above the pool, feeling the goose bumps on my skin. I took three deep breaths and dove in. I hit the water and my breath was knocked out of my chest. My skin was on fire, my heart racing, as the momentum of my dive carried me to the bottom. I kissed the glacier, and then I entered into a slow-motion ascent. My head broke the surface and, taking in a gulp of frigid air, I dog-paddled to the shore. A dozen arms helped me out of the water and others dried me off with a towel. Everyone was smiling and speaking excitedly. Seemed I’d passed some kind of test.

Later that evening I asked Don Manuel what it was like when he had to dive into the pool.

“No one ever goes into the Female Jaguar Lagoon. You could die from the cold,” he said.

I must have looked puzzled.

“That was for my teeth.” He grinned, flashing a flawless smile at me.

The following day we prepared for the ceremony of the Time to Come. Don Manuel and the others laid out the ingredients for a despacho offering for Pachamama. Some had brought seeds, others flowers, chocolate, colored yarn, or cotton balls that would represent the clouds in the mandala we were about to prepare.

A horseman approached me and asked if he and his friends could join the ceremony, and I asked Don Manuel.

“No,” he replied.

“Why?” I asked. After all, they were Indios as well.

“Because they are not Inka. They are Peruvians,” he explained.

Don Manuel distinguished between the Peruvians, who went to church, and the Inka, who prayed in nature. Further, he also differentiated between the Laika, who were masters, and the shamans, who were skilled healers but had largely forgotten the ancient wisdom of the Primordial Light.

We prayed for hours, making offerings to Mother Earth, to the holy mountains, to the ancient ones, and to the lineage of Laikas. And then we received the rites that would anchor us to the future, when

the earth begins the return back to harmony.

Don Manuel took care to explain that the Pachakuti—the great upheaval—means the end of the human world as we know it, not the end of the earth. What will end are the unsustainable consumption and economies that we have built. The pollution, the greedy use of resources, the weaponry. The world is distinctly human, and our species is poisoning the mother that gives us our life. This rite would anchor us to a time after the great correction, so we can dream a new dream in right relationship to the earth and all creatures.

At the end of our time on the holy mountain, Don Manuel gave me his personal blessing. He explained that we had been together on these mountains many times before, that the warmth we felt toward each other was the recognition of an ancient friendship. He went on to say that we all live many lives, that we have been together before in many lands. The Laika were now returning as people of all colors in order to help bring healing to the earth. Then he placed his forehead against mine and struck me on the head with his altar, the collection of stones that the Laika pray with.

He separated his forehead from mine and looked into my eyes, and I felt I was gazing into the eyes of an old friend.

On my return home from the holy mountain, it was as if I had inadvertently stepped into a tornado. My entire life was turned upside down. I discovered how many aspects of my life, of my relationships, and of my work were a real nightmare. Everything that was out of integrity was jettisoned, including my marriage.

I had to wake up from the bad dreams of insecurity, death, and love. I had to find the way to dream a new dream. *

CHAPTER 5

WAKING FROM A BAD DREAM

We spend the first nine months of our life dreaming in our mother’s womb. Then we spend many years in and out of long naps, or seemingly endless sleep when we are teenagers. If mom’s pregnancy went well, if she had a partner who made her feel safe and loved, we had good dreams. But many of us were born into families that did not feel safe. As a result, we grew up in a nightmare home with no apparent way out.

Western psychology notes how important it is to reconcile ourselves with our childhood and family of origin. How do we forgive an abusive parent, or understand an alcoholic mother? How do we turn the nightmare of a lousy childhood into valuable lessons? The psychology of the shamans is different. It asks why you chose that family you were born into, and what lessons you came to learn from your parents. And you understand that even though the events of your childhood were absolutely and painfully real, they were not necessarily true, at least not the way you recall them. They would explain that there are no accidents, that you should practice gratitude for the great (and often painful) lessons you were offered, and that you really should not have been born in your best friend’s home, the one with the good parents. Eagles, they would say, are not born in serpent nests.

The Laika understood that waking dreams, such as the recollections we hold about our childhood, are real but they are not true. They are a bad dream.

The waking dreams we have with open eyes are as vivid and engaging as the ones we have in our sleep. What’s more, it is just as difficult to wake up and change the waking dream of our past as it is to wake from the sleeping dream.

But it can be done. And it must be done if the dream you are living is no longer suited to you and you want to exchange it for a better one. In the same way that a mother shakes her son awake from a nightmare, telling the boy that it was just a bad dream, we can learn to wake up and transform both the sleeping and the waking nightmare into something better.

Think about how quickly a nighttime dream can change, how one moment you can be at the beach and the next you are walking through a green meadow in the mountains. We have the ability to change the waking dreams as quickly, but only when we realize that they are no more true than the sleeping dreams. I know this is a big bite of alternative reality that I am asking you to chew and swallow. After all, if it’s so easy, why can’t we change the war in the Middle East, or the violence in America, simply by dreaming it differently? The answer is we can, but enough of us have to be holding the new dream of peace.

We know how to wake up and transform the dream.

If you are unwilling to change the dream, if it takes too much effort, or it’s too uncomfortable, or it seems too difficult or expensive, you want the quick and ready fix. When this happened for the Inka, the Casters of Spells became powerful. People saw them as the easy way they could improve the hand that life had dealt them. You can still see them today, in the marketplace selling formulas for success, charms for finding instant wealth, spells for manifesting the love you want.

To wake up and transform the dream you first have to find yourself in the dream.

Have you ever noticed how in your sleep you dream of people and places but you never see yourself? You never see your hands, your feet, or your face. You perceive everything around you in great detail, and occasionally you might recognize that you are dreaming.

In our waking dream it is the same. We bound out of bed in the morning, catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror, maybe dab a little makeup on or shave, and then dash off to engage people and situations. We only see ourselves through the eyes of others, through their reactions to our words and the approval or disapproval in their body language. But we never stop to find ourselves. We do not even notice our shadow that follows us everywhere we go.

We need to hold a clear mirror up to our face to show us a true reflection of who we are, so we can find ourselves within the dream. Then we can wake up and discover the sacred dream that gives greater significance to our lives.

To find out who you truly are and discover your sacred dream, you need to transform the three corrupt daydreams that have weakened our resolve and debilitated our spirit throughout the course of history: the dream of security, the dream of permanence, and the dream of love that is unconditional.

THE DREAM OF SECURITY

Seeking safety and security is our most primitive, inborn instinct. It prepares us to fight or run away from a perceived threat. When our security is threatened, we no longer think carefully about what may be the best course of action. Like a cornered creature, we lash out physically or emotionally, or we run and hide, shutting down, no longer available for dialogue about what makes us feel uncomfortable. And when we cannot run or fight, we go into paralysis. We bury our heads in the sand and hope that somehow it will all go away.

When we are unable to transform the dream of security, the world is a dangerous place and we feel the need to be on guard— physically or emotionally—all the time. We fail to recognize opportunities because we consider them too risky, and we seek safety above novelty and exploration. On the flip side, in our misguided attempts to transform this dream, we can become overly trusting and gullible, attracting people who see us as easy marks and take advantage of us. When we are unable to wake up from the dream of false security, we stay far too long in a relationship or job we should have left long ago because the familiarity gives us the illusion of being safe. And we continue tolerating abusive behavior from others and destructive habits in ourselves.

All animals have a fight-or-flight instinct, but your set point for security is personal and individual. It was fixed by how safe your mother felt when she carried you in her womb. It’s not psychological, and you cannot reset it on the therapist’s couch. It’s chemical; it’s programmed into the brain. This is the generational curse that is passed down from mother to child in the first few months of life.

Once born, you will spend much of your life trying to figure out where you came from, who you are, and where you are going by gazing at the reflection in the mirror of your family of origin. And while eminently real, the face you find in that mirror is not true, or not the entire truth. Because who you are, where you have come from, and where you are going is much greater than the image you will discover in the mirror of your family. That is because this mirror is tainted by fear, by the need for safety and security. The old adage says it well: “Better a known evil than an unknown good.”

Where Is Safe?

I asked Don Manuel about the prophecies that speak about a time of great upheaval in the world. According to Inka legend, this is part of a cycle of renewal and destruction that happens approximately every 500 years. This is a both terrifying and hopeful prophecy that announces the destruction and renewal of the world. The last Pachakuti, as these cataclysmic events are known, occurred in 1531 with the arrival in Peru of the conquistador Pizarro and the beginning of the end of the Inka Empire.

Don Manuel explained that we are in the middle of another such event, a time of great danger for all of humanity. It’s already started; we can see the signs of collapse all around us, from climate to economics to toxic cities and workplaces.

“Where can one be safe?” I asked him.

“There is nowhere that will be safe,” he replied. “But there will be safe people, who create safety around them simply with their light.”

“Our mother the earth wants her children to be well, to be safe— and she will look after you if you have looked after her.”

I did not understand. “How can the earth keep me safe,” I asked the old man.

“In the same way that she can kill you in a storm or an earthquake, or keep your home from burning when a forest fire burns every house around you,” he replied.

When you understand that your safety is no longer dependent on others or on external circumstances, on gated communities or armies, on forever vows of love or friendship, then you can transform the dream of security.

THE DREAM OF PERMANENCE

Do you recall the first time you realized that you would die? Did you lie awake at night wondering what would happen afterward? I remember as a young boy learning at church that if your parents divorced, they would not be allowed to enter heaven. I agonized over my father being banned from eternal paradise. He would surely be going to hell, because he was divorced when he married my mother. Then I wondered what would happen to me when I died, as I was the child of an illegitimate marriage in the eyes of the church. Where did such children end up?

We all have a moment when we first become aware of our mortality, and that death is always by our side.

When I first met Don Manuel he was already an old man, at least to my 30-something-year-old eyes. Yet he insisted in helping set up camp when we went to the mountains, including lugging heavy pieces of baggage. Whenever I tried to help him he would shoo me away, saying mockingly this was no work for an “educated white boy” like me.

“But I want you to last for a long time,” I complained one time as I tried to take a heavy bag that he had shouldered.

“But I don’t,” he replied. “I’m ready to die today, right now. I have no regrets, only gratitude. You, on the other hand, think you have the next fifty years to wrap up your business here, so you want everything to last a long time.

“The beauty of my life is that I know who I will be after I leave it, whereas you do not have the slightest notion of who you are.”

The old man nodded his head, indicating I should get out of his way so he could carry on with his task.

The dream of permanence offers us the illusion of personal immortality. Death only happens to someone else—someone old and infirm, which we will never become. We enjoy our youthful sense of immortality and invulnerability until the daydream becomes a nightmare, the wrinkles are undeniable, and we realize that we have been fooling ourselves. Life can end at any instant, for this state of being is not permanent—and aging, disease, and death are guaranteed.

When we transform the dream of permanence, as Don Manuel did, we discover that there is life in death and death in life. We realize that being born, growing up, growing old, all in linear fashion —the three score plus that we expect to have—is not the entire picture. The reality is we are born, and born again, and in our sacred dream we travel in the river of time to the future to create the world anew again.

We discover infinity. But don’t take my word for it. Try the exercise in Chapter 7.

THE DREAM OF LOVE THAT IS UNCONDITIONAL

“I know that you like the brain,” Don Manuel said to me. We were sitting around the fire at the Earth Temple in Moray. The sun had just set, our camp was up, and the thermometer was plummeting as it does at high altitude.

“Yes, I do happen to like my brain,” I replied. The old man knew that I had a small research lab at the brain center at San Francisco State University.

“The brain is not where it is at,” he said. “It’s the heart. The brain will get you in trouble nine out of ten times, whereas the heart will always lead you true. The soul is in the heart, not in the head.”

“I know that you have held a brain in the palm of your hand,” the old man continued, “but have you ever held a beating heart? It continues to beat, even when you remove it from the body.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Chickens,” he replied.

“I mean about the soul being in the heart,” I said.

“When the soul rests in the heart you love without conditions, without the ‘ifs’ we barter love with. The brain is fine to navigate through life, but do not make it your destination.”

Soon after we are born, we learn that if we behave in certain ways, we will get a loving smile from our mother, so we do more of what brings on the smiles. On the other hand, if we toss our food on the floor (as babies do) or behave “badly”—say, throwing a temper tantrum in the grocery store—we receive a disapproving frown or a scolding word. Even the youngest of babies can read the tone of their mother’s voice. We learn that approval means we are loved and disapproval means we are not loved. Since we are small and completely dependent on adults, we begin to believe that our very survival is at stake if we do not conform to the behaviors that bring approval and a loving smile.

When we associate love with approval, we will do almost anything to get it. To earn the love and approval of people we look up to or are attracted to, we will do things we do not truly believe in and compromise our values and our being in ways we will later find despicable.

Psychologists have explained that when we were left as babies to cry and were ignored (“She’s just having a tantrum. Let her cry it out.”), we felt as if we were being tortured.2 If we were repeatedly left in distress, we learned that we couldn’t trust ourselves or others. In time, we started to believe that the people we loved were the ones who could hurt us the most. As adults, we ask, “Why does love have to hurt so much?”

Some of us confuse love with sex or with submitting to another’s will or agenda. Or we believe that receiving material gifts from someone means they love us. We then search for someone who will love us without a list of conditions that we must satisfy, without exacting a terrible price for their affection.

When we wake up from and transform the dream of love that is unconditional, we discover that love is who we are, not what we feel. We have love without conditions. We no longer need someone to love, or to experience love through, because we become love.

Our dream of reality is forged by these three fundamental human needs—security, permanence, and love. We all want to live forever, safe and secure, loved unconditionally, never aging or having to face our mortality. We try various ways to keep our daydreams from becoming nightmares—sometimes creative, sometimes hilarious in retrospect. Inevitably, we are faced with having to admit the daydreams have reached their sell-by date. Then we open up to the possibility of a new dream: the sacred dream that at the beginning may not seem real, but is absolutely true.

CHAPTER 6

TRANSFORMING THE DREAM OF SECURITY, DISCOVERING I AM

Before we lived in towns, we found safety and security around the village campfire. The dancing flames kept the dark at bay and the large animals away. For centuries firelight was the only light we knew after sunset, and even today we find pleasure in sitting by the fireplace or from a candle with dinner. For the shamans, fire was not only for cooking and staying warm; it was the living presence of the Primordial Light of the Universe. The sunlight and starlight that had been captured by the leaves of the tree were set free again when the logs were placed in the fire. The light provided a deep sense of safety by dispelling the shadows within which our fears lived.

The firelight eased your feelings of hunger even as your stomach growled. It alleviated your loneliness even as you sat alone, by yourself. You felt accompanied by your ancestors and could sense the faint presence of future generations. The flames stilled your fear even as you knew there were mysterious and powerful forces lurking in the forest around you, and the embers dissolved your longing as you were reminded of the generosity of the Primordial Light.

FINDING YOUR INNER FIRE

I am.

These are two of the most powerful words in our language. Whatever words we place after these two words shapes our reality for the entire day, and sometimes for the rest of our lives. There are four adjectives that keep us asleep in the dream of security.

I am hungry. I am afraid. I am angry. I am lonely.

When the words you place after the phrase “I am” are hungry, afraid, angry, and lonely, you will spend the rest of your days trying to fill the void that they represent.

These are the four emotions you have to purge to transform the dream of security. Hunger (not having enough), fear, anger, and loneliness. These emotions lurk in ancient regions of your psyche, they are vestigial feelings from the time we lived huddled in dark caves with real and imagined predators outside. These emotions will twist your dream of security into a nightmare.

I learned after years of psychotherapy that I had to work hard on what “I am not.” When I am not hungry, when I am not afraid, when I am not angry, when I am not living from hand to mouth, and when I am not lonely, then I will feel safe and secure. I will have enough. I won’t be attacked physically or emotionally by others. I will be loved.

I will be appreciated.

You can spend years cycling through this list of four, working on your anger or finding abundance in order to feel safe and secure. When you achieve a goal, the benefits it promises slip away quickly and you are back to worrying and planning about fixing the next feeling—perhaps your fear—that you think is an obstacle to your happiness.

Shamans go on a vision quest to transform the dream of security. They fast to face their hunger. They are solitary in the desert or the woods for days to confront their aloneness and their fear. And when they meet these emotions face to face, they discover that while they seem completely real, in reality they are not true.

The key for setting yourself free from the dream of security you may be caught in is discovering that while it feels eminently real, it is inherently not true. Each of these emotions holds a false promise of freedom or safety, or an excuse for your shortcomings, if you are only able to overcome them.

If you are experiencing hunger (read: scarcity), fear, anger, or loneliness, ask yourself: “What am I getting out of holding on to this

way of thinking and feeling?” Once you find the benefit you are receiving, it will be easier to let go of the old dream. For example, for many years I felt lonely, even when in the company of friends. Even when I was with a loved one I often felt forlorn that they were not really “getting me.” One day I discovered that I was holding on to this emotion because it allowed me to feel special. I was different. Even if it meant living in a world with only one person in it—me.

Then I decided to transform my loneliness. One morning I realized that I could not dig myself out of a hole.

It begins with asking the question, “Who am I?”

After you discover that you cannot be defined by your name or by your nationality or by your gender—that all of these are real but not intrinsically true—you begin to accept the possibility that what you thought was your identity was only a dream.

“I am lonely,” is not true, I discovered.

After you find that there is no noun, no modifier, no description that

can complete the “I am ,” then you settle for the “I am.” And

then the dream of security will begin to unravel itself.

I AM is the ancient name of God.

One day we were sitting at the old Cafe Excelsior on the main plaza in Cusco. The waiter had just brought us our coffee, an Americano for Don Manuel, an espresso for me. We had been speaking about the centuries-old conflict between the white man and the Indio. Don Manuel seemed to accept much more readily than I the raping, looting, and pillaging the conquistadores had done.

“I was angry when I was a young man,” the old Laika said. “But now I am glad for the conquistadores. They woke us up from our slumber. We were asleep. The Inka believed their wealth and their empire would go on forever. They stopped caring for the people. The dream of the Tawantinsuyo, the Empire of the Four Directions, turned into a nightmare. Do not blame the Spanish—it was our fault as much as anyone else’s. And when the inevitable became evident, the rulers asked the priests to cast their magic spells and sacrifice baby llamas and young children.”

“Pretty despicable, if you ask me,” I said. I reached for the sugar, placed a brown cube on the tip of my spoon, and watched it dissolve

slowly into my coffee.

“You are angry,” the old man said.

“Damn right I am angry. Between the Inquisition of the Church and the conquistadores, every one of your ancestors was persecuted, tortured, or enslaved.”

“You are angry,” the old man repeated. “You are using the tragedy of our people to feel righteous about your feelings. Please do not use the memory of my ancestors to fuel the anger inside you. That is your nightmare, not mine.”

I was shocked and ashamed at the same time. Don Manuel was right. I was using his people to justify expressing a poison that lived within me, my own anger toward the church of my youth.

“The problem is that you do not know who you are when you are not angry, or hungry for things—since you have all the food you want —or afraid, or alone. You keep these feelings in your pocket and pull them out when you want to feel who you are.

“Take that flower over there.” Don Manuel gestured to the park across the street, pointing with his spoon to a large budding rose. “It tells who it is by its nectar and its scent. The visiting bees will take only nectar with them. But you define who you are by the poisons that you call your opinions. And what others find when they come to drink from you is your anger, your loneliness, your desire for more things, or your fear. Your friends are people that share these same feelings. No amount of sugar can sweeten that taste,” he said, pointing at what remained of the sugar cube at the end of my spoon.

HOW WE COME UNDER SPELLS AND LEARN TO CAST THEM

After you experience coming under the spells of others, you learn to cast your own. It begins in infancy.

I know who “I am” because I learned it from my mother and father in the first few years of my life. We all did. If Mom came and fed us when we cried, we felt secure, not hungry, or lonely, or angry.

Your mother, your father, your siblings were the mirror in which you discovered your reflection. As you learned to read the faces and feelings of those around you, you began to learn who you were. You learned to see yourself through their eyes. When you read disapproval, you corrected your behavior until you saw a smile again. When you saw love and Mother beamed at you, all was well in your world. You scanned her face for validation, and when you did not receive it you became deeply uncomfortable.

You might say you fell under the spell of your family.

I use the word spell here for a specific reason. Remember when the Laika retreated to the mountaintops, taking with them the knowledge of how we have the power to dream our own sacred dreams, how we help craft and mold our reality? But we lose that power if we are under the spell of others (or even if we think we are). So just as the lowland Indios relied on someone to cast a spell for their good fortune, for a healthy baby, to avoid a certain death, or to bring misfortune to those not like them, we learn to rely on someone else to tell us who we are like and who we are different from, and who the “others” are.

A child learns from his parents that “Those are not our people . . .” And we begin to believe that the “other” is not as smart, as peace- loving, as educated because they are not enough “like us.” Then we find our love partner and tell them “I love you” when what we really mean is “I love you when you are just like I am.” The big, not-so- funny joke in this is that when we are deep in this spell we know neither who we are nor who our partner is.

After a while, we become convinced that the spell is true. And this can be deadly. In 1992 Clifton K. Meador, M.D., chronicled the story of a man who, along with his physicians, was convinced he was dying of cancer. In the autopsy, the doctors found that his cancer was not at all the cause of his death. Dr. Meador concluded that the man’s belief in his imminent death itself was the cause of death.

The Spell of Your Name

The first time you experience your “I am” is when you learn your name.

For a long time, I introduced myself as “I am Alberto,” instead of saying “My name is Alberto.” I believed I was my name, which was also my grandfather’s name; it was the extension of the story of my family. What I knew about our family history revealed that we were pirates and highwaymen, with an occasional slave owner and merchant on our family tree—not much to look up to, really.

When you say, “I am <your name here>,” you rouse the spells of your ancestors. Some of these spells are about your health and how you will live and how you will die. When you go to your doctor, she asks what your parents died from. Breast cancer, heart disease, dementia—she tells you that your destiny has been cast, that it is written in your family genetics. When you go to the therapist, she shows you that the stories that run in your family leap from one generation to the next, until you become just like the mother or father you vowed you would never become.

Remember the day you woke up and looked into the mirror and exclaimed, “Oh my God, I have become my mother!”?

Well, there is a different reality to wake up to. And I think you know it.

In many Native American traditions, you get to choose your name at the age of puberty so that your destiny will not have been cast by the tales and struggles of your ancestors.

I remember an uncle telling me when I was 13 years old, “Alberto, you stand with your arms crossed just like your papa.” I was horrified when I heard this. My father seemed stern and serious, and I was trying very hard to look relaxed and friendly, but my body language was telling a different story. I immediately decided to change my posture. I did not want others to see me like my father, of all people. I wanted them to see me like myself: cool, friendly, and available.

I had no idea of who I really was. I just knew who I did not want to be like—which is, I suppose, a step toward getting out from under the spell.

Another step is to stop looking for validation in the faces of others. Try this exercise with someone. When they are speaking to you, stop giving them affirming cues. Simply look into their eyes, without nodding in agreement or saying anything, neither approving nor disapproving. Notice how uncomfortable the person becomes when the body language that affirms them is not offered.

When you do not receive validation from others, you no longer know who you are. We will do just about anything for approval, for a gold star in school, for a pat on the back, for our parents telling us how good we are, or how proud of us they are.

In one of Jalaluddin Rumi’s poems he says to his beloved, “For I have ceased to exist, only you are here.” Has your beloved ever said that to you? Of course Rumi is speaking of God, but in our love relationships this quote often becomes “For you have ceased to exist, only I am here . . .”

The greatest form of control we can exercise over another is to deny their existence. This is why prisoners all dress alike in nondescript clothes, for they have ceased to exist as individuals.

Monks in Tibet shave their heads when they enter the monastery, as a sign that they are no longer the children of poor or rich families, or special in any way.

The first thing we needed to be sure of is that we exist, that I am.

And we believe we can only be certain that we exist if we add a modifier to I am.

I am secure.

IT ALL BEGINS WITH THE QUESTION "WHO AM I?"

If you live long enough, you will get to ask the question “Who am I?”

It is a terrible question, because it launches you on a journey into places and experiences that are unknown. You realize that you are not your name, that you are not your family, that you are not your job, or any of your myriad roles in your life. That you hate Brussels sprouts and love the opera is not, I repeat not, who you are. Until you begin to transform the dream of security, you do not have the foggiest idea of who you really are.

But ask the question; this is a step in the right direction.

When my father was in his seventies, he called early one morning and said to me, “Alberto, I have been living someone else’s life. I have tried to be a good husband, a good provider, a good person. But I have no idea whose life I have been living.” And for the next few years after he asked himself that question, he lived his own life until he died. I like to think that my father died at the age of five, but it was a well-lived five years.

When we are young we know that we exist because others acknowledge us with praise or criticism. You acknowledge me; therefore, I am. I exist. Sometimes we remain in a toxic relationship far longer than we should because we are acknowledged for who we are not. We settle for that type of recognition.

When you hear “You are a selfish human being,” that person is really telling you that they see themselves in you, and they do not like what they see. You get into trouble when you believe that if you change for the better, this person will accept you more graciously or become kinder. And when you muster the courage to leave, you discover that you are actually a thoughtful, loving person who had been looking into the smoky mirror all along.

THE MIND IS MAD

Rene Descartes’ famous maxim “I think; therefore, I am” tells us that the “I am” is dependent on our ability to think. Descartes had searched for a factual statement that could not be questioned by anyone. His reasoning went along the lines that if he ever doubted that he existed, since he was the one doing the doubting, this affirmed his existence. In Latin the declaration is “Cogito, ergo sum.”

Thinking, letting the mind chase thoughts one after another, will not give you an enduring or endearing sense of who you are. You need to have one thought and then another to be sure that you exist, so cutting off your train of thoughts can be terrifying. This is why the mind remains so busy chasing ideas one after the other. When I am not immersed in thought, when my mind is still, I might cease to be. Many of us find it so difficult to meditate, to stop the ramblings of the mind, because we believe that we will cease to exist if we stop thinking.

When you transform the dream of security, you discover that the mind is mad—and has been all along. You allow the mind to rest, and being thoughtless, the mind becomes blissful. You no longer need to see yourself through the eyes of others. You become self- referencing. You hold the mirror up to your own face, discovering who you are. You are thrilled with “I am,” no modifiers needed.

The holiest, most sacred aspect of your identity is the “I am.” According to the Bible, the name of God is “I am that I am.” Who am I? I am.

We evolved such extraordinary brains to, among other things, discover the answer to the question “Who am I?” Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 65 million years with a brain the size of a pea, relatively speaking. Nature selects for intelligence, not only for muscle and razor-sharp teeth. Intelligence leads you to explore the question “Who am I?” courageously.

The Eastern philosophers are expert in this exploration of “Who am I?” They understand that the restless mind has to be placed to the side during meditation so that a greater mind can arise. In the Zen schools that practice the koan, riddles designed to help you beyond your chattering mind, there is one that asks, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” When I first heard this from a Zen master, I replied that of course all living creatures have a Buddha nature. I was surprised when the master shook her head at my response. After many failed tries, she finally said to me that the correct response is “Woof”

As you explore the question “Who am I?” you dismantle your intellectual and emotional defenses, allowing yourself to be vulnerable. Facing an assailant with open hands or losing a job or a spouse and knowing you will still exist—these kinds of experiences bring you to knowing “I am.” Become vulnerable, with a soft underbelly like a serpent that has just shed her skin.

You discover the “I am” by releasing the stories of anger, fear, hunger, and loneliness to the fire, because you are not any of those stories. This is why the shamans place all of the tragic stories in the flames. They are releasing the Primordial Light that lies trapped in every one of these tales of horror and pain, just as the light is released from the logs in the fire.

REALITY

We know that the stories of our past are real because they happened to us, but somewhere along the line we began to believe that they were true. More often than not, these stories are an excuse for missing the opportunity for greatness, for why we could not be who we might have been. Remember, you can either get what you want or end up with the reasons why you can’t.

These stories are not true, not a single one of them.

But they are real to you.

Let me give you an example. Andrea was in her mid-30s when she came to me as a student, convinced that her father, who had passed away a few years earlier, had abused her sexually. She had done years of psychotherapy and multiple sessions of hypnosis and discovered that her father had touched her inappropriately when she was a baby. She believed that this violation was responsible for her not being able to be intimate with any of the men that she dated. When she confronted her elderly mother, the woman was taken by surprise. After a few moments, she smiled and explained to Andrea that her husband had lost his job, and for two years remained at home babysitting while she worked as a nurse. Andrea’s father always changed the diapers wrong—when you wipe a baby girl’s bottom you always wipe away from the genitals, to avoid a urinary infection. With a boy this is not a problem.

Her mom was certain that there had been no transgression on her dad’s part. He was simply wiping her bottom the wrong way, and then having to clean her up afterward.

Andrea’s belief that her father had been sexually inappropriate was not true, but it was real. Her body retained a memory of her father’s touch but misread the intention. It was Andrea’s reality, which she clung to with tenacity, because it helped her explain why she could never find the intimacy she sought. In her story she was a victim and had a handy excuse for why she could not have successful relationships.

Similarly, when a patient walks into my office with a terrible diagnosis, I explain to them that their diagnosis is only a story. I tell them that they are not a story, that they are a miracle in flesh and bone. They are not an MRI or a blood test, or what happened to them in the past. And after all, every one of us has a terminal prognosis. (Let me add, just to be clear, that ignoring the story of a diagnosis does not transform it. Finding ways of dealing creatively with the diagnosis—through medicine, healing, and so on—is what we’re after.)

We can change the story, but first we must place it in the fire.

But where can you find a holy fire to perform a ritual of letting go of the old and bringing in the new? You can do this in your backyard, in your fireplace, over a candle, or even in your imagination. The important thing is to remember that every fire burns with the radiance of the Primordial Light. And it is this light that sets you free from the drama of your past. You place in the fire that identity that has become too small for you, the terrible diagnosis, or the story of your upbringing, and take from the light the power and strength to dream your life newly.

Try this at home. Light a candle and blow into a toothpick the story that is burdening you right now, whatever it might be. Then hold the toothpick over the flame until it catches on fire, and imagine that the story is being consumed by the flames.

Shamans speak about it as shedding the past the way the serpent sheds its skin.

And while we’re shedding our skin, we’d better be sure it’s our scales we’re shedding. We can’t transform the dream by borrowing someone else’s story.

Years ago, in Canyon de Chelly in the American Southwest, I dropped in on an old Navajo medicine woman whom I’d befriended over the years. She asked me about my life, and I told her about my absentee father, and how I had always searched for a positive role model for what it was like to be a man.

She nodded agreeably when I finished. Then I asked her to tell me her story. She said, “The red-rock canyon walls am I. The desert wind am I. That child who did not eat today in the reservation am I.”

I was blown away. What a fascinating story, so much better than my story of “boy searching for daddy.”

A few days later I was flying back home to Los Angeles. Shortly before we landed, the man sitting next to me asked me to tell him about myself, and I began: “The red-rock canyon walls am I . . .”

He gave me one of those “this guy’s a lunatic” looks and got up and moved back four rows to the coach section of the plane faster than I could say “desert wind.”

He could tell that my story was a lie, that it had no depth or substance. I had tried to think up a more impressive story than the one I was living, and borrowed a story that was not mine to tell. I lacked the courage to create a new dream. He was not fooled by my fakery.

It wasn’t until I placed my story of anger, of loneliness, of fear, and of hunger for things I thought I lacked, into the fire that I was able to become the storyteller and not the story. I was able to become the cure, not the disease.

The seers of old would build a bonfire to burn their personal history in, and even though the stories remained in their memory, they no longer had any weight to them.

And it all begins with the question “Who am I?”

After you spend a long time discovering that you can’t be defined by your name or by your nationality or by your gender—that all of these are real but not intrinsically true—you begin to understand that what you thought was your life and your identity was only a daydream.

You let go of the need to place something after “I am ,”

because you now recognize it is a complete statement.

You do not need a raging fire to burn all your stories. Even if you took part in the most ornate and powerful ceremony around a fire in a high Andean village, if you only went through the motions of placing your past stories into the fire, you would come down from the mountains the same person who hiked up a few days earlier. Nothing would have changed. You would still not be the storyteller.

You build your holy fire of the “I am” inside your heart. The heart is the great drummer of the body, and you can hold your own sacred ceremony in the quiet of your heart. This is where all sacred ceremonies happen anyway, to the rhythm of your heartbeat.

We set our past on fire so that life will not do this to us by surprise. In the same way that the North American Plains Indians periodically set fire to the underbrush in the forests so a freak lightning storm would not burn the entire woodland down, it is best if we regularly use our stories for kindling, to unburden ourselves from what has been, and light the fire that will make us available to the future.

This practice will set your entire life on fire. It does not mean that your past will magically disappear and you will become a new person overnight. It means that you will realize you are not any of the events or stories that happened to you in your life. You are not the product of an unhappy childhood, or the child of alcoholic parents, or the survivor of a health crisis.

You will become the dreamer and not the dream, the storyteller and not the story.

You will become a safe person, because you have nothing that can be taken away from you, not even your name and your history.

CHAPTER 7

TRANSFORMING THE DREAM OF PERMANENCE, DISCOVERING INFINITY

As soon as you discover the “I am,” the very next day you will recognize that someday, you will not be.

You will cease to be you.

We all have a moment when we first become aware that everything comes to an end—that flowers wilt, that beloved pets die, that grandparents grow old and pass away. Death and endings are inevitable. Even mighty empires crumble. But death does not feel real until you realize that it is not just other people who die. You will soon be gone as well.

As a boy I struggled with my experience of a faith that promised eternal damnation to the heathen and the commandment breakers. Later, as I grew older, I would discover the teachings of Christ about love and forgiveness, but what I learned in church did not help assuage my childhood fear.

Death is always by your side: it is like your shadow, which follows you no matter where you go. And just like your shadow, which you do not notice unless there is a sudden change in the light, you develop the habit of no longer sensing the presence of death—until it arrives unexpectedly to take someone close to you.

If you live in denial of death, ignoring it or seeing it as something far in your future, it begins to haunt you. You see it out of the corner of your eye in your friends who are getting older. Then death becomes a bad dream when it begins to show up in your own reflection in the mirror. If you transform the dream of permanence,

death can become your ally, keeping you from spending precious life force avoiding it in every way possible.

HOW TO TRANSFORM THE DREAM OF PERMANENCE

As soon as you discover that “I am,” you find death waiting for you around the bend. This is one reason so many of us never get over being angry at our parents or at the people who wronged us. It gives us a sense of having the rest of eternity to work on our terrible childhood. Isn’t it amazing to meet someone in their 50s who is still angry at their parents?

How shocking to discover that “I am” exists within the river of time, and that eventually this river will return to the sea, to death, to annihilation. The “I am” turns into I am dead. Finito. No one survives this journey. No one makes it through to the other side intact.

So, the only way to survive it is to become no one.

You become no one by deleting all of the I am this or that stories, and by following your breath to infinity. To transform the dream of security, we release the four toxic emotions. Next, we must release all of the roles we play in life. All of those stories must go, every last one—I am a woman, a man, a parent, a lover, a writer, a shaman, a friend, a mensch—for the only way to wake up and transform the dream of permanence is to discover you are not any one of these.

THE START OF THE EMPIRE

The rise of the Inka Empire was accompanied by the meeting of four technologies. From the Nazca people along the coast, the Inka borrowed the art of weaving and how to fire delicate ceramics. From the Tiwanaku people of Lake Titicaca, they learned the art of architecture and how to work the monolithic stones to build citadels like Machu Picchu. From the Wari culture, they learned to terrace the barren mountains and turn them into fertile gardens. From the Amazon shamans, they learned the journey beyond death into infinity. They learned that we continued on an endless journey through the stars.

I had been meaning to ask Don Manuel about life after death. It is a belief woven into the tapestry of Andean wisdom, invisible to the eyes of the novice yet underlying all the wisdom teachings. How could he be so sure that there was indeed another side, and if so, how did he know that it was better than this one?

We were at the town of Paucartambo, at the foot of the mountains where the Q’ero villages lay hidden between millenary glaciers. We were camping by the edge of the Mapocho River, and the next day we would begin our trek to Mt. Ausangate, nearly a week away on horseback.

“Your maestro was educated by the priests,” he said. Don Manuel and my mentor, Don Jicaram, had been close compadres. But whereas Manuel had been brought up in the mountain villages, my mentor had grown up in a Catholic orphanage and spent his youth sweeping the churches of Cusco. In the summers, he would hike to the Q’ero villages to train to become a shaman.

“Your maestro was obstinate and hardheaded, just like you are,” the old man said. “And he was smart. He noticed that the Church of Rome promised you eternal life, regardless of where you ended up. If you were a good Catholic and made it into heaven, you earned it for eternity. If you wound up in hell, that would also be forever. Regardless of where you ended up, you would continue. You would never cease to exist.”

“It takes death out of the equation,” I ventured. “No matter where you earned your stay, on the beach or on the other side of the tracks.”

Don Manuel looked at me, puzzled. He had never been to the ocean, or seen the beach, or watched television, and there were no trains near his village. But after a moment he understood my metaphor.

“For us it’s different,” he explained. “There is no promise that you will endure or end up anywhere forever. It’s like the jaguars. You understand?”

I confessed that I did not.

“Cats have nine lives,” he said, gazing sternly at me, as if this explained everything.

I said to the old man that this was a metaphor, that once you killed a cat, it remained dead.

“Cats have collective souls, so when they die their kawsay”— which I knew to be their life force, or soul—“goes back to the singular sphere of light of their kind. And so it is with all of the animals, even the ones that are no longer here, like the great beasts, the dinosaurs. Their kawsay continues in the Spirit world.

“Your cat is dead here but remains alive in the Spirit world. But it’s no longer your cat or my cat or the village cat. It’s only a cat. All of its history is erased. The next cat that is born takes a drop from the kawsay and carries it inside itself until it perishes.

“But humans do not have group souls. We have individual ones. When we die, we go to villages in the Spirit world, and we are attended to by shamans dedicated to helping us repair our soul. They are the midwives of the Spirit world.

“We get nine of these lives, more if we are good to others and do not mistreat the animals. You get nine chances to become infinite, give or take a few tries. If you do not discover your own light, your Ti, in these attempts, then you cease to be. Your kawsay becomes food.”

That did not seem to me like a scenario I would enjoy . . . “Food for whom?” I asked.

“Food for life!” Don Manuel exclaimed. “Life feeds on life. Remember when your maestro said to you that we did not come here to grow corn only, that we came here to grow gods?”

I understood. Don Jicaram had told me years before that the earth was the garden where we could grow the seeds of gods within us. Inkari was the example, and left behind a map for attaining our divinity. Man made God, instead of God made man.

You have nine chances to become divine, give or take a few, depending on how good a person you were in your last life. After nine tries you either become a Laika, or you become lunch.

“You know who built the pyramids in Egypt?” Don Manuel asked me.

“Slaves,” he replied, before I could answer. “Your maestro taught me that. He learned it from the priests. The Inka also created monuments built by slaves. I can imagine the slaves carrying stones up an earthen ramp on their backs, sweating, and the priests telling them that if they were good workers, their god would reward them in the afterlife. The Inka did the same. They taxed every village of the empire, making them pay with their finest children. A few were sacrificed to plead with the stars for the long life of the empire. The smart ones went to learn music and weaving and ceramics and architecture. The duller ones lugged the stones up the mountainsides, or served in the army. The Inka discovered that their slaves worked hardest if they were promised heaven. The Spanish conquistadores were masters at this because they promised salvation but also guaranteed damnation if we did not work in the gold mines. And the people believed them.”

“People will do anything to avoid facing their mortality,” I said.

The old man smiled and there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “In reality,” he said, “no one gets out of here dead.”

INFINITY

A promise that you can earn your way into an eternal paradise is a nice daydream. A belief in an end to suffering and a reward in the afterlife can make difficult days easier, but remember: in the end, daydreams, even the most pleasant ones, turn to nightmares. You can become trapped in the daydream of permanence, believing you will live forever in paradise as long as you keep putting up bravely with the unpleasantries of this life, or slaying the enemies of your god and believing hard enough.

As you learned earlier, when we transform the dream of permanence, letting go of the illusion of immortality, we discover that there is life in death and death in life. We realize that our idea of being born, growing up, growing old—the three score plus that we have—is not the complete picture. The truth is we are born, and born again, as we travel in the river of time.

We discover infinity.

In a traditional society, you can discover infinity when you go through the rites of initiation, of symbolic death and rebirth. A woman has the opportunity to go through her initiation when she gives birth to a child and understands that she can create life from her own body. A young man does so with his first kill, which he brings to the village to feed all. Life and death. Inseparable. For us in the modern world who no longer consider childbirth a sacred rite of passage, and who no longer go out into nature to hunt game that will provide for the tribe, discovering infinity is more difficult.

But we have nine goes at it, give or take a few.

THE DREAM OF THE AFTERLIFE

The dream of permanence is a fantasy. In this dream, death is simply a doorway to another reality where we will continue to exist. The “I am” will endure forever into the future, residing in the Christian heaven, or paradise, in a Buddha field, or on Olympus. Our personal immortality scheme helps to alleviate the dread that we would experience were our death to be final.

For a long while, religion offered us a well thought out immortality scheme. If you were very good, you would go to heaven. If you were not such a good person but had redeeming qualities, you might end up in purgatory. And if you were a really terrible human being, you would end up in some hot, unpleasant place. But regardless, you would end up somewhere. You would still be able to state unequivocally “I am here.” It might not be pretty, but it surely beat being nowhere.

In the 20th century the story offered to us by religion about our survival after death became less convincing. We no longer trusted religion the way we had before the arrival of modern science. After all, we’ve confirmed that the earth is not at the center of the universe and that humans and dinosaurs did not walk side by side on the planet 6,000 years ago. Could we trust religion to give us a reliable map to the beyond?

When we no longer subscribe to the eternity scheme being offered by religion, we create a personal immortality project. My favorite one is “I am too busy to die.” Another one is “I have too many open items on my to-do list.” It should become obvious to God that I was in the middle of too many things that were of critical importance.

Another one of my favorites is “But there must be a mistake.” He wasn’t meant to die young in a car crash. The doctor said she could live for years with that cancer.

Others take to science for their immortality project and freeze their bodies, or if they cannot afford it, their heads, until a cure for their condition or for old age is discovered. Still others believe that sometime soon we will all be able to upload ourselves to the cloud and live forever in virtual reality, after we unplug the messy biological body.

As you read this you might think, “This shamanic theory is nihilistic” or “This goes against my belief.” But stay with me as we explore the wisdom teachings of the shamans.

DEATH AS AN ILLNESS

When the sages of old sought to heal disease, they observed that the problem with becoming ill, other than it making for an unpleasant few weeks, was that you could die. Death was inevitable, or so it seemed. As they continued learning about the plants and remedies that healed disease, they also set about healing death.

They tried all the solutions available to them—the plants, the spells, the chants, the ceremonies—and found that none would keep death at bay. Then they discovered that death stalked everyone within time. Time was the problem. Time ran out and all good times, including ours, came to an end. So they set about solving the problem of time.

They discovered infinity.

They defeated death by breaking free from time. Then death became a friend, an ally, a companion that taught you to savor every moment, every breath. Even though the journey was infinite, this moment would never happen again.

Infinity is different from eternity, which is what religions promise us —suffering or ecstasy for all time. Eternity is an infinite number of moments, still trapped within the river of time. Infinity is before time, beyond time. The river of time, eternal as it is, runs through the valleys and meadows of infinity.

THE PARTICLE CONUNDRUM

Everything in the universe exists as either matter or energy. Albert Einstein explained this in his astounding formula E=mc2. When in the state of matter, M, electrons are a particle and occupy physical space. They have weight, velocity, momentum, and acceleration, and obey the laws of Newtonian mechanics.

When in the state of energy, E, on the left-hand side of Einstein’s equation, electrons are a field. They occupy physical space and have energy but are not in any one location (they could be everywhere) and they have no weight, velocity, momentum, or acceleration. They do not follow Newton’s laws. Instead they follow the laws of special relativity described by Einstein. Perhaps the fields we are most familiar with are magnetic fields, such as those of a household magnet, and how they can move the needle of a compass from a few inches away.

Electrons can behave both as a particle and as a field. Humans also have a particle state—our bodies. But we also have a field state, the luminous energy field that surrounds our bodies. Like an electron, the particle version of you is always somewhere. Yet your field can be anywhere. In your field state, your energy extends out to the farthest reaches of the galaxy and beyond.

I am anywhere, and all things.

You can be everywhere, intertwined with and identical to the Primordial Light.

Infinity exists outside the laws of Newtonian physics. For Newton, and for all casual observers of the world, time is separate from

space. You could travel through space, going from point A to point B, but time would seem to travel through you as you grew older each day. Einstein transformed the world of physics when he suggested that in special relativity, the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time are fused together to create a four-dimensional grid called space-time. As I said earlier, the ancient sages called this pacha, as in Pachamama (meaning Mother Earth, but also earth¬time) or in Pachakuti (meaning the one who overturned time). Pacha is the ancient concept of infinite space-time.

Although we tend to think of infinity as related to time, it is not time. Time is a calculable moment that comes before or after another such moment at a given rate or speed or arc. Infinity can’t be contained or limited.

The Laika learned to dream the world into being within infinity, where things could be fixed before they were born into time and into form. They could change the course of fate. When we are in our particle state, believing that we are a body only, it is not possible to perceive and do things that can only be accomplished from our field state, such as to change the destiny of an individual or a village.

In effect, hundreds of years ago, the Laika decided to remain outside of time until the right moment to return. They literally disappeared from the visible world. They stopped taking birth in physical bodies, remaining instead in the field state of limitless possibilities. And now they have taken birth and body again to teach us that we can change the future of the world we live in.

Why now? Because the earth is going through a major extinction event. The lives of all creatures are at stake.

The Laika could step outside of time because they understood how the Primordial Light works. Let me try to describe this. You may be familiar with the seven chakras, the energy centers of the body running from root to crown. Shamans understand that we have two more chakras. One is above our heads, a chakra that is inside our energy field. You often see this energy center depicted around the Buddha or the Christ or other illumined beings. This halo of light is what we call the soul. This is the eighth chakra, the seat of the “I am.”

Then, as shamans know, there is a ninth energy center at the epicenter of the cosmos that we call Spirit. There are nearly 8 billion souls on this planet, but there is only one of us here in Spirit. The Spirit is singular, and everywhere. It is the universal field that we experience as the Primordial Light. It is the ninth chakra.

One of the jobs of the eighth chakra is to guide the growth of our body while we are in our mother’s womb, and repair it during our lives. When we die, the seven chakras upload their information into the eighth—the stories of how we loved, how we forgave, how we

were hurt, who hurt us, all of the “I am ” tales. The eighth

chakra is like a golden egg, bursting with all of the information or imprints from our past. This radiant egg searches for the family we are going to be born into, where we will have the greatest opportunity to learn. The eighth chakra selects your parents, and it is such a powerful force that it will even bring two people together for a single night of love in order for you to be born through them. It’s an unconscious process. You do not have a choice as to where, when, or into what family you are going to be born.

That is, unless you are a Laika or a Himalayan lama.

This is why it is so important for us to clear the imprints from our energy field, so we can break the cycle of unconscious rebirth into dysfunctional families where we will learn through pain and suffering.

The Laika were the children of the light. But so are we. The only difference between a Laika and an ordinary person is that the Primordial Light flows through them without distortion. They could choose the time and place of their return. They stepped outside of time and waited for the right moment to be born. Having taken their consciousness with them beyond death, they continued to gather power and wisdom while in the field state. Alive or dead was the same for them; they were the undying. They were in no rush to be born at a time when the conquistadores were hunting down the witches and imprisoning the Laika or, worse, torturing them ruthlessly. Why waste a precious incarnation?

The rest of us remained inside the river of time, in our particle state, continuing to be born and to die. We were—and are—stuck in a cycle, unable to take our consciousness with us beyond death, and hardly even able to maintain it during this life. Meanwhile we burn through our allotted nine or so lifetimes.

I am afraid of dying. We assuage our fear with the belief that what we do in our particle state—all the different ways we are busy— matters enough that we won’t die.

I think of a quote from the movie Troy. Odysseus is speaking: “Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity. And so we ask ourselves: Will my actions echo across the centuries? Will strangers hear my name long after I have gone, and wonder who I was, how bravely I fought, how fiercely I loved?”

And to those questions, I say, ultimately, no—unless we wake from the dream of permanence, befriend death and our own mortality, and discover the true meaning of our infinite nature.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

We see that life ends—for animals, plants, others. But somehow in our dream of permanence and immortality, we are convinced that death will never happen to us. As teenagers, most of us can’t grasp that we will die. Drink one too many beers and drive way too fast on a slick road with a group of friends cheering us on. No problem! We’re sure we’re immune to death.

It’s like growing old. We know that everyone grows old, but are surprised when we look in the mirror and notice a wrinkle or gray hair that was not there yesterday. There has to be a mistake. This is not supposed to happen to me.

And then it does.

All of the achievements of humanity—from the pyramids of Egypt to the magnificent temples in Machu Picchu to our modern skyscrapers—can be seen as a fantastic attempt to dull the dread of our mortality. There is even a school of philosophy that asserts that all of humanity’s great architectural works are an attempt to blunt the blow of death. It’s as if I may be claimed by death but my works will survive.

When I was very young, I asked my grandmother, “Where do we go from here? Where will I go?”

I was terrified that I would cease to exist, that Alberto would no longer be around, that I would no longer see my dog again after it died. Even at that young age I wanted to endure beyond this life.

Legacies can be enjoyed by others in the future—others who may or may not care about the story of who was behind a building or a work of art that lives on. To create something for the ages is understandable. Who wouldn’t want to be remembered forever? But the dream of permanence keeps us from experiencing the most beautiful aspect of life, which is its transience. Some butterflies live only for one day. Some cacti bloom only for a few hours in the night. And this is what makes them so exquisite. A moment of sunshine on your face, breakfast with a loved one, a child’s smile. This moment will never happen again. This breath I am taking is precious because it exists in me only for an instant. If we spend much of our time worrying about what the future will bring and whether we will leave a legacy fitting to our inflated sense of self, we fail to notice the moments of our precious days.

When we transform the dream of permanence, we can love the instant and be present in the moment fearlessly. We can even make death our great ally, letting it remind us to be aware of what we are experiencing now and not get lost in dreams of better days to come when we will get our reward for all our hard work and sacrifice.

The shamans of the Himalayas, and later the Buddhists in Tibet, believed in transforming the dream of permanence and offered teachings on impermanence and taking our consciousness beyond death. They called this the Phowa.

TO WAKE FROM THE DREAM AND TRANSFORM IT

To wake up from the dream of impermanence, we have to discover what our personal immortality project is and let go of it—toss it in the fire.

We do this by asking the question “Who dies?”

Alberto will die.

Alberto in this body, which is around 60 percent water and made of 70 trillion cells, of which 40 trillion belong to the bacteria that live within me (the flora in the gut and skin), will return to the earth. It will become food for millions of microbes, will become part of the earth and the trees and the mountains and the streams.

Alberto will not continue. He will die.

I will lose this name as I have lost so many other names that I have been known by. I will shed this story as I have shed all the other stories I so carefully tried to preserve, to fix, to repair, to relish, and to enjoy as long as I could.

But my light will continue. This is what is known as the light body. It is the eighth chakra. It will continue in a journey to infinity, one with the Primordial Light yet not lost within it; it will not vanish.

You will never be who you are at this moment ever again. At the end of your life your light body will separate from your physical form and go about the task of revisiting the stories from your past. You will begin by calling on people you loved and people who hurt you to say your good-byes, to offer forgiveness, to try to say you love them and you forgive them.

As an important aside, I want to add that it is very difficult to say I love you or I forgive you from the field state. It is best to say those things while you still have a physical body, as you shed your stories and transform the dream of permanence.

The stories you have not shaken free of while you were living will continue to haunt you after you are dead. This is why it is so important to transform the dream of security in its totality. Then you will recognize that you are not any of those stories, and that none of the terrible stories from your life left their mark upon you, because while they were real, they were not true.

Next time you place a log in a fire, notice how the flames are setting free the bands of sunlight that wrapped themselves around the trunk of a tree as the earth spun around the sun. Similarly, when we die we also set our light free. Our physical bodies, the ashes, return to the earth. What endures is our light.

And just to be clear, we do not have a light body. It’s the opposite. Our light body has a physical body that it inhabits for the short time we are on this planet. The “I am” endures. Not as attributes, characteristics, achievements. But as essence. As a luminous egg, your eighth chakra, free and clear of all imprints that lead you forcibly to another birth and a life laden with tragic stories of love and loss and despair.

Wait a minute. Doesn’t this sound just like the tale the conquistadores told the Indios? Isn’t this just like the Christian heaven? Well, yes and no. First, the Christian heaven was not available to the Indios, because it was a well-known fact in the 1500s that neither Indios nor women had souls. Preaching to the Indios was considered a form of sport, as you needed a soul in order to be saved. Incidentally, this is also the excuse that was used to work the Indios in the fields like animals, since like the animals, they did not possess a soul.

Second, the Christian heaven was closed to non-Christians. Third, it opened only at the end of time, after the Day of Judgment at the end of days.

The Laika thought that this would be a very long time to wait.

And lastly, the Laika did not go anywhere after they died, they went everywhere.

How do I know that this idea is not just another immortality project, less complicated than any of the others but essentially another way to avoid facing death? How do I know these teachings are not simply religion repackaged?

Simple. You can discover this yourself, and it will make all the difference in your life. You do not have to take anyone’s word for it. It is verifiable if you choose to do the experiment. The experiment is called by many names, including meditation.

Many of us have tried to meditate and then stopped. We were too busy. Why were we too busy to spend a few minutes a day? One reason is that when we stop being busy even for just a few moments, we are faced with the reality of our time running out.

When you begin to meditate, rest your mind on a single point, such as a flower or a candle, or on your breath—or on any other

object of focus, according to the technique you like to use.

After a while, let these questions arise naturally: “What dies?” and “Will I die?”

At first these questions will make you feel terrible—maybe sad, regretful, and angry. But soon after you ask them, or better yet, after they ask themselves, because the questions are unavoidable, you will feel a tremendous sense of relief.

If you await the answers long enough, you will discover your infinite nature, the one that never entered the stream of time, that was never born and will never die. Meditation is a universal practice, found in every culture but perfected in the East.

The Laika developed a form of meditation called stopping the world. They would sit quietly in nature on a beautiful or stormy day, and say to themselves, “I am my breath.” They would inhale and follow their breath into their body, exhale, and follow their breath to join the mountains and the wind.

Eventually they would become their breath and be able to ride the wind anywhere they chose, to visit in their imagination the four corners of the world.

Try this, if you can make the time for it. And, if you cannot make three minutes a day for this experiment, you are probably too busy to plan your upcoming journey into infinity.

“I am my breath.”

Follow each breath as you inhale deeply, pausing at the top of the breath and resting your mind there for a moment. Then follow your breath to the exhalation, pausing for an instant as it turns again into an inhalation.

This practice will help you discover the beauty of impermanence. It is what makes life beautiful. That flower that you noticed yesterday morning is gone today. The snow in the mountains will soon melt and find its way to the sea.

You will never have this breath, or this kiss, or this thought, or this laugh ever again.

Remember: when you wake from the dream of permanence, you discover that there is life in death and death in life. How magnificent.

You discover your infinite nature.

CHAPTER 8

TRANSFORMING THE DREAM OF LOVE THAT IS UNCONDITIONAL, DISCOVERING FEARLESSNESS

We all want to be loved unconditionally by another, and we search for this other all our lives. But the love of another always comes with a long list of conditions.

Several years ago, I asked Don Manuel to speak to me about love, for I had never seen his people be affectionate with each other like we are in the U.S. From what I observed, the Indios did not hold hands or kiss in public, even though mothers doted over their babies, whom they carried bundled up next to their bodies. But I had no idea what love meant for grown-ups.

We were on day two of our hike to Mt. Ausangate, and we had broken camp early in the morning. I was riding Hirshell, a horse I had bought for my daughter when he was a pony and she was six years old. I had made sure he was well fed and had plenty of hay during the winter, and he had grown into a sleek and strong animal nearly 15 hands tall. Don Manuel was walking alongside me; he refused to ride, as the horse was the animal of the conquest. He would change his mind years later in his 80s, when it became too arduous for him to hike up to the Q’ero villages.

“Love is only for the brave,” he said. “Frankly, I recommend you stay away from it. You are too soft to endure love for very long.”

I disagreed with him, explaining that I had been in love numerous times in my life, and knew the pain and the ecstasy of the feelings.

“That’s not love, that’s romance,” he said.

“Love is like a mill,” he explained, pointing toward the entrance of a dilapidated adobe cottage. In front of the house was a batan, a flat stone with a shallow depression in it that had been used by the owners as a mill for grinding corn. The moon-shaped handle, the una, was nowhere to be seen. We were in an abandoned hacienda that had thrived perhaps 50 years earlier. The roof of the structure was long gone, the clay tiles taken by neighbors, and all that remained were the crumbling walls.

“All the people from this hacienda are gone, the wells dried out, the earth parched. All that is left is the earthen walls, and they too will collapse soon.”

“So how is love like a mill?” I asked the old man.

“My great uncle worked on this farm. He was a field hand for the owners. He would return to our villages in the summer and report on the activities of the Viracochas. He and others before him brought with them the sickness. Thanks to him we are alive today.”

I recalled how the conquistadores defeated the Inka with “guns, germs, and steel,” as Jared Diamond explains in his brilliant book by that title. The primary “germ” was smallpox, which took the lives of millions of Native Americans. The Q’ero had developed resistance to the pox after travelers like Don Manuel’s granduncle had brought the disease to the mountain villages and the survivors had developed immunity. Even though his people had experienced no contact with Westerners, they had been afflicted by the illnesses of the West for centuries.

“But what about love . . .” I repeated.

“We are people of the corn. This is how we thrived for millennia.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few purplish kernels.

“We have hundreds of varieties of corn: blue, black, yellow, red . . . and we are like the corn. Love comes to harvest us and pluck us from the dry husk, which is fed to the pigs. Each kernel is full of light. But the light inside has to be set free. So we take the corn to the batan.

“Love grinds you down,” he explained. “It cracks you open and breaks you out of your shell, so you no longer recognize who you are. You become like a fine dust that can be blown away by the wind if you are not careful. Love then mixes you with a dash of spring water and pummels you, kneads you, and then places you on a hot stone by the fire to bake, so that you can become like the corn bread in the sacred feast of the Inti Raymi.”

“I’ve experienced that,” I mentioned to Don Manuel. I was thinking of my recent divorce, and how painful that had been. I had felt the heat of the fire and been singed by the flames.

A northeasterly wind had begun to blow a cloud of dust in our direction.

“You know little about love,” he said. “You are like a kernel of corn that got too close to the fire and exploded, like a canchita” (popcorn).

“You are proud, you are a doctor, you have a position at the university, you are writing a book. All of these important jobs keep you from love. When you are ready, love will come and separate you from your tasks, which are your husk, and grind you down so Spirit can knead you into a new being. Love will cook you until you start crisping a little at the edges, like the corn bread. Everything else is romance.”

“I have to disagree,” I said, dismounting from Hirshell and leading him by the reins.

“Of course you do,” the old man said. “You believe you need another person, a woman, to find love, and you keep looking for that right person. But love is in here.” He tapped his heart with his closed fist.

“Love is what allows the luminous warrior to live without enemies in this world or the next. It does not mean you do not have battles. Sometimes you cannot avoid conflicts. This is useful when you are visiting the invisible world and you meet adversaries that are best to dodge.

“I know that you got divorced recently,” he went on. “And that the woman that you once loved with all your heart became the person that turned your children against you. She became your enemy.”

That’s not true any longer, I thought to myself. I had gotten over that phase; now I only felt sad and sorry for my loss.

“So when it comes to battles and avoiding them, what about when you meet a nasty creature in one of the shamanic netherworlds?” I

asked.

“You love them,” he replied. “After you have been baked by the fire of love, you can offer them a feast of your own light. They have no defenses against love, and you have nothing that you need to defend any longer, not even your life. But you can only do this after you realize that your light cannot be taken from you, that it is infinite, because it is the Primordial Light.

“Then you can love your neighbor like you love yourself . . .” He smiled. “Your maestro taught me that as well. I think it is a good maxim, don’t you? But if you want a Laika practice, try to love your enemy as you love yourself. Every morning when the sun rises over the horizon, I say a prayer for the conquistadores.

“This is love. Everything else is barter, like in the mercado where the women sell vegetables. I give you potatoes, you give me carrots.”

We had reached the edge of a plateau, and I could see the river a thousand feet below us. We would have to lead the horse down a steep rocky trail to the riverbed below.

“But what if I do not want to become like corn bread?” I asked Don Manuel. Somehow the image was not very appealing to me, even if it brought to mind the poetry of Rumi, where he writes that love will hollow you out so you become like a reed for the wind to blow through to make the music of God. Hollow reed sounded so much better than a corn tortilla.

“Then you will decay on the husk,” the old man replied. “Or become food for the birds. The grape must be turned into wine. Otherwise, it rots on the vine.”

THE FIRST LOVE

Love is the most powerful emotion we will ever experience—even greater than fear. From infancy, many of us learn that love is something that we have to earn. To survive our childhood, we learned the tune we had to dance to in order to receive approval and recognition. As we grew we were delighted to hear our father say, “I am proud of you,” and we worked even harder to hear those words again. And that felt good. And then we wanted more.

Because love is such a powerful force, when we learn early on to associate it with approval, we will do almost anything to get it. We will do things we do not truly believe in and compromise our values in ways we later find despicable so we can get approval, which we think of as love, from people we look up to or are attracted to.

When I was a child, I believed there was only so much love to go around in my family, that it was rationed and that we had to compete for it or make onerous payments for it with our behavior. My sister did the ballerina routine. That seemed to earn her more kudos than my collections of lizards.

My father only told me once that he was proud of me, and I believed at the time he did not really mean it because it rang hollow in my ears. For many years, I was disappointed. Later in my life, after he had passed away, I learned to appreciate his words. How could he be proud of me when I was not pleased with myself?

It happens to all of us. Our love becomes conditional, satisfying a need to know that I am real, that I exist, and that I am okay. We later discover that we can control others by withholding our approval, and to demand exacting payments in exchange for a loving glance or word. It’s amazing how early babies discover they can control their world by throwing a tantrum. Have you ever met a friend’s three- year-old who is the bully of the family, and whose frown or laugh sets the mood of the entire house?

Love that is accompanied by a long list of conditions—often lying just beneath the surface—has shaped our upbringing. The love you learned from parents who were not in touch with their own feelings, and from adults caught in the dream of “I am angry, lonely, hungry, or afraid” is not real love.

TRANSFORMING THE DREAM

Transforming the daydream of love that is unconditional requires you to discover fearlessness. You become fearless through taking

three actions:

• Give up the fantasy of finding your perfect soul mate.

• Love who you are, even with that nasty streak.

• Give up the idea of a god who loves you only when you do “what’s right.”

Let’s look at each of these.

First, you must break the habit of searching for your “true” soul mate. This habit is so deeply ingrained that even after we are married we continue scanning the horizon in case the person we were really meant to be with should suddenly appear. And if they do appear, and you lock eyes and recognize each other, then you will risk everything, including your marriage and family, to join them in a journey into a nightmarish realm.

This person is often someone you tortured in a former lifetime and you are irresistibly attracted to in order to repair, heal, and mend from these misadventures. When you meet them again in this life, you feel as if you have known each other forever (you have), that you have been waiting for them your entire life (you have), and that you have finally found someone you can be happy with (how wrong!).

I am convinced that this is why monks and nuns take a vow of celibacy—they are choosing to stop learning and growing along the hazardous path of the kind of love that you fall into or out of. Meanwhile the rest of us continue searching for the mate who is our perfect fit, our twin flame who totally gets who we are, who knows us better than we know ourselves.

The Laika believe that we reincarnate to learn specific lessons and to be of service. We are irresistibly attracted to people we failed to learn a lesson with in the past.

One of the oddest experiences I have had with this was a client whose health had deteriorated very rapidly. Bruce was in his mid-30s and a successful entrepreneur. Every joint in his body had begun to ache in the few months before we met, and he could hardly get out of bed in the mornings.

Many of Bruce’s family members had been exterminated in the Holocaust, including his grandmother Sitka. In our therapy sessions, he expressed his rage toward the Nazis and the atrocities they had committed against his family. He explained that he had begun to dream about her regularly, and had decided to visit the concentration camp in Poland where she had been interned. This was a work camp, where the inmates did forced labor, and when they were too weak to work, they were exterminated.

When Bruce arrived at the camp he was shown the mass graves where the inmates had been buried. He spent a long time praying on one of the sites where he thought his grandmother’s remains might be. In his reverie, he sensed Sitka near him, comforting him, letting him know that everything was okay.

That night, back at his hotel, Bruce had a dream that his grandmother appeared and led him back to the camp. She was in her early 20s, but was thin and sick. There were workers digging a long trench with their bare hands. It was winter, and they were shaking with the cold. Then Sitka and a dozen others were lined up at the edge of the trench, and she was shot in the head by a young SS trooper. Then Bruce ceased being the observer and felt himself become the Nazi officer, holding the pistol to the woman’s forehead, and squeezing the trigger.

At that point Bruce woke up in bed, bathed in sweat. And he thought he could hear Sitka’s voice saying to him, “It’s okay, all is forgiven . . . ”

Shortly after this incident Bruce found his pain was gone. He came to my office and explained his discovery that in his former life he had been the Nazi SS officer that had executed his grandmother, and felt he had been forgiven by her. He felt his journey to Poland had been exactly the healing he needed to learn the lesson from that past lifetime.

There are many other possible explanations for Bruce’s healing, yet he was convinced that it had to do with a former life of his, and the irony that he had reincarnated as the person from the past that he despised the most.

It is not unusual to be drawn into a love relationship with a person we hurt in the distant past in an attempt to heal. The problem is that instead of healing an ancient wound, most often we end up reinjuring each other. That person who once burned you at the stake for your beliefs in a Christian or pagan god, and whom you confuse for your beloved, ends up lighting the kindling under you once again. And you’re left wondering why you are choking from the smoke of the relationship.

When you are sure that you have met your dream lover, your soul mate, and every cell in your body is quivering with excitement, run away as fast as you can. Unless, of course, you are ready to sign up for another lesson in the school of emotional storms.

There are many people in our lives besides soul mates—partners and ex-partners, families, co-workers, friends, and not friends. We need to give up the dream of perfect, unconditional love with all of them—parents on forward. We never got the best parents, only the right parents for us. We never got the best spouse, only the right spouse. The sooner we recognize this the faster we will be able to move on to more interesting engagements with the world.

Learning to love the people you do not necessarily approve of or agree with is a challenge, but they are often our greatest teachers. They hold the mirror up to us so we can see hidden and neglected parts of ourselves in them. If you can love the people who bring out your worst behavior, you will discover that you no longer have to be like the organ-grinder’s monkey, performing your act in public in exchange for a token of love or admiration.

Who are the people you least approve of, that you have the hardest time being with? You are likely to find they are your own family members, the ones who voted for the wrong candidate for President. This is why family reunions are so challenging—but they offer a great opportunity for loving those we disagree with, and even those who withheld their love from us when we wanted it.

As for your soul mate, accept that you will never find that person perfectly designed to your romantic specifications. They do not exist.

But know that you can become the right partner. This will only happen once you stop looking for him or her.

To discover fearlessness and end the dream of unconditional love, the second action you must take is to love who you are, even with that nasty streak.

This is really tough, as you are the only one who truly, really, knows what a screw-up you are. You are the one who knows how many times you turned your back on opportunity, how you cowered in fear when you could have risen in valor. Be fearless as you look at yourself. You are what you are. Take a deep breath and accept that for better and for worse, you are you. No one else is going to give you this kind of “unconditional” approval without extracting a sky-high price.

You can spend countless hours in therapy trying to understand why you do not love yourself, why you are such a tough personal critic, why your father never expressed his love to you, why your children reject you. But dissecting the past will not lead you to love yourself.

Love that part of your body that really bothers you—the crook in your nose, the extra roll on your belly, the double chin . . . As you love it, others will grow to love you in your totality as well.

Analyzing your childhood is helpful only for a little while. Then you must muster the courage and determination to get on with life—and with love, beginning with you. Start by accepting your flaws and faults, loving every new wrinkle you see in the mirror in the morning (okay, I know this is tough . . .), and holding everything that happened to you in your childhood and your life as a lesson and a gift. Then you can stop pretending to be someone you are not. You can drop the mask of perfection together with the mask of the village idiot. Both are false; they are the masquerade we adopt in order to hide from ourselves, and keep the world from seeing us as we really are.

Show yourself in all your flawed beauty. You no longer hide anything from the world or from yourself. Try this: reveal to someone an embarrassing incident you have been hiding for a long time, something you are terribly ashamed of. As soon as you no longer care that it is a secret, no one else will either. Please don’t misinterpret this as permission to dump the story of your awful past on everyone—we do far too much of this already. Simply share one incident that shows your flawed beauty.

How do you practice loving yourself? Cook a scrumptious meal for yourself when you are alone. Know that you have a heavenly guest coming for a feast: you! Don’t make a peanut butter and banana sandwich next time you are by yourself and hungry. Prepare a healthy feast. It need not be elaborate. Light a candle, set some flowers, bring out the linen napkins, know that you are the one you’ve been waiting for and you are coming to dinner tonight.

Dress as if you love yourself, eat as if you love yourself, forgive as if you love yourself, act as if you love yourself. Unconditioned love is a habit that has to be developed. You cannot get to it by chewing on the reasons why you can’t. You can get to it by breaking the habit of conditioned love, which is the kind of love we learned while growing up. You break this habit by loving yourself unconditionally.

Then you will be ready for the third action in discovering fearlessness: give up the idea of a god who loves you only when you do “what’s right.”

Like many people, I was raised in a religious tradition—Roman Catholic. From a young age, I was told God loved me, but . . . there was a catch.

God was a loving father who made sure you obeyed his commandments, didn’t eat meat on Friday, obeyed your dad, did chores for your mother, and never told lies or stole cookies from the cupboard. That God who made your body certainly did not want you to use it for its natural pleasures.

I know a woman who was raised Catholic who credits her initial questioning of her faith to reading a story when she was quite young. She loved reading about saints’ lives—that is, until she read the story of Maria Goretti. Maria was a maid on an Italian farm in the late 19th century. One day when she was working alone in the kitchen, a farmworker came in and tried to rape her. Instead of succumbing, and most likely getting away with her life, she fought back. He stabbed her. She became a martyr and was declared a saint, one of

God’s favored. This was a god who, it seemed, loved his children better dead than alive.

All theistic religions teach that you should believe in a god who loves you only when you are doing what’s right, making sacrifices— even killing someone or dying a martyr. Going to war on the side of your God: that one has always puzzled me. I remember reading about the Children’s Crusade in C.E. 1212, when nearly 30,000 Christian children aged 10 to 15 were shipped to the Holy Land to battle the Saracens and liberate Jerusalem. Most were captured and enslaved long before they reached their destination. Is this not a form of child sacrifice?

The Inka also practiced human sacrifice, periodically sacrificing one or two of the most beautiful children in the sacred mountains, in a ritual known as Kapaq cocha. Today as the high Andean glaciers are melting, we are finding the mummified remains of these children, who at the time were considered emissaries sent to the stars to try to change the fate of the empire or the drought that was causing a famine. These sacrifices were performed by the high priest, called the Willaq Uma, who was not a Laika but a priest of the Inka state religion.

To transform the dream of a god who loves you conditionally, who does not accept you in all your flawed beauty, you must first experience your connection to all of creation, to the Universe, to Spirit. We are all One in Spirit. The Lakota prayer of mitakuye oyasin —all my relations—conveys the power of our interconnectedness with all beings.

LOVE IS

When you no longer need to experience love through a lover or a mother or a child, when you can love the people you disagree with, and when you can celebrate yourself with all your gifts and faults, when you no longer need to barter for love and can bask in the love of Spirit, then you have unconditioned love. Then you no longer need anything to make you happy. You can be happy for no reason at all.

Then love simply is. You recognize it as the warp on which the fabric of the universe is woven. You are the weaver, Spirit is the wool, love is the weft. Long before we used the metaphors of science, of vibration and frequency, we used the metaphors of weavers. The weft are the long threads on a loom over and under which the threads of the warp are passed to weave a fabric. Even the Greeks personified the Fates as weavers who spun the threads of your destiny.

Love is not only a feeling. The sages believed that love is the singular force in the universe, that all of creation arises from love, and that every beautiful thing you create in your life comes from love. Love is a force that you cannot escape, like gravity. It is ubiquitous yet invisible. It exerts an irresistible pull on us, leading us to acts of courage and foolishness beyond our wildest imagining. But unlike gravity, which you cannot do anything about—you cannot easily levitate, for example—love is a force that you can use to co-create with the Primordial Light. When you discover this, you can go about dreaming the world into being.

THE FIFTH FORCE

The Laika were consummate observers of nature and discovered that all creation was made by four powers. Modern physicists, too, recognize four forces that rule our physical universe. The first is gravity: everything falls to earth. The second is light, which is the universal constant and the nature of stars. The third is the glue that holds atoms and molecules together. The fourth is the fuel of the stars. In physics, they are known as the four fundamental forces— gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and the weak nuclear force.

All life, from grasses to insects to whales to humans, is spread by DNA, which is made of four bases represented by the letters A-C-G- T. We discovered the four nucleic acids that make up DNA only 70 years ago, so the shamans of old did not know the language of modern genetics. But they understood that all living beings, including trees, eagles, and wolves, were our brothers and sisters. We all share the same four-letter code of life.

The Laika described this universal code of four with the names and faces of four Spirit Animals: the serpent, the jaguar, the hummingbird, and the eagle. They were totem spirits through which you could learn the language of creation and take part in creating the world. (Notice that for indigenous peoples the important element is creating, not “the Creator.”)

The serpent knows how to shed the past and practice beauty.

The serpent also brings you the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and in India is known as the creative power of the kundalini. The serpent shedding its skin is the symbol of transforming the four toxic emotions and discovering the “I am.”

The jaguar knows the ways beyond death and into infinity. The jaguar shamans were the ones who had defeated death, and remained alive whether in a body in a physical birth or in the field, potentially everywhere. The jaguar is the symbol of the practice of fearlessness.

The hummingbird teaches you to embark on the great journey, in the same way that hummingbirds migrate from Brazil to Canada every year, despite seeming not to be built for such an extraordinarily dangerous and arduous flight. Hummingbird brings you the gift of courage, of biting off more than you can chew, of taking on extraordinary challenges.

The eagle brings you the gift of spreading your own wings and seeing life from 10,000 feet up with clarity and precision. Eagle teaches you to put the cart way before the horse, to look at the possibilities before you look at the probabilities and the reasons why something cannot work out.

The Laika described the four great power animals in their mythology and legends. But these animals are much more than the stuff of fairy tales. Symbols not only represent things; during ceremonies they are equivalent to the things themselves. The eagle is not just a symbol of freedom and of flight, for when you summon it in a sacred way, it bestows its power upon you. We hear the legends of shamans who, like the eagle, were able to fly through the air, to track lost objects or people in the rain forest with the skill of the big cats, or even become invisible for a time. And after they became good at these magical feats, after they mastered the superpowers that came with deep knowledge of the forces of creation, they were able to dream the world into being.

But to do this they needed to learn the fifth force.

Love.

WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH LOVE

I was once again with Don Manuel in the ruins of Machu Picchu, the Inka Citadel of Light. We started hiking from the river below before sunset, and it was nearly dark when we passed the Temple of the Moon midway up the mountain. Ordinary tourists typically take buses up the winding road to the entrance to the archaeological site. But my group was neither ordinary nor tourists. I was with a dozen medicine men and women, and we were breaking into the ruins to do sacred ceremony in the temples built by their ancestors. The law forbade Indians from entering Machu Picchu to hold their rituals. The government did not want to jeopardize the considerable revenues it earned every year from visitors to this archaeological site. What if the descendants of the Inka wanted to stake a claim to these ancient ruins? Banning rituals fostered the illusion that the site was simply of historical interest.

My group was hiking in cover of darkness. I was the only white man and the only one with a flashlight. It was as if the others could see by the dim light of the crescent moon—or perhaps they had some inner sense I did not possess. When I tried turning my light off,

I would stumble and trip on the rocks. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have worried much about that; I have spent much of my life stumbling through the Andes Mountains. But this was dangerous—we were hiking along the edge of a cliff with a sheer 2,000-foot drop to the river below.

The moon was high in the sky by the time we reached the Temple of the Pachamama, a gigantic stone propped up on its side on a plaza. The rock face seemed to trace the outline of the distant mountain range. Archaeologists say that this was the temple of the Virgins of the Sun, the acllas of Machu Picchu. Our ceremony would take place in the square.

One of the women used a stick to trace a large circle on the ground. Then Don Manuel assigned roles to each person. There were four positions, arranged on the four cardinal directions. One person would be in the South and represent the serpent. The young woman selected was given an oiled boa skin that she placed around her neck, like a scarf. An old man in the West draped a jaguar fur over one shoulder, while a woman in the North put on a manta, a shawl, with hundreds of hummingbird feathers sewn into it. In the East, another shaman strapped the desiccated body of a magnificent condor onto his back.

A dance began. One by one, each person would take a turn twirling in the place of the serpent, then move to the West and drape themselves with the skin of the jaguar, then the North and place the manta of the hummingbird around them, and then the East, with the condor on their back. Finally, we would end up in the very center of the circle.

I noticed how sinuously the young woman with the boa moved, eyes closed in a private dance, absorbed by the power of this animal. Then the call came to rotate, and she was unable to break free of the grip of the sensuous serpent. Don Manuel had to step in and remove the boa that had slid down to her shoulders and spray flower water in her face to bring her back.

“It’s easy to be seduced by the power of any one of these animals,” he explained. “In the South, we can get caught in the spell of the sensuous. In the West, the jaguar can snare us with its power. And some of the Laika of old succumbed to the temptation of using this power for their own gain exclusively.

“In the North,” he went on, “hummingbird can trap you in a fascination with yourself, so that the world seems to spin around you and you become the center of creation. Hummingbirds are fiercely territorial and can forget that there is enough nectar to go around for everyone. And in the East, the eagle or condor can be enticed by greed. The condor has such mighty wings that it can fly a few hundred feet into the air with a young llama, drop it on the rocks, and come back a few days later to eat it after it has fermented. Remember, condors cannot feed on fresh meat. But some are so greedy that they will pick the fattest llama in the herd and try to take flight with it, and end up crashing on the ground and losing their meal.”

Don Manuel was telling me that each of the Spirit Animals had its own gift and its own trappings. Each represented one of the great forces of the universe, and you had to master all four—without becoming trapped by any of them—to become a luminous warrior. Then you had to step into the center of the circle and embody all of them. And this was the fifth force, love.

“It is the power of love that organizes the four forces,” Don Manuel explained. “It will allow you to do the seemingly impossible. That’s how you test the power of your love. You pick a seemingly impossible task and you do it.

“But if you are not in proper relationship with the four Spirit Animals, then you will experience love only as a feeling, a fleeting sentiment. It will wash through you and leave you empty, longing for more.”

I did not understand. I asked Don Manuel for an explanation.

“Find what is most difficult for you to love and love it,” he said.

He explained that their theme that night was to bury the sword of the conquest and allow the tree of life to grow from it. They were loving the conquistadores, the men who raped their mothers and looted their temples. They were thanking them for the lessons they brought to their people, harsh as they were. And they were healing the evil of the conquistadores that lived inside each one of them.

Find what is most difficult for you to love and love it.

This is the practice of the luminous warrior—not to vanquish your enemy, but to love that which is most difficult.

This has become my personal spiritual practice.

SETTING LOVE FREE: UNLEASHING THE FIFTH FORCE

For the shamans, love is not a feeling, although most of us experience it as such. It is a force. It’s what the flower feels for the morning dew, the jaguar for the deer it hunts to feed her cubs. It is the rainbow after a rain.

Love is the force that can help us see the truth amid the lies.

And above all, love is the power of the Primordial Light, which is cognizant, intelligent, wise. We can interact with the Primordial Light, what we call Spirit, and it responds to us. This is the contract that the Laika has with Spirit. You call, and Spirit responds to you every single time. What an extraordinary relationship we have with the cosmos. (Spirit, by the way, is not separate from the cosmos. It is the cosmos.)

To enter into this contract with Spirit, we have to understand that it is a two-way agreement. Spirit responds to you 100 percent of the time, and when Spirit calls, you answer, not 50 percent of the time, not when you have enough money or when the kids are grown, but 100 percent of the time. You are showing up for Spirit. You can be counted upon to partake in the work of creating. The Primordial Light can flow through you unhindered. You become accountable.

The only language that love knows is truth. The practice for co-creating with the divine is the practice of truth—speaking the truth, hearing the truth in the words of others, and seeing only the truth.

You no longer search for the truth, but rather you bring truth to every situation you find yourself in. When you practice truth perfectly, then everything you say becomes true, becomes so. This is how you dream the world into being.

While it may not be easy at times to tell what is true, we can almost always tell when something is false. We can smell a lie. We register it in our gut. And love does not tolerate lies. Lies will kill love, and there is nothing sadder or more tragic than the death of love. When love perishes, the universe becomes still and lifeless. And while there are many kinds of lies, there is only one kind of truth.

It is known as absolute truth.

Absolute truth is the truth that can be known but not told. The minute you speak this truth out loud, it is no longer true: it is but a semblance of the truth, a shadow of the absolute truth. Our task is to find it and experience it for ourselves.

The ancients relied on the four Spirit Animals to discover truth. They found that each of the totem animals described one level of creation. They believed that the entire cosmos had been created in four different levels, each level enfolding the one below it, like Russian nesting dolls, and each holding a portion of the absolute truth.

The first is the level of serpent, which is the literal, material world. It is the world of chairs and tables and physical bodies. In this level, the truth is that everything is what it seems to be. It is the world of appearances, where the Primordial Light is the densest. Everything seems to be solidly real. It is the level where most of us live most of the time, where we drive the kids to school and go to the grocery store and have an argument with our spouse and make up later. In this level I believe that I am sad, that I am angry, that I am lonely, or that I am afraid.

The second is the level of jaguar, which is the world of the mind, of thoughts, of ideas, of science, and of neurosis and stress. In this realm the truth is that nothing is only what it seems to be. The Primordial Light is less solid, less intertwined with matter, but full of shadows. You have to look carefully to notice that the king has no clothes, that there is much hype in the world, and that the news is not really news but opinions disguised as facts. This is not new. It has always been this way. The manipulators of the truth are the Casters of Spells, who try to convince you that if it is real, then it must also be true, which it is not. In this level I discover that “I am.”

The third is the level of hummingbird, which is the world of the soul, of myth and legends. It is the realm of dreams that we enter into every night, where time passes differently, and where we think it is perfectly normal to have a conversation with one of our loved ones who passed away years ago. In this realm the Primordial Light

shines clear and strong and there are no shadows to confuse us— other than our own.

In this level the truth is that things are what they are: no more, no less. Reality simply is, and you realize that there is no use arguing with reality because you will always loose. We accept that our waking reality is as much of a dream as our nighttime one, that life is truly a dream, and we embrace it naturally and easily, just as we did with our dream where we were sailing in a galleon across the sea. In this realm, the Primordial Light is at its brightest and most available, and we see the true nature of all reality as luminous. In this level you discover love as a force.

The first three realms are real, but they are not absolutely true. They are only relatively true, within their borders. Our dreams are true while we are asleep. Our ideas are true while in the mind. Even great ideas like democracy are more beautiful as a concept than as a practicality. And our literal world is true when we are awake and have to drive the kids to school and get to our job on time.

Only the fourth level, of eagle, is true in an absolute sense. The world of eagle is the realm of the Primordial Light, the essential, fundamental nature of reality. In this realm, everything is fluid and formless. Here is where all reality is born, and where it dissolves back into light. In this level I discover the vastness of the Primordial Light, and that I am not different from it.

The absolute truth of the eagle world of energy does not deny the reality of the world of serpent, of the physical body. You still need to feed it, wash it, exercise it, and make it happy. Yet we know that we are not only our body; we are also our mind—in fact, our mind is who we are more truly than our physical form is. And there is nothing more terrifying than the idea that we might lose our minds to one of the illnesses that afflict so many people today.

As you continue your exploration into the world of Spirit, you discover that you are not your mind; you are your soul. And while you have a mind, you do not have a soul. Your soul is the one who has a body and a mind. When you realize this, you take up residence in the realm of hummingbird, where things are simply what they are and have always been.

When you enter the realm of eagle, you discover that your soul was simply a luminous vessel, a cup that allowed you to be filled with the Primordial Light and organized you into a biological miracle made up of cells, bacteria, blood, bone, and flesh. You are much more than your soul; you are the Primordial Light of Ti.

SOLVING PROBLEMS, CHANGING THE WORLD

When you want to dream the world into being, you have to do so one level above the one in which a problem was created. You change a problem in the physical world by intervening at the level of jaguar, of the mind, with a novel and revolutionary idea. We can’t end war with more war, but we can end it with a vision of peace. We can’t create health with medicine, but we can with healthier lifestyles.

Everything that happens at the level above the one where you are operating seems like a miracle. And after you rise to the higher level, the miracles of that realm become commonplace.

You can best solve a problem of the mind at the level above it. When you are suffering with anxiety, depression, or stress, you can best address these at the level of the soul, through an experience of the Primordial Light. It’s amazing how many psychological problems are solved when you have an experience of the vastness of the cosmos, of the language of creation, and of the miraculous principles that organize all of life.

And when your soul is aching, you can best resolve this at the level of Spirit, by having an experience of recognizing that you and the Primordial Light are not different, and you always reside in infinity.

CHAPTER 9

DREAMING THE WORLD INTO BEING

I believe that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who are dreamers and those who are being dreamed. You can’t stop dreaming, because dreaming is the nature of reality. Life is a dream, like the song says. But you can awaken inside the dream and begin to dream courageously. The dreamers are able to transform their experience of reality. The dreamed only complain about it, saying that “Someone really should do something about this . . .”

Practice living consciously inside the dream, where you are fully awake even while you sleep, instead of being fully asleep even while awake, which is the ordinary state of most people. The danger in remaining asleep is that we end up inside one of the default dreams of our times: living in a world where we rely on the police and gated communities for our safety, where we cling to religion and endless to-do lists to keep death at bay, and where love terrifies us and hurts all the time. Or where we are haunted by the health issues of our family of origin, growing old and sick the way our parents and grandparents did.

Wide awake, we realize that life is indeed a dream and that we can transform it, that we can dream with our eyes open, and that we have the power to have original dreams.

DREAMING A DIFFERENT DESTINY

Imagine that your life is a solid cord of light extending backward into the past for many lifetimes. In the now, today, this cord separates into countless threads from which you weave the future. Each thread represents a possible future, one of your many destinies. Some of these futures are more likely than others. One thread leads to your waking up to discover that you have won the lottery, but that is not very probable. Follow another thread and you’ll see it leads to your dying young from heart disease. That is a more likely future for you if this condition runs in your family.

The threads where you have the greatest freedom are your destiny. The strands where your health or your love life has been selected for you by your genetics or your upbringing are what we call fate.

The likelihood of one of your possible futures becoming the one you end up with is illustrated by the bell curve. It depicts your odds of a particular future—such as in this example in which you can see the odds of a person becoming a top-performing athlete. Seventy percent of the population will turn out to be average athletes, 10 percent will be very poor ones, and 20 percent will be exceptional.

Odds are that you and I fall in the fat part of the curve: we are average performers in the athletic field. If we want to improve, we have to practice diligently and redesign our lifestyle so that we might possibly become exceptional athletes.

Now imagine that this curve shows the risk for Parkinson’s disease. Seventy percent of the population has an average risk of developing this disease. If we want to lower our risk of Parkinson’s, we have to design our diet and lifestyle for health. The beauty is that you can change your destiny by making different lifestyle and dietary choices than you might have if you were resigned to what you think of as “fate.”

When you dream your world into being, you break out of the fat part of the bell curve. None of us wants to become a statistic. We want to be exceptional, to lead extraordinary lives. And we want to age well, and die healthy. That requires us to make a conscious decision to live differently and better our odds.

To live an exceptional life, you have to transform the dreams that keep you trapped in mediocrity at the center of the bell curve, repeating the nightmares of your family history.

The Laika speak about a silver book we were all born with, one that came written with the challenging story of our life. In this book our fate has been cast and the story line is unoriginal. When you pick up your pen and begin writing in the golden book, the one that is all blank pages, you start dreaming an original destiny that was never permissible by your birthright.

The most powerful way to start authoring the golden book of your life is to practice the giveaway. Ask yourself: How can I give? How can I bring beauty and healing to others? How can I practice being of service to all beings? You avoid the life in which you get to retire early or make the most money or have the biggest house, because that life is a dead end.

This dream may not be the easiest one to manifest. On the contrary, these dreams are often filled with tests. If you select the dream that leads to the summit of the holy mountain, you are going to have to ford raging rivers, become lost in the forest, and hike along the edge of a precipice. If you select the dream that leads to the meadow where the cows are grazing, you will gaze at the distant mountain longingly, feeling the call to test yourself but too busy scraping the cow dung from your boots to move forward toward your calling.

The Greeks believed that three Fates delivered your destiny on the day of your birth. Clotho spun the thread of your fate, while her sister Lachesis handed it to you, and the third sister, Atropos, cut the thread with her scissors. The length of your thread determined the length of your life. The Fates were deities, and there was no way to change your fortune: You could only grow to accept your lot in life and carry your burden with as much grace as you could muster.

The shaman believes that when you become the author of the golden book, you cease being a character in the dream, beholden to a script that you did not write. You are the master spinner of your fate. You can change anything, as long as you do it from the level above the one where you observe it.

FROM THREE DREAMS TO ONE SACRED DREAM

Remember that whatever dream you hold about reality, the universe will prove you right.

Transform the three dreams that keep you from your destiny and you will find yourself in a sacred dream. You will look with awe at the flower that will drop its petals tomorrow and rejoice at the butterfly that lives for only one day. You will discover that there is death in life —that everything that lives will perish, and find excruciating beauty in this. You will relish every moment, love the colors and creatures on your path, admire the light on the horizon at dawn. You will observe a beautiful young man or young woman, and not think, Soon you will be old and withered. You will enjoy the beauty of youth and the wisdom of age. As you rub your eyes to wipe off the cobwebs of sleep, you will love without keeping score and find security in knowing that you are always one with the Primordial Light, woven into the fabric of the sacred dream, and a powerful dreamer.

Transform the dream of permanence and you discover infinity, where you have always dwelled, where you are always safe, where you are surrounded by love. You discover that everything in the universe exists as light longing to acquire form, and once in the shape of trees, grasses, whales, and humans, death is the light longing to return to the formless realm. Next time you are walking at night with a flashlight, notice how the light travels through space invisibly. When the beam strikes a tree, you see the shape of the tree trunk. Only when the light strikes a solid object do we see it. In our world of matter, light is only a reflection. In the invisible world, light is everything there is, and there is nothing to obstruct its path.

Nothing is permanent. This is the beauty of life. Death is the great mystery that you can embrace as an ally instead of fear as an enemy. You can invite death to become your friend, to walk by your side and help you live and love fearlessly within the sacred dream. Death will remind you that “not dying” is not the same as living. It will remind you that the real security is found in your being a part of the sacred dream. You will no longer have to hide from death and deny the impermanence of life. You will find you are no longer afraid of visiting someone in a hospital or comforting a dying relative just in case death might be contagious.

Death is always by your side because you are living in the river of time. Transform the three daydreams and you will recognize that there is life in death: everything that dies will be born again. Knowing this will give you a sense of peace.

You have learned how to transform three dreams, but the snake sheds all of her skin at once, not bits and pieces of it. It is the same with these three dreams. When you transform only one of the dreams, you are likely to become stuck in another dream.

Say that you awaken from the dream of security: you no longer seek safety in insurance policies, in burglar alarms, and in your doctor’s office, where you go to find out if anything is wrong. You discover that you can become a safe person and that you can be trusted and counted on. Yet you remain trapped in the dream of love that is unconditional and the dream of permanence. You can find yourself looking for love in all the wrong places, searching for potential partners who are attracted to you—and you will attract those who see you as the answer to their dream of security. They sense that with you they will be safe, and will demand perpetual security in exchange for their love. They will keep score. They will withdraw their love if they fear you might leave them or betray them in any way. Sensing this, you will start to keep a tally of who is more loving, who gives more and who takes more.

Then, when your partner ceases to feel safe with you, their dream of security will extinguish the love you were sure would last forever.

If you have transformed the dream of security and the dream of love that is unconditional but not transformed the dream of permanence, you may find yourself in a relationship that promises you a sense of refuge from the aging and death you feel stalking you. You might say to yourself, I should stay, for this person will always look after me, or think, This job really stinks, but holding on to it is better than being unemployed and poor. Caught in the dream of permanence, you will feel convinced the headache you are experiencing is a sign of a brain tumor, or the quickened pulse you feel after hiking up a hill is the sign of an impending heart attack. You will find yourself worried about the rash on your arm being skin cancer, or you will avoid a medical checkup altogether, not wanting to get any bad news.

When you transform the dream of permanence, you relish each moment, without fear. You are able to remain within the sacred dream, not falling back to sleep and into the nightmares that have kept you from your destiny.

CREATION UNFOLDING

The sages believed that nothing exists in the world until there is someone present to witness it, to tease it out of the web of infinite possibilities, in the same way that a sculptor might tease a horse out of a block of granite. Without you and all the other creatures, there would be no creation, as there would be no one to witness it. What we learned in biology—that humans are the end product in a long chain of evolution—is only half of the truth. When you wake up to dream the world into being, you discover that the long chain of evolution and the universe itself are the product of our being here to witness them.

This is called future causation.

We created the conditions that made life possible on earth 5 billion years ago. All of us, including the birds and the whales, are responsible for this act of creating. And the process of creating is not complete, so we dream the world into being each day. Life would cease to be, the earth would become a barren lifeless rock drifting through space, were we to stop dreaming the world into being. For creation to unfold, we must continue to dream.

Events in the past influence the present, yet for the dreamer, the future can influence the present as well. We can be the product not only of our family genetics and dramas, but of who we are becoming 10,000 years from now. The future can reach back to us like a giant hand and lead us to a great destiny, where humans live in peace with each other and with nature, where the rivers and the air are clean, where your health span can equal your lifespan.

Together, we dream the entire world into being. It’s not enough for you to conjure up a parking spot on a busy street, or a better job or a nicer spouse or a bigger house. When you dream up a parking spot, you get a parking spot. It is not difficult to do. When you dream up peace on earth, you get peace in your life and the lives of those around you, even if you are in the middle of a war zone. This is why practitioners of all traditions pray for all beings, including their supposed enemies, and not just for what they need or want that day.

Every day, we can participate in making the dream of creation manifest. We dream together, creating the world anew in each moment.

CONCLUSION

THE DAILY PRACTICES OF THE LUMINOUS WARRIOR

Choosing to incorporate the three practices of the luminous warrior into your life will help you to transform your dream and stay awake within it. You will be able to weave your life with the threads that hold your highest destiny, not simply the ones that promise to make the dream a little more comfortable.

As you transform your personal dream, you participate in choosing a new vision for the world. As you wake up, you can help others wake up.

You are where the action is!

“What can I do for you?” or “Can I be of help?” or “How can I be of service?” are powerful icebreakers to the practice I call the giveaway.

As you begin the giveaway, it might be a good idea to read through each practice here first thing in the morning.

The daily giveaway will help you transform the three dreams, remain awake, and dream your world into being. Improving your lot in life is not the ultimate goal. Although it is likely that you will experience greater happiness and well-being, the goal of the luminous warrior is transforming the world by bringing beauty and healing where there is ugliness, alleviating the suffering of others, and creating peace where there is conflict. You will no longer want to have the best in life but be the best for life. You will no longer want the best job in the world but the best job for the world.

The three practices you will learn are not subtle: they do not wake you up gently with a brush on the cheek or a pull on your toe. They are more like a bucket of cold water in your soul. Be grateful for them even if you find them difficult!

TRUTH: THE FIRST GIVEAWAY

Speak your truth. This is the first practice because hardly anyone is willing to speak the truth anymore. The truth has become inconvenient. Do not be afraid anything bad will happen to you if you speak your truth and live your truth. On the contrary, you begin to wither when you do not live truthfully.

Share your truth freely. Give it away by example, by living it.

As you speak your truth, remain aware that there is “the truth” (which is generally something that someone wants you to believe) and then there is your truth. Remember that “the truth” of history and the truth of facts are the truths of others. Your truth is born from your experience, from how you suffered and how you healed and how you forgive and how you love.

Your truth is in your heart. Do not look into the hearts of others for the truth, for that is their truth, not yours. Look inside your own heart and honor and celebrate the truth that you find there, scary as this can be.

Your truth is mysterious, hard to articulate, subtle. It insists that you perform acts of courage and deeds of valor that are sometimes scary.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, it’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction—fiction has to make sense. Your truth does not make sense, because it is the truth of the heart, not the truth of the head. When your truth begins to sound rational and coherent and logical, be careful, for this may be a sign that it is not the truth of your heart.

“The truth”—the truth that you have been taught to value over your own truth—has encouraged you to lead from strength, to hide your weakness, to show your best face, and to break a leg while putting your best foot forward.

It is exhausting.

Your truth encourages you to lead from vulnerability, to expose your soft underbelly, to take off the emotional armor. It does not try to hide the unpolished faces of your crystal, or to put on Superman or Superwoman outfits. It is yielding yet courageous; soft yet unstoppable. Your truth allows you to be who you are, take it or leave it.

It is refreshing.

When you speak your truth, recognize the power of the word. Remember that in the beginning was the word, and words hold enchantment. Words become things. The words you use to describe your reality become your reality. Words such as angry or sad will make you so. The same goes for words like joy, grace, and peace. As an experiment, speak these words, right now: “From now on, I speak and live my truth.” Observe how it feels to say this firmly, out loud. Truth.

Your truth will not allow you to collude with “the truth” of popular existence. The consensual “truth” is an agreed-upon story that we did not write. There are many consensual truths tangled together, but mostly, they come down to this: We are the chosen people. We have privileged access to the one and only truth. The consensual “truth” is not true. It is tribal.

When people are speaking badly about Catholics, you are a Catholic. When they are being anti-Semitic, you are a Jew. When others speak critically about Muslims, turn to the East and bow to Mecca. Practice fearless truth.

Speak up loudly when you notice that the king really is not wearing any clothing. Speak your truth and stand for what you believe in, even when you think it might risk your career, your marriage, or your reputation. Speak freely, knowing that you are safe and that the universe will conspire to keep you so.

Be true to your word. When you break your word, you turn your truth into a lie. Your truth is when your head, your heart, and your soul speak in a single voice. When there is congruence between who you say you are and who you know yourself to be, you are practicing truth.

Remember that the facts are not the truth, and that reality, while real and factual, is not necessarily true.

When someone speaks a hard truth, thank them, no matter how difficult it is for you to hear.

The ultimate practice of your truth is to put the cart way before the horse and dream of the possible before you weigh the odds against it succeeding. This is what it means to live fearlessly within the sacred dream. Take on the impossible and leave the possible and the ordinary for the dreamed.

BEAUTY: THE SECOND GIVEAWAY

See beauty everywhere. This is the second giveaway because hardly anyone sees the beauty for more than a fleeting instant. We are all searching for the beautiful but are conditioned to see ugliness, to be fascinated by the bad news, to get sucked into someone else’s drama, to become gossips and pessimists.

Point out beauty to everyone. Let someone else explain why it will not last, why it is sure to fade away with age, why it’s not as important as that mess just over there.

Let people believe that you are na ve, that you are not in touch with reality, or that you do not watch the news.

When you practice beauty, you have time in your life, because beauty takes you into the timeless. Beauty requires stillness, pausing, stopping in your tracks at the sight of the new blossom in the almond tree or by the cactus flower that only blooms for one night.

Seeing beauty is not a passive act. It is one of the most active and empowering deeds. By perceiving only beauty you are dreaming beauty into creation. When you see beauty above all else, you are transforming the map you carry of reality, and that most likely you inherited from your parents when you were young. When your internal maps are filled with beauty, so is your outer world also infused with splendor.

As you practice beauty you get to taste infinity and touch your own immortality. You will have time to laugh, time to meditate, time to help others. When previously you had no time, you will now have all the time in the world.

Perceive beauty even when there seems to be only ugliness around you. When everyone sees only darkness, point out the flickering flame that lies hidden in the shadows.

Bring beauty to every moment by smiling sincerely. Give others your joy. Give others the gift of seeing the beauty within them and within every situation. Beauty will seek and find you. As you recognize beauty in others, acknowledge it in them. Speak words of beauty, including the words Thank you. Find something beautiful in the person you are speaking with, even if it is a difficult and challenging conversation.

The sages discovered that creation is not complete, that on the seventh day the Great Spirit was not finished, and said, “I have created the butterflies and the whales and the eagles. Aren’t they beautiful? Now you keep at it.”

The power of beauty is the ability to co-create with the Primordial Light. Beauty is the colors, reality is the canvas, and you are the brush with which you splash the light of many shades and dream the world into being.

This is your sacred task, to complete creation with beauty, in beauty, from beauty. Give your beauty freely unto others, and beauty will surround you until the end of your days.

LOVE: THE THIRD GIVEAWAY

Ultimately your love is the only thing that is truly yours to give. Love is not a funny feeling at the pit of your stomach when you are with someone you like. Love is the most powerful force in the universe. And the universe always mirrors back to you everything that you offer it. The only way to have more of everything you need is to give your love freely.

Then everything is bestowed upon you.

Once you transform the dream of love that is unconditional, you will be able to practice love without conditions, without a scoreboard.

Unconditioned love is wild and fierce, still and tempestuous. It demands nothing yet requires everything.

Love is conditional when you feel others are responsible for your pain or happiness. Then you will barter for their love, and offer yours to the highest bidder—the person who promises you the most approval, comfort, or joy. After a while, you realize you entered into a bad agreement, that you were cheated and shortchanged, because love can only be given away. It is at the heart of the giveaway.

It is easy to love those who love us. When you are able to love one who will never love you back, you will discover true power. Who is that person who does not deserve your love? Who is the most loathsome human being you know or have heard of? Can you find something to love about them, simply as an exercise? Love does not excuse the atrocities committed by a tyrant—just the opposite. It allows us to heal that part of us that despises ourselves for being just like the villain.

One of my favorite quotes on love is by Kahlil Gibran: “And God

said, ‘Love your enemy,’ and I obeyed him, and loved myself.”3

Love is a state of being. You can be in love, and it is fun while it lasts, or you can become love, which is much richer and more interesting, and infinite.

Love is the essence of the Primordial Light. It is the source of its infinite generosity. When you become love, you immediately heal your separation from the source of all things visible and invisible.

Love is the practice of paying it forward, without expecting anything in return. Paying it forward means being grateful even when terrible things happen in your life. It means giving thanks when there’s nothing apparent to be thankful for. It means being appreciative when life dishes out the bitter herbs as well as the sumptuous feast.

PAYING IT FORWARD

Paying it forward is sometimes thought of as making deposits into your spiritual bank account, where you have credits that you can spend when the going gets tough. The true giveaway is when you practice paying it forward without expecting anything in return.

You can do anything if you give up your need to take credit for it. Even the slightest expectation of any kind of reward will ruin the act of love you are performing, of being absolutely grateful for no reason whatsoever. Give freely, without attachment to whether you will receive your reward on Earth or in heaven. Give without needing to post about it on social media and pay attention to how many likes, shares, and comments you get.

Let the power of the Primordial Light move in its own mysterious and marvelous way.

We have many references in the English language to the power of the light. In fact, every language on the planet has abundant references to the light. The Hopi prophecies tell of the rising of the fifth sun. The Hindus speak about enlightenment and attaining the luminosity of Spirit. The Buddhists in the Himalayas talk about acquiring a “light body” and say that you can take it with you on your journey to the invisible realms. When you attain this light body, your protein-based body is totally consumed and disappears in a flash of brilliant light. You become like the phoenix that is consumed in the flames. The only difference is that for the light body practitioners, there are no ashes left behind.

While I am certain this is a real practice among the Tibetans, I always thought the light body was more of a metaphor than a true description of reality. Then Don Manuel explained it to me. Andean masters believe that once we understand that everything in the universe is made of light, including ourselves, then we can have an experience of our luminosity. And if you happen to have this experience toward the end of your life, you not only take your consciousness with you beyond death, but you are able to combust the physical body and turn it into fuel for your journey to the highest realms.

Achieving this phoenix-like act requires the most profound understanding of the nature of energy. Even your vocabulary has to change so that energy is no longer something you have, or you consume, or when you use up, you replenish. Energy is who you are at your core. Your essence is pure energy, and the purest form of energy is light. Yet as long as you believe that the energy you experience is your energy, that the light you feel is your light, you will continue to be trapped within your dream.

When you realize that there is no difference between your light and the Primordial Light, then you can move freely between the visible and the invisible world. You can go from one side of the

equation E=mc2 to the other with ease.

I have come to believe that the Laika were able to dance on top of the equal sign of Einstein’s famous equation. They helped ideas be born from the invisible world of energy, and they helped the dying return back to the world of the Spirit. This was the day-to-day work of the shamans.

Our work as luminous warriors is to craft a new dream that will transform our world so we can birth a sustainable destiny for ourselves and for the Earth.

You do this by transforming the old dreams so you may live within the sacred one, dreaming a new world into being each moment.

What do you have to lose?

ENDNOTES

1. Kambiz Kamrani, “Earliest Known Archaeological Evidence of Americans Found in Monte Verde, Chile.” Anthropology.net, May 8, 2008, https://anthropology.net/2008/05/08/earliest-known- archaeological-evidence-of-americans-found-in-monte-verde- chile/.

2. Darcia Narvaez, “Five Things NOT to Do to Babies.” Psychology Today, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/moral- landscapes/201404/five-things-not-do-babies.

3. Kahlil Gibran, The Broken Wings (New York: The Citadel Press, 2003).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First I would like to acknowledge the Mesoamerican calendar makers—the men and women who mastered the art of stepping outside of ordinary time. In their memory, I have used the Aztec Calendar Stone in the cover. This gigantic calendar announced the end of the fourth world and the start of the fifth sun.

This book is not the stuff of serious anthropology, as it is a collection of intimate chats and myths. Yet I have been assisted and inspired by serious anthropologists, including Loren McIntyre, Marlene Dobkin de Rios, and Wade Davis, to whom I am grateful.

Credit for the conception of this book goes to my longstanding editor and dear friend, Patty Gift, at Hay House. She recognized the value in the wild tales and mountain conversations with my aging mentor, Don Manuel Quispe. Nancy Peske and Jan Johnson helped me polish the final draft, and Sally Mason-Swaab made the final steps in the birthing of this volume bloodless and relatively painless. This project would have never happened without them.

Lastly, I want to thank the shaman wisdom keepers from the past, the ancient ones who first ventured beyond the shores of the known to explore the depths of the river of time, and hide there the treasures that we are discovering now in our moment in history.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alberto Villoldo has trained as a psychologist and medical anthropologist, and has studied the healing practices of the Amazon and the Andean shamans. Dr. Villoldo directs The Four Winds Society, where he trains individuals in the U.S. and Europe in the practice of shamanic energy medicine. He is the founder of the Light Body School, which has campuses in New York, California, Chile, and Germany. He directs the Center for Energy Medicine, where he investigates and practices the neuroscience of enlightenment. Dr. Villoldo has written numerous best-selling books, including Shaman, Healer, Sage; The Four Insights; Courageous Dreaming; Power Up Y our Brain; and One Spirit Medicine.

Website: www.thefourwinds.com

Hay House Titles of Related Interest

YOU CAN HEAL YOUR LIFE, the movie, starring Louise Hay & Friends (available as a 1-DVD program, an expanded 2-DVD set, and an online streaming video)

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THE SHIFT, the movie, starring Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

(available as a 1-DVD program, an expanded 2-DVD set, and an online streaming video)

Learn more at www.havhouse.com/the-shift-movie

JAGUAR IN THE BODY, BUTTERFLY IN THE HEART: The Real-life Initiation of an Everyday Shaman, by Ya’Acov Darling Khan

KINDLING THE NATIVE SPIRIT: Sacred Practices for Everyday Life,

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SHAMANISM: Awaken and Develop the Shamanic Force Within, by

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WINDS OF SPIRIT: Ancient Wisdom Tools for Navigating Relationships, H ealth, and the Divine, by Renee Baribeau

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