Balance and Aesthetics in the Andean World
by Tom Best and Americo Yabar
“When we propose looking to intact traditional cultures for the kind of balance and aesthetics which will guide us in creating personal culture, we are implicitly making a claim, namely, that there is a wisdom to the organization of traditional cultures which does not exist in our society.” from Turtles All The Way Down, by Judith Ann DeLozier & John Grinder
The last time I saw Mircea Eliade was in 1981. Surrounded by professors of anthropology, psychology, physics, and religious studies, he sat in a faculty lounge at the University of Colorado talking about the evolution of culture heroes in the United States. With hands crippled by arthritis, he dipped into a battered leather briefcase and, like rabbits from a hat, drew forth brilliantly colored drawings of the new mythic heroes of post-industrial America. Spiderman, Captain America, The Silver Surfer, The Hulk... all the Marvel Comics super-heroes had surreptitiously crept into his briefcase and, presumably, into the collective unconscious of the United States. His unvoiced implication, that we have become a nation of adolescents with comic book dreams, echoes through the years to the recent visit by the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to the White House. Now, in 1995, I share Paul Simon’s lament: “I don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard. ”
Mircea Eliade’s monumental scholastic treatise Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, has been instrumental in popularizing both the word “shaman” and the vibrancy of a world-view that predates literacy, agriculture, and the domestication of animals. Eliade borrowed the word “shaman” from the Tungus people of central Siberia because he recognized that their ‘healers’ and ‘medicine people’ epitomized the life path and abilities of traditional and aboriginal healers worldwide. He “discovered” and codified a cross-cultural phenomenon, shamanic consciousness, that pervades our world.
This ‘archaic state of being’ has been ignored or actively suppressed in technological societies, since it requires a relationship with life that is not dependent on money, external authority, linear time, self-importance, or the primacy of human beings as the crown of creation. Fortunately, for those of us who struggle with the unwieldy legacy of Descartes and Newton, genuine practitioners of these “archaic techniques of ecstasy” are with us still.
The qualities of shamanic consciousness are many and varied. Rather than talk about them, I’d like to introduce you to Don Americo Yabar, a Paq'o (shaman) from the Q’ero people of Peru. The Quechua-speaking Q’ero live in the central Andes at elevations above 17,000 feet. They have been the keepers of a shamanistic spiritual tradition that has been largely untouched by the Conquest and the ravages of colonialism .
In these excerpts from transcriped video tapes, Don Americo Yabar expresses the nature of the “ balance and aesthetics ” to which Grinder and DeLozier referred in our opening quote.
Don Americo Yabar: World-View from 17,000 Feet
(translated from the Spanish by Ricardo Figueroa)
" One of the most essential things of being on this planet is meditation. We normally do not meditate. Meditation carries within itself the will, the intention, of the action of being in contact with oneself, with the world, and with the cosmos. Kids are the greatest meditators of all. Grown ups do not meditate. We are fixed completely. We put on our obsessions like a suit of clothes and wear them as if they were our meditation. And then we become habitual in this approach to life, and life carries on like the wind. Then there is no longer time to truly meditate. Meditation becomes a posture. I see lots of people putting their legs over their neck to meditate and the truth is they are not meditating. They have become huge mental constructs attempting to force their conscious minds into an explanation of what they think they are doing. This kind of life is invariably fickle.
The mountain lion goes to a place and finds his fields of energy to pee, to eat, to sleep, and to be in contemplation of the world. He does this in a position of correct relationship with the mother earth. When you become the mountain lion, you incorporate in yourself the spirit of the mountain lion. Like a mountain lion you will move. It is going to be your ally. If you can incorporate the spirit of the eagle, you will have a way to project your spirit that will be just natural for you.
I want you to understand that this is the work we are going to do...all our lives. The path I propose has no going back. Going back is not possible because of the natural dimension this path contains. It is a path that expresses the sensation of a mountain lion facing the world... and the childish joy that each one of us has inside. The central core of this dynamic is “not doing.” We come from a culture where everyone does lots of things. By "doing," I mean that we learn lots of things that are not really useful for anything. It’s alright to do things but it's also right “not to do”. You see, our work is going to consist of “not doing " and in “undoing” many things we have done. As an example, “not doing” has to do with watching the shadows of the mountains or feeling in your body the imprint of something that touches your soul...of feeling the touch of death in the wings of a bird...or embracing the joy of spirit that comes when we are watching a hummingbird, the living symbol of the spirit of the sun. Things like that.
The person who is always doing and who is on the track of doing things has very strong defense mechanisms. He is afraid to flower, to open. He has a fear of shining, of jumping into the abyss and working in the age of the sword. There are so many defense mechanisms that we become afraid of life. The fear which you live with all day, everyday, in a sado-masochistic relationship, is the greatest defense mechanism to avoid understanding. Fear is not a virus that comes from the outside and gets inside. It is a lack of harmony of the body with the beauty of the world.
We are part of the world and of everything that happens in it. If you are in total harmony with yourself, with the people that surround you, with the stones, with the mountains, with the cosmos, with everything that is alive, why should you fear? Then, the fear is just a lack of love. Why be afraid? It is just a lack of love.
With this small introduction we now go to the core, to the center. What is the cosmovision of the Andean people? The Andes is filled with spirits. All the Andean world is populated by spirits, making clear that a 'spirit' is a subtle and vital energy that warms life and taking into account that the being of the universe is life. LIFE! Every thing has a spirit. The water has a spirit, the mountain has a spirit, the stars have spirits, the wind, the father sun, the mother moon, all have spirits. And, do you know, they are families just like us! And they all have a participation in our real world.
The Pacha Mama, which is the cosmic mother, with her great feminine energy... the great eater of energies and the great creator of energies, the center of fertility, the great feminine capacity...has a spirit that will have great strength in our work. If we do our meditation with the planet, we will realize that we are sitting on the lap of this great mother, under her sleeve. So we are grounded with the spirit of the mountain and we are in union with the spirit of the wind as it carries to us the voice of the shamans. We are all implicated in existence, an existence that comes forth from the Pacha Mama and rises to the sun. We are all sons of the sun. We are all sons of the moon. We all have our stars.
In the ancient days, the meetings of the people were in churches or temples of stone. Imagine where the first people got together in the origin of mankind. In their stone temples, they had skin contact with the earth. Then the temples were dedicated primarily to the stars, to the moon, to the sun, to everything that surrounds us in the cosmos.
Now, you realize that with the birth of our cultures, we have allowed our own sense of personal importance to grow, abandoning these natural temples to the stars, and adopting other religious positions that, maybe, just perhaps, are not so natural. There is a peculiar arrogance in the man who points his finger and calls "animist" to the men who kept contact with the stones and the source of the essential energy of life. What is closest to god if not the rain, the sun, the forests...any natural expression of this planet.
I understand that Jesus was not wrong. I understand that Jesus did not make a mistake, because, truly, there are thousands of Jesus’s in this world, crucified and not crucified, and thousands of St. Francis's of Assisi. In the Andes at 17,000 feet, where you can hardly breathe, you can see people from the mountain walking bare footed among the spirits. Without going too far in Cuzco, my city, you can see children sleeping out in the cold on the cobblestone streets, curled up like mountain lions. There are those of his own culture who see this child as beggar... but that child is not a beggar. He is a warrior of the spirit. "