Tawantinsuyo 5.0

Copyright © 2015 by Alonso del Río.

Cover design and weaving: Waltraut Stölben

General Editor: Fortunata Barrios

Design, graphics and layout: Claudia Sarmiento

First Edition: December 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

Rev. date: 22/10/2015

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Contents

Acknowledgment

Chapter 0

Chapter I Unity

The invisible path

Absolute unity and relative unity

Illa Teqse Wiraqocha

The paradox

The numbers

Fractal understanding

Masters and paths

Change of axis

Trust

The myth of communication

CHAPTER II The great duality

Pachamama and Pachakamaq

Parity

The symbolic reality

Altar to Qorikancha

Unity and diversity

The mind

The feeling

Including logic

Spirit and matter

Reality

A journey within

Simultaneity

The relation

Energy and form

Truth and honesty

Religion and politics

Theology and myths

The axis of existence and the axis of love

Mental patterns

The limits of the mind

The teachings

Photographs instead of movies

Level of fragmented consciousness and mind

The illusion of I

Do you really know what you want?

Memory

The ego

Judeo-Christian culture

CHAPTER III The Ternary

The three Andean worlds

The sacred coca leave and the payments or ‘despachos’

Mind, soul and religion

Love, justice and injustice

The first figure

The trinity

Where we come from and where we are going

Consciousness

The ladder of three steps: sex, money and power

The sacred family

CHAPTER IV The quadripartition

The culture of Tawantinsuyo

The power of the symbol

Essence and form

The grandparents saw the future

The great blessing

The religion of reality

The quadripartition

The dynamic law of transformation or the wheel of medicine

Imperialism and globalization

The human being and the urban being

Ayahuasca medicine

Recapitulating

Acknowledgment

To my great mother and my great father —Pachamama and Pachakamaq—, for creating this marvel we call ‘life’. To the Sun and the Moon, the sky and the earth, my grandparents. To my father and my mother, for the gift of existence and of love. To my great love Waldi, for a full life in the three worlds and for the opportunity to allow me to be honest. To my children, my teachers. To my unforgettable Don Benito, who protected me and guided me through the difficult path of sacred plants. To my lifelong friend, Fortunata Barrios, editor and midwife of this book. To Claudia Sarmiento, who drew the graphics and worked on the layout of this book with all of her love. To Zadir Milla, who provided some images and concepts on the Tawantinsuyo. To Román Vizcarra, who taught me the importance of speaking about the Tawantinsuyo with your own words. To my friends Rajani and Guillermo Pernas, who finally convinced me to write this book. And here would follow a long list of brothers and sisters from all around the world, with whom I have been very happy sharing many ceremonies, the fruits and reflections of which I present here. Last but not least, to all the men and women who walked before us the sacred American path and made it possible for that knowledge to arrive in our hands. I always have you all in my heart.

Chapter 0

This book gathers what I can share up to now after 30 years of walking the path of sacred plants and studying ancient symbols and traditions from remote times. My first teachers were from the Shipibo nation in the Peruvian Amazon. They instructed me in the art of the sacred medicine we call ‘ayahuasca’. All my gratefulness to the Arévalo family and in particular to my unforgettable don Benito. My second source of learning was the traditions of the North American natives. Ceremonies like the Vision Quest, Sundance and the Inipi were a determining factor in my life to reconcile with myself and bring back the understanding of what it means to pray. My third thanks goes to the Tawantinsuyo Nation spread out in time and space but united like a monolith in its love for reality and common good. The teachers here were the stones, the temples, the textiles, the living culture and all the different designs that for millennia the ancient ones used to pass on so many truths that would not even fit in a 1000 page book.

If we represent total truth with a dot in the center of a circle, we would at least have 360 ways of looking at it. If we take into account the minutes and seconds that form each degree we could have 1,296,000 different approaches. This work does not even pretend to be one of those many points. Each being has the right to simply describe what they are seeing. This is simply my proposal in front of my family, in front of my brothers and sisters. I want to unfold if in front of you like a carpet. If it works for you, use it.

To my brothers that are Tawantisuyo theorists, I ask for forgiveness for using controversial words for the Tawantinsuyan orthodoxy. Terms like ‘God’ or ‘pray’ have been included because I think they can help some people easily understand the text. I invoke inclusion, understanding. In any case, it is necessary to specify the meaning of ‘God’ as the ‘cause without cause’ and of ‘praying’ as ‘to dialog in a sacred manner’.

I exonerate myself from any scientific pretension that this text might show. This is not a history or archeology book. There are scholars that have written about ancient Peru from the perspective of social sciences. Many of them agree that the wisdom of Andean and Amazonian peoples does not need to be validated in terms of modern science because even thousands of years before the word ‘science’ was coined, there was already in the Americas¹ surprising achievements in different areas of knowledge. This continent followed its own sacred path evolving in the search of the equilibrium between thinking and feeling. I find it arbitrary to ignore the singular values in which the American process is based in order to make it fit within the patterns of the development of the western model that, for example, labels the civilization that did not have writing as ‘primitive’. One of the intentions of this book is precisely to revalue the symbol as a masterful means of communication. In some way, sometimes I even find it superior to writing because it is the merging of a rational concept with an emotional image. Highest wisdom. It is precisely an essential part of this work to take a look again at the relationship between feeling and reason, between feminine and masculine, not only to live as complete and balanced human beings but because this duality is the foundation of light, of life itself.

This book answers to the urgent necessity to switch the paradigm of ‘spiritual evolution’ for ‘sacred path’ since the former creates and absurd opposition between spirit and matter, not acknowledging the sacred quality of the latter. A society that is little conscious of the sacred dimension of the feminine is being developed, which generates disastrous consequences in the relationships between man and woman, and between human beings and mother earth. Some ‘spiritualists’ do not see matter or women or the planet as a sacred mother but as a thing.

On the other hand, herein lies the almost accomplished dream of talking about a great universal synthesis of human knowledge, expressed mostly in an integrating vision of the quadripartition, the wheel of medicine and the dynamic law of transformation. Three systems of transformation developed simultaneously in five different continents. Raising this fifth universal Tawantinsuyo we recognize the capability of all peoples and all beings to arrive at the same truths when we live ‘with the heart in hand’.

The use of master plants was a fact of undeniable importance in ancient Peru and in my point of view plants have a much greater influence than geography when it comes to shaping the interior landscape of men and the culture that use them. It is not my intention to justify myself or give myself credit to try to validate my opinion. But I do want to say that essentially, my mind is more similar to that of a Chavin officiant than to many of my contemporaries.

I share with many researchers of the Andean culture the need to complement the female energy represented by Pachamama with its masculine counterpart. We know that Pachamama is also father and mother for the duality that every being has, but it is easy to realize that it is predominantly a feminine energy. Pachamama is the mother of the whole universe. Literally, the mother of Space. Therefore, following the great teaching of parity and complementarity in the Andean world, the big question is: where is the partner of Pachamama?

This absence is not part of the great mystery but of the huge empty gaps left by military and religious invaders after centuries of opprobrium and extermination. It is not my intention to fill in the gaps for the sake of filling them in order to have something complete to show. I do not feel that obligation. The subject inspires my utmost respect. The truth is that my search for equilibrium, harmony and complementarity asks me to give and image and a name to who I consider my father, my mother’s partner, my lord Pachakamaq, father of Time. Literally ‘creator of Time’. Only direct iconography and tradition collected in some cultures were able to free us from the immense error to mistake Pachakamaq with the supreme creator Wiraqocha. To those who continue to repeat this identification, complementarity could just be a 15-letter word because according to iconography, Wiraqocha represents the unity that contains the unmanifested duality. In this gigantic absence even of temples, rituals and memory, I find a tremendous and enormous presence that floods all that exists: Pachakamaq is also the spirit, my own spirit.

On the other hand, in moments in which diversity is seriously threatened, each culture has not only the right but the obligation to reconstruct their own natural form to relate to the sacred. All peoples and nations devastated by religious imperialisms must reconnect with the mere prayer that sprout from the core of every corner of our mother earth. I do not think there is a more powerful prayer in your land than that of your ancestors, even if you have to go back many centuries. I am not saying for us to invent or copy the past, nor that we attach to it. Each tradition and ritual is different because each part of the earth is different. The rites resonate with the culture and the geographical shape of each place and that is in part what gives these rites so much power.

I find it very interesting to know all traditions and ways of praying in the world but importing and exporting religions is not my thing. I invite people from the places where life takes me to find out the local way of praying and I do not intend to impose my way. Here in my land, I like to call my great mother and my great father by their traditional names but I think it is important that each culture recovers their own voice, making a last attempt to preserve one of the greatest gifts of this life: the great diversity of which you and I form a part.

In the first chapter I attempt to talk about unity and the great creator Wiraqocha who is beyond and above the three worlds. Then I continue with different reflections that can be useful to contextualize what comes next. In the second chapter the great subject is duality, Pachamama and Pachakamaq which in the Kay pacha are represented by man and woman. Within ourselves —Uhu pacha—Pachamama and Pachakamaq become mind and feeling, the last representatives of these primordial energies to which we dedicate a good amount of attention. In the third chapter I treat the three worlds, the triads, the trinities. Finally, in the fourth I aboard the Tawantinsuyo more like a concept than a historical reality. Then I talk about quadripartition and the wheel of medicine relating them to other similar systems in all continents. The analogies or images that I use are only means to translate totally abstract situations and realities into simpler understandings. They are not to be taken as beliefs that replace the reality they represent.

We are presently contemplating the manifestation of one of the most important myths of humanity: the Ouroboros, the serpent that bites its own tail. Many of the latest scientific discoveries only but prove the inexplicable wisdom of ancient times. How and through which ways did the ancient ones access such truths? This is one of the points I comment on towards the end of the fourth chapter when I talk about ayahuasca. In this book the word ‘medicine’ generally refers to all sacred plant or plants of power and in particular I use it for ayahuasca. This structure of four chapters was intuitively designed following the same fractal logic of the wheel of medicine or the dynamic law of transformation.

Lastly I will say that if my dream was completely fulfilled it would not be necessary to write this book. It would be enough to contemplate the design on the cover. Do not forget that what is written is only my interpretation; the truth is in the symbol, in the weaving…

Chapter I

Unity

The Chavin monument approximately 4000 years old represents Wiraqocha, creator of the world, flaunting two scepters. The two energies inside the hands symbolize the primordial energies —the masculine and the feminine— in potential state. All the adornments in the upper part could correspond to the innumerable worlds or dimensions it holds within.

The invisible path

I have no doubt that the ancient teaching speaks to us of two paths: one to go and one to return. A visible path and another one invisible, a path towards diversity and another towards unity, one towards the mind and another towards the heart, one towards knowledge and another towards wisdom.

This book is the beginning of the path of return. It is thought and felt for all those brothers and sisters that have intuited the end of the first path. Where else will you search? How much more information do you want to have? How big do you want to let your ego grow before you offer it up? If you believe you are mature enough and ready to begin the invisible path; that it is useless to continue filling yourself with information infinitely; that there is nowhere else to look but within; this is your book and it is made for you because it is written from within and we are all equal within. This is one of the secrets of unity.

If you are not ready to start on the path of return and you rightfully believe that you need more time to learn and enrich your personality, I implore you to not keep reading because further on you will maybe find phrases and truths that might offend your beliefs and that is by no means my intention. The teaching of the invisible path is many times contrary to the visible path and if you are not mature enough for the great journey of return, you will simply not understand or will not be able to handle the intensity of