[kj] Homo Luminous

[Lennonka]

*Homo Luminous: The New Human*
Alberto Villoldo <http://www.realitysandwich.com/user/alberto_villoldo>

Many prophesies in the indigenous world speak of this time in human history
as a period of great transformation. In the medicine tradition of the Inca,
legend tells of a great angel who looked into the future and saw that
humanity would face an enormous task at the beginning of the 21st century.
Extenuating circumstances in an extremely difficult and challenging time
would require extraordinary effort to bring about peace and heal the heart
of the world. “Who would like to volunteer?” the angel asked. Knowing we
could make a difference, we jumped up and said, “Me!”

The legend reminds brings to mind a scene in *The Lord of the Rings* when
the dwarf says, “No chance of success, certain death ahead? What are we
waiting for!” Of course, our odds are better than those faced by the dwarf,
but the problems humanity is facing are huge. It is no longer a matter of
global warming or carbon emissions, but the possible collapse of the entire
climate system – a catastrophe beyond imagination. At the human level, the
distribution of water is a huge problem. Who owns the water? Can private
interests own the water? And how do we distribute water to places that don’t
have it? The problems we face are vast and overwhelming. But the problem the
Earth is facing is simple: do away with the parasite affecting it. The Earth
has an immune system that recognizes what is toxic and will do what is
necessary to eliminate it.

The indigenous peoples have a body of prophesy that says up to two-thirds of
humanity will be eradicated in the next decade, between now and 2012. There
is to be a tremendous culling of humanity because the earth can no longer
sustain this parasite humanity has become. But every crisis brings with it a
marvelous opportunity and this is why we stood up and said, “Me!” Our work
is to find new solutions, to develop sustainable ecological practices in
commerce, business, and medicine. This is what we came to do.

I see the main problem as a spiritual one. Not resource problems, but the
problems centered around human beliefs, the troublesome elements founded in
our mythology. Our problematic mythology is collapsing all around us. It is
a mythology that is predatory, that is abusive, that reaps the cream of the
earth – timber, water, topsoil – and passes the furtive costs onto future
generations. These greedy, rapacious paradigms that pose humans as a
dominator over nature are no longer sustainable.

One day, I was walking with a medicine woman and her husband deep in the
Amazon. “Alberto, go across the clearing,” they said. “Go back into the
rainforest and see what happens.” So I turned and went back into the forest.

>From all around me, the forest was full of song. The sounds of the macaws

and the monkeys and the parrots from all about were as an orchestra. First
step, second step, third step, and then, everything stopped. The shamans
came up to me and said, “See? They know that you’ve been kicked out of the
garden. They know that you don’t belong here.”

Certain that all of nature could smell my underarm deodorant, my hairspray,
my toothpaste, my athlete’s foot powder, I looked around for a way to cover
up my scent. By the edge of the river, I came upon a couple of Indians
cooking a boa on a spit. I asked them for the fat they had been collecting
from the boa. Stripping down to my shorts, I smeared myself with the boa
fat, thinking this would conceal my smell. I walked back into the
rainforest. First step, the forest was full of song. Second step, the forest
was full of song. Third step, and again, everything stopped. Except for the
flies, hundreds and hundreds of flies swarmed about me.

It took ten years of study with the indigenous people before I was able to
walk through the rainforest and have it continue singing. No longer did the
forest recognize me as someone who did not belong. I belonged in the garden
again.

This reveals a great deal about our mythology. Mythology creates our beliefs
and those beliefs inform our reality. In the west, we have the only
mythology on the planet in which we are kicked out of the garden. Nobody
else was cast out of the garden. The aborigines were not kicked out, the
sub-Saharan Africans were not kicked out, the indigenous Americans were not
kicked out. These peoples were given the garden. They were the stewards and
caretakers of the garden. We, on the other hand, were not only cast out, but
as we were being cast out, a voice said, “And cursed is the earth because of
you,” pointing to the woman. And to the man, condemning him to a life of
hard work, “With the sweat of your brow you will take your fruit from the
earth and the earth shall produce thorns and thistles for you.”

This is the original damnation. The Bible doesn’t say, “And the earth shall
grow strawberries and mangoes and papayas for you.” It says thorns and
thistles. This is our mythology. From the beginning, we have a hostile
relationship with the feminine, with the earth itself. And if we look still
deeper, even before we were cast out of the garden, we learned on the
seventh day of creation that all of the food on the planet belongs to us.
The animals and the trees and the flowers were created for our pleasure and
for our feeding as humans. Instead of putting us in a position of
stewardship with all life on the planet, it puts us in the position of the
consumer. The assumption is that all of the food on the earth belongs to
humans. It doesn’t. The food on the earth belongs to all living beings on
the earth.

A second element unique to western culture is that we have practically the
only mythology on the planet in which the masculine gives birth to the
feminine. Eve is made from the rib of Adam. Nowhere else, except in Greek
mythology, does this appear. As the ways of the feminine began to be lost,
Zeus became the dominant god. In the early Greek mythologies, the goddess,
the “creatrix”, was predominant. As she began to be eclipsed by the
masculine principle, Zeus became predominant. And though Zeus took the
goddess Hera for his bride, she refused to submit to him. Thereafter, she
was known in mythology as “the bitch” because you cannot repress the
feminine without ill effect. Eventually, it becomes deadly for a culture,
and this is what has happened to us.

The paradigms of the west are the paradigms of the masculine. This is at the
core of the problem. We have to break free of this mythology that sees the
earth as ours to consume and sees the feminine as damned. These mythologies
express themselves in our economic, political, social, and educational
systems. Even our medical practices are, by their very nature, hostile and
aggressive. These paradigms hold that all the food and resources on the
planet belong to us. Not to the other animals, not to the plants; it all
belongs to us. We can rape, loot and pillage, we can spoil the earth and
postpone the price of clean-up to future generations. We have been in the
grip of a mythology that has exhausted itself. Our economy, our political
system, education, and even our relationship paradigms – all show signs of
collapse. The old mythology has taken us as far as it can.

Now we must look for mythologies of sustainability, of collaborative
relationships with the earth. This new mythology has yet to emerge, but we
have the traditions of the Earth Peoples to provide us with models of the
kind of world our children’s children can truly inhabit. The Earth People
have an animistic relationship with all of life. Animism is practiced by
people who believe they can speak to the rivers and to the trees and to the
canyons and to the mountains and to God. This is what we were able to do
before we were cast out of the garden. We were still in relationship with
Spirit and with the natural world. Spirit is actually talking to us all the
time. But we, in the west, don’t open our ears to hear. If we are to find
that self that still walks with beauty on the earth, that speaks to the
rivers and to the trees and to God, and to whom the rivers and the trees and
the voice of spirit talks back, we need a great kind of soul retrieval.

I embarked on my study in shamanism nearly 30 years ago as a result of my
frustration with western psychology and my inability to discover the
workings of the mind. I spent 25 years, first as a medical anthropologist
and psychologist, and then becoming a student of the shamans, immersing
myself in the ways of the shaman. I began to study the techniques,
methodologies and practices of the earth peoples who have developed a body
of knowledge for stepping beyond mind, for living mindfully, but outside the
visceral grip of the mind.

My studies led me to South America, to the rainforest, to study with
medicine men and women of the Amazon. These traditions had been neglected by
anthropologists and by students of religion because they had left no body of
writing. Modern prejudice says that if you do not learn to read or write,
you are illiterate and therefore, not intelligent. These traditions were
dismissed, whereas students of religion and anthropology have been studying
the other world traditions, ones that left the Vedas and the Sutras and the
Koran and the Bible, for hundreds of years. The indigenous practices of the
Americas were neglected because writing is largely absent. Only since
Margaret Meade and the advent of experiential anthropology have we begun to
discover the true wealth and beauty of the indigenous teachings of our land,
of the Americas.

The shaman believes that we live in a benign universe. Evil exists, but only
in the human heart. We live in a collaborative, benign universe that will
actually go out of its way to conspire on our behalf. But you have to be in
proper relationship with it. In the medicine traditions, the shaman sees no
difference between being killed by a microbe or killed by a jaguar. To us,
one of them is an illness, and one is an accident, “Poor boy, he went to the
river at dusk, and got eaten up.” For the shaman, these two are identical.
You have to be in proper relationship with microbes and with jaguars,
otherwise they both begin to look at you as lunch. When you’re not in proper
relationship, the universe turns predatory. It begins to stalk you. When we
come out of proper relationship, the universe becomes adversarial – we hit
obstacle after obstacle – but when we are in proper relationship, it
conspires on our behalf. The most unlikely possibilities line up to make
things work for us. This is an essential aspect of the healing process in
the medicine way: to come into proper relationship. Not to medicate, to
treat, to intervene, but to come into proper relationship through an
energetic process.

The shamans of the Americas understand that we have a luminous energy field
that surrounds the physical body. It informs the physical body in a way
similar to the energy fields of a magnet that organize iron filings on a
piece of paper. In the paradigms of the west, we are intent on shuffling and
moving the iron filings about, trying to change at the level of the
physical. Shamans possess a body of ancient energy healing practices that
move and shift at the level of the energetic – moving the magnet – and the
physical body follows. The shaman works at the core, at the essential level
and healing happens.

The shamans discovered that time runs in figure 8s, that it loops in
wormholes back and forth. The way we can know that is by breaking free of
the grip time and experiencing infinity. The core healing practice of the
medicine way – the illumination process – happens outside time, in infinity.
It happens when we access a self that never entered the stream of time, that
cannot be affected by disease, that cannot be touched by ill health. Once
having made contact with the infinite, we can re-inform who we are today. We
can grow bodies that age differently, that heal differently, that die
differently.

In times like these we are constantly challenged to face little deaths in
our lives: who we once were, a relationship ending, loss of a loved one, a
career, a cherished time in our lives. During transitions, we have time to
reinvent ourselves. When we don’t, a deadening happens. That deadening
causes us to age instead of becoming the sage. If we go through these little
deaths consciously, they become opportunities for new life. Instead of being
wounded by transitions, we become inspired by them if we have the
prerequisite courage. How we respond to adversity turns us into courageous
beings. Courage can come out of frustration, illness, from many sources,
sparked by adversity or by the divine.

I remember when my daughter was thrown from a horse at age six. The horse
stepped on her and ruptured her liver. She was very close to death for three
days. I was in the Amazon at the time. It was the longest journey of my life
coming back to upstate NY. When I arrived at the hospital, she was in
pediatric ICU, hooked up to tubes and IV’s. We didn’t know if she was going
to make it. I sat beside her, crying, praying to God that she be saved, when
an immense clarity came over me. My sadness disappeared and I spoke to her
soul. Although she was unconscious, I said to her, “Sweetheart, I love you,
and you have to make a choice if it’s time for you to go or not. It’s your
choice. I love you, your soul knows if your journey is done.” Three minutes
later, she regained consciousness. She chose yes.

To go from victim to hero we go into the feminine, into the earth, the
mother, the great one. There is no way to make a personal journey without
embracing the greater journey of the planet. The heroic stories are the
stories of accepting that call to the hero’s journey, accepting the calling
to a destiny. While we all have a future, only a few have a destiny. A
destiny is something you must make yourself available to by saying yes to
life, yes to God, yes to your own growth, your own spirit.

The medicine way is as contemporary today as it was 50,000 years ago. My
mentor believed that the new shamans, the new caretakers of the earth would
come from the west. We are the ones who can bring healing and transformation
to our families, to our communities, and to the earth. This is a critical
time in history, a time for a reawakening of the earth and of our own
feminine. It is a time of tremendous transformation. All our old models are
being reinvented, in every facet of society. And we are the change agents.
That is what the shaman has always been. The shaman is a map-maker. We need
new map-makers. Essential maps do not simply lay out the territory, but are
a guide to the territory. So we must make new maps.

The nature of the dialog that the shaman has with nature is one of life
speaking to life, life connecting with life, life responding to a call and
responding to life, to us. We call on four great archetypes: the serpent;
the jaguar; the hummingbird; and the condor, the eagle in the east. These
are the four organizing principles in the medicine tradition. They are known
by different names among the Hopi, among the Shoshoni, among the Navajo, the
Maya and the Inca. The important thing is not what you call it, not whether
it’s the jaguar in the west or the buffalo – the important thing is that
when you call it, it comes. That is the shaman’s agreement with spirit. Our
agreement with spirit, that each and every one of us has made, is that when
you call, spirit comes. Not 60% of the time, not 90% of the time, but 100%
of the time.

Each of the four archetypes is the embodiment of organizing principles in
the universe, described in animistic fashion. Each one of the directions
represents one of the steps that the shaman must go through to become a man
or woman of knowledge. The shaman differentiates between information and
knowledge. Information is what we are flooded in every day. Knowledge is
wisdom. Information is knowing that water is two hydrogen atoms and one
oxygen atom. Knowledge is being able to make it rain.

The shaman is a person of the percept, of perceptual traditions. In the
west, we are people of the *precept*. We get precepts, laws, rules. We get
the ten commandments, elect legislators and law makers that make more rules.
When the shamans want to change the world, they work at the level of the
essential to bring about a shift in perception. By shifting perception, we
dream the new world into being and the world changes. That is our task, to
dream with our eyes open.

Through this great transformation, a new human is emerging on the earth. I
call this new human “homo luminous.” Shamanic traditions understand that
evolution happens within generations. In the west, we believe evolution
happens in between generations: maybe your children will be smarter and more
handsome, maybe the indigo children will climb to the next rung on the
evolutionary ladder. The shaman understands that evolution happens within
generations. It is for us to take that quantum leap into who we are
becoming. We can become homo luminous in our lifetime. This is our greatest
task: to take that quantum leap individually because as we do it for
ourselves, we do it for the entire planet. Each and every one of us, when we
choose truth, when we choose life, when we choose light, we are transforming
the world.

Copied from here: http://www.realitysandwich.com/homo_luminous_the_new_human


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