Alberto Villoldo Quotes

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are dreamers and those who are being dreamed.

The shaman is a self-realized person. She discovers the ways of Spirit through her inner awakening.

When the first chakra is disconnected from the feminine Earth, we can feel orphaned and motherless. The masculine principle predominates, and we look for security from material things.  Individuality prevails over relationship, and selfish drives triumph over family, social and global responsibility. The more separated we become from the Earth, the more hostile we become to the feminine.  We disown our passion, our creativity, and our sexuality. Eventually the Earth itself becomes a baneful place. I remember being told by a medicine woman in the Amazon, "Do you know why they are really cutting down the rain forest? Because it is wet and dark and tangled and feminine.

You can accomplish anything,” she once told me, “as long as you are willing to let others take credit for it.

December 21, 2012 represents a unique opportunity for renaissance, renewal and reinvention that people have waited for for centuries.

Unless you eat foods clearly marked “Certified organic by the USDA,” you are taking part in a genetic experiment that is unprecedented in earth’s long history.

As the Lakota Sioux phrase Mitakuye Oyasin—“All my relations”—implies, we’re all connected, all in this together. Recovery is reciprocal: heal yourself, heal the world; heal the world, heal yourself.

People who suffer from learned helplessness think they have no control over their situations, so even if their suffering is great, they won’t take the smallest action to change matters because they figure, What’s the point?

We come to realize that the universe mirrors back to us perfectly our beliefs, our intentions, our sincerity. What is is the product of the map of reality you carry inside you. If you want to change your experience, you need to change the map.

There’s an old Cherokee tale in which a man tells his grandson, “There are two wolves fighting within me. One of them is angry and hateful, the other is generous and compassionate.” When the boy asks, “Which one will win, Grandpa?” the old man answers, “The one I feed.

We have to become still in the midst of the turmoil so we can observe clearly how our actions and the actions of others, past and present, fit together in the tapestry of life. In the timeless instant when we stop moving and simply witness the moment, the dust settles and the big picture emerges.

The Earthkeepers believe that the world is real, but only because we've dreamed it into being. But dreaming requires an act of courage, for when we lack it, we have to settle for the world that's being created by our culture or by our genes - we feel we have to settle for the nightmare. To dream courageously, we must be willing to use our hearts.

With the courage of the soul, we don’t focus only on self-preservation, security, or safety; in fact, such courage compels us to risk our comfort and safety, and sometimes even our lives, as we act according to our most deeply held values. This kind of valor comes from a higher source and is the necessary ingredient for us to create a different dream.

you recognize your connection to others and perceive that you aren’t the only one who matters, and you genuinely care about the good of all of Earth’s creatures.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world. — Buddha

It’s in bringing others the healing gifts we’ve received that the benefits of these gifts become truly ours.

We must think of ourselves as a tribe — as an international community that has come together with a common purpose of being initiated into the process. We all have to do it together. There is a link that happens — where THE growth, my growth, depends on the others' growth around us. We can no longer take these steps by ourselves. We have created a synergistic community. We must take a step towards knowledge together.

In the West we have a disease-care system, and medicine recognizes thousands of ailments and myriad remedies. One Spirit Medicine, on the other hand, is a health-care system that identifies only one ailment and one cure. The ailment is alienation from our feelings, from our bodies, from the earth, and from Spirit. The cure is the experience of primeval Oneness with all, which restores inner harmony and facilitates recovery from all maladies, regardless of origin.

You would be surprised at the healing power of a simple “I love you” from a dying parent to a child or vice versa. This is not always easy, of course, yet a lifetime of mistakes can be undone through forgiveness even at the end of a life.

Unlike longings, hopes, or even concrete goals, these affirmations can manifest in every moment when you hold them in your heart. Then you naturally and easily behave in accordance with your dream, accessing the tremendous power of courage.

just as America was the first modern land where people could practice freedom of religion, perhaps someday America will be a place where we enjoy freedom from religion, and discover true spirituality through the awakening of our higher brain functions.

With courageous dreaming, you discover that your problems are no longer overwhelming you or defining your life. While the difficulties you face feel very real, you always have the choice to create a heroic account about your relationship to them instead of a disempowering saga of suffering. You’ll recognize that you can stop being a victim, trying to fix the world all on your own, or feeling vindictive toward those who harmed you. You’ll see that your life is exactly as it should be right now, and you’ll be able to let go of all the stories that keep you feeling trapped and unhappy and venting in your therapist’s office. You’ll begin to practice dreaming the world into being, and everything will change.

hippocampus damage on a national scale can be measured by the number of guns owned by a country’s citizens. According to The Washington Post, the U.S. has the highest per capita gun ownership in the world—nearly 90 guns for every 100 people—and the highest rate of gun-related murders in the developed world.4 The hippocampus senses danger lurking behind every tree.

The dreamtime infuses all matter and energy, connecting every creature, every rock, every star, and every ray of light or bit of cosmic dust. The power to dream, then, is the power to participate in creation itself. Dreaming reality is not only an ability but a duty, one all humans must perform with grace so that our grandchildren will inherit a world where they can live in peace and abundance.

The True Self quietly observes the playground where thoughts take form, where games are played, and the gunas obeyed. These are the laws of light, activity, and inertia … of inspiration, action, and obstacles. The gunas are those things that can be known. Your mind ponders all their qualities, mistaking these for reality, for they gave birth to the mind. But the Self remains unmoved by the noise in the playground.

As your brain is upgraded, you will discover that you can let go of your fixation on what you think is absolutely vital to your safety and happiness and essential for your survival. As you release your old, fear-based approach to life, you will find you have more faith in your ability to handle uncertainty. You will gain a sense of living in a world that is safe and welcoming, and a universe that supports your intentions and what you value as truly important.

We often confuse love for a warm glow we sense in our bellies and as something we can offer and withdraw, like a cat who comes and goes at its pleasure. It’s easy for us to extend love toward those who are lovable, but loving people and situations that are not to our liking isn’t so easy. We give our love “unconditionally,” but when we don’t receive what we feel we deserve, we withdraw it. We then reinvest our love in a new person or situation that we think will give us a better return, but we find it difficult to maintain when we don’t feel recognized or acknowledged. If things don’t work out the way we want them to, we too readily exchange our loving feelings for hatred and resentment. Our initial excitement over a new job, for instance, may sour and become disappointment and bitterness. When we’ve been jilted by a lover, the intense, starry-eyed passion of infatuation can turn into loathing so great that it consumes us. To an Earthkeeper, love is not a feeling or something you barter with. Love is the essence of who you are, and it radiates from you as a brilliant aura: You become love, practice fearlessness, and attain enlightenment.

EAGLE The East direction is represented by eagle and condor, who bring vision, clarity, and foresight. Eagle perceives the entire panorama of life without becoming bogged down in its details. The energies of eagle assist us in finding the guiding vision of our lives. The eyes of condor see into the past and the future, helping to know where we come from, and who we are becoming. When I work with a client who is stuck in the traumas of the past, I help her to connect with the spirit of eagle or condor. As this energy infuses the healing space, my client is often able to attain new clarity and insight into her life. This is not an intellectual insight, but rather a call, faint at first, hardly consciously heard. Her possibilities beckon to her and propel her out of her grief and into her destiny. I believe that while everyone has a future, only certain people have a destiny. Having a destiny means living to your fullest human potential. You don’t need to become a famous politician or poet, but your destiny has to be endowed with meaning and purpose. You could be a street sweeper and be living a destiny. You could be the president of a large corporation and be living a life bereft of meaning. One can make oneself available to destiny, but it requires a great deal of courage to do so. Otherwise our destiny bypasses us, leaving us deprived of a fulfillment known by those who choose to take the road less traveled. Eagle allows us to rise above the mundane battles that occupy our lives and consume our energy and attention. Eagle gives us wings to soar above trivial day-to-day struggles into the high peaks close to Heaven. Eagle and condor represent the self-transcending principle in nature. Biologists have identified the self-transcending principle as one of the prime agendas of evolution. Living molecules seek to transcend their selfhood to become cells, then simple organisms, which then form tissues, then organs, and then evolve into complex beings such as humans and whales. Every transcending jump is inclusive of all of the levels beneath it. Cells are inclusive of molecules, yet transcend them; organs are inclusive of cells, yet go far beyond them; whales are inclusive of organs yet cannot be described by them, as the whole transcends the sum of its parts. The transcending principle represented by eagle states that problems at a certain level are best solved by going up one step. The problems of cells are best resolved by organs, while the needs of organs are best addressed by an organism such as a butterfly or a human. The same principle operates in our lives. Think of nested Russian dolls. Material needs are the tiny doll in the center. The larger emotional doll encompasses them, and both are contained within the outermost spiritual doll. In this way, we cannot satisfy emotional needs with material things, but we can satisfy them spiritually. When we go one step up, our emotional needs are addressed in the solution. We rise above our life dilemmas on the wings of eagle and see our lives in perspective.

The Spanish chroniclers in Peru wrote that when the conquistador Pizarro met the Inka ruler Atahualpa, he handed him the Bible, explaining to him that this was the word of God. The Inka brought the volume to his ear, listened carefully die a few moments, then threw the holy book to the ground, exclaiming, “What kind of god is this that does not speak?

When I eat at restaurants in Peru, I always load up my bag with the extra rolls that are served, because I know I’ll have an opportunity to help someone out by giving them a roll that may be their only meal of the day. Once when I was traveling with a Laika elder, I found myself in a bus station surrounded by several children who had gathered around me in the hopes that I might give them some coins or candy. I began to take the rolls out of my bag and distribute them, but the elder told me, “This is not the bread these children need. The kind of food my people need is the food of the soul, not the stomach.” He took the rolls from me and distributed them to the children himself, but as he did, he also began telling them stories about their Inka ancestors. Afterward, the elder explained, “These stories are the nourishment that they are craving. I gave them not the bread that will feed them tonight, but the bread that will feed them throughout their entire lives.” He was perceiving with the eyes of the hummingbird—to him, the stories were nourishment for the soul. When he saw me handing out rolls, he intervened at the level of the sacred by offering these children the mythology of their people.

This isn’t true for us Westerners, though: Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek and Roman mythology see the Lower World as a place where we bury our dead. We associate the deep earth with hell and fire and brimstone—we believe it to be a place of torment and suffering. We don’t see the earth as the origin of our life; instead, we look to images of our ancestors or photographs of our biological relatives as the place from which we come. In the West, we aren’t children of the earth—we’re children of humans.

Sacred space allows us to enter our quiet inner world where healing takes place.

Alzheimer’s is being called type 3 diabetes, linked to a gluten-rich, wheat-based diet and a stressed-out brain.4

Samadhi. Immersed in concentration and meditation, all thoughts and distractions far away. Your focus steady, you achieve samadhi. All that exists is the heart of the experience. There is no one meditating, no one concentrating, only awareness. There is no yogi, only the yoga. (3)

soul retrievals to recover parts of myself I had lost to trauma,

In the seventh chakra we understand that life is an intricate web of luminous strands, and that each of us is one of these strands, but also that we are the entire web.

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...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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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, “Love grinds you down. 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. “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).

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.

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. 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. 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.

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 sages say that the reason we are born into a body in the physical world is to evolve and grow, to acquire maturity and wisdom. To use a metaphor from physics, when we’re embodied, we’re like a photon in a particle state; while in the invisible world, we’re like a photon in a field state. The particle state is our “local” nature—flesh and blood, sitting on a couch reading. The field state is our “nonlocal” nature, in which we extend to the farthest reaches of the universe and are at one with all things. When we die and leave this body behind, we return to our nonlocal nature, to our field state, to invisible Oneness. But the sages of old learned to experience their field without dying—to taste Oneness while still in the world.

Through the heart center we share and experience love. This is the most misunderstood chakra in the body, because the quality of love of the heart chakra is neither the affection that we exchange with each other nor the romantic love we “fall” into. The heart chakra thrives on the love of Creation, the same love that the flowers feel for the rain or that the jaguar feels for the antelope it will have for a meal. This kind of love is not object-focused, nor is it dependent on another for its existence. It is not sentimental. It is impersonal. Christian theologians call it agape. The Inka call it munay. This kind of love is not a means to an end. It does not lead to marriage or relationships. It is an end in itself.

To experience selfless love we must die to who we have been in the past. Thus shamans have devised intricate practices for experiencing the death of the ego and egotism. However, we do not need to go through the complicated death rites of the jungle shamans to experience the love of the heart chakra. We simply need to surrender to love—to translate love from a feeling into a practice and a meditation. We need to stop falling in love and become love itself. When you experience your heart beating, remind yourself that it is love that is beating.

Doubt disappears when you step beyond the mind, and desire and longing cease to be driving forces. One enters the realms of knowledge that can be experienced but not told.

When the sixth chakra is malfunctioning, the individual confuses information with knowledge. He feels he has attained great spiritual truths when all he has is a collection of facts.

The shaman is a self-realized person. She discovers the ways of Spirit through her inner awakening. Antonio would remind me that the Buddha was not a Buddhist, and that Christ was not a Christian. One sat under a banyan tree until he gained illumination.

The Earth protects us and nurtures us with her life force, and the Heavens propel us toward our becoming. Seeds sprout only when they are in the rich, dark, moist Earth, yet they grow by the light of the Sun. After germination, all plants turn to sunlight for life. Similarly, our spiritual life germinates in the first chakra with our nexus to the Earth, and later the light of the Heavens enters through the crown to feed the entire chakra system. The name for this chakra in Sanskrit is sahasrara, which means “emptiness.” Persons who have attained the gifts from this center no longer need a physical form. Able to travel through space and time, they are one with Heaven and Earth.

In the seventh chakra there is no longer subject and object. Everything is participatory. Apparent contradictions are merged into one: life in death, peace in pain, freedom in bondage.

Those who have mastered the seventh chakra attain unusual powers, including remembering ancient memories belonging to the collective consciousness of humanity. Doña Laura used to tell me that the final test of the shaman who attempts this level is to remember the first story ever told. “When time was still young, before the arrival of the four-leggeds or the plants, the first story ever told was told to us by the Stone People,” she would say. “This is why we place a circle of stones around our fires.” I would implore her to tell me more. “Ask the stones,” she would say. Until one day I remembered.

There are remarkable positive attributes of the first chakra. Its survival instincts ensure the continuation of the species: They drive us to mate and bear children, and allow humans to persevere under the most adverse of conditions. In Sanskrit the first chakra is called muladhara, meaning “foundation.” Our energetic house must be built on a strong footing.

In yoga this chakra is thought of as the home of Kundalini energy. Its symbol is a coiled serpent asleep at the base of the spine. Kundalini is seen as the active power of the great goddess Shakti, the force that animates all creation. For the shaman this is the primordial serpent who swallows its own tail, Ouroboros, and portrays an unconscious state of self-absorption.

As we clear the imprints within the first chakra, the Kundalini energy is awakened. The primal serpent uncoils, and its feminine energy moves up through the chakras. Shamans in the Americas, India, and Tibet have long believed that it is through the power of the primal feminine that all creatures move, live, procreate, and flourish.

Its energy, which lies dormant within each of us, is the energy of the Earth and the heartbeat of the mother planet.

The feminine power of the first chakra and the primordial sexual energy of the second chakra are transformed into a fine fuel that the third chakra employs for the fulfillment of our dreams. This chakra replenishes the reserves in the Luminous Energy Field. When we awaken the power of this chakra, we experience fearlessness and a resolve that cannot be deterred by adversity.

The Inka lore tells us that when one of these luminous warriors slayed an adversary, he would honor the other by shedding a few drops of his own blood into the earth. He realized that in other circumstances they might have been sitting together exchanging stories around the fire.

The function of the third chakra is to translate vision into reality. The name of this chakra in Sanskrit is manipura, which means “the palace of jewels,” referring to its ability to transform dreams into living treasures. The shaman understands that you dream the world into being. This center is the alembic on which our dreams are alchemically turned into gold. When you want to improve the world around you, bring balance to your third chakra. The tool of this center is visualization—whether sitting in meditation or on your feet at the beach being mugged. The fire element that rules it provides the fuel to manifest dreams. Be careful that you do not exercise this power for personal gain, but rather for the common good. The key word for this chakra is service.

I’ve come to the realization that we have to discover the shaman within. I teach my students that no amount of traveling with the Indians will bring you to your own wisdom and power. I’ve found that it frequently achieves exactly the opposite, distracting us from a true encounter with Spirit.

We begin to see order at the heart of uncertainty and tranquility in the eye of the storm. Abandoning fixed ideas about how things should be, we instead take delight in watching plans manifest and dissolve in kaleidoscopic fashion, arranged and rearranged by the vagaries of everyday life. It is in the North that we learn to embrace the Yiddish proverb “Man plans, God laughs.

The sense of inner peace that arises as we start the work of the sage is the direct result of a radical shift in perception. Only when we’ve stopped grasping and yearning, avoiding and worrying, endeavoring and battling can we find equanimity. In stillness, we can access the wisdom of the ancestors.

The nature of the cosmos is such that whatever vision you have about yourself and the world will become reality. As soon as you awaken to the power you have, you begin to flex the muscles of your courage.

Courageous dreaming allows you to create from the source, the quantum soup of the universe where everything exists in a latent or potential state. Physicists understand that in the quantum world nothing is “real” until it is observed.

Rather than resign herself to the fate dictated by her medical history, she has chosen a different, if less probable, outcome—one in which she is a shaman.

After morning yoga a luminous being appeared to me in broad daylight. She walked out of the river, and I saw her

Alzheimer’s is being called type 3 diabetes, linked to a gluten-rich, wheat-based diet and a stressed-out brain.4 And these are just a few of the diseases that are killing us prematurely and compromising our quality of life.

In the West we do not have a health-care system, we have a disease-care system that recognizes thousands of ailments and myriad remedies. One Spirit Medicine, on the other hand, identifies only one ailment and one cure. The ailment is alienation—from our emotions, from our bodies, from the earth, and from Spirit.

Nature loves intelligence. The ancients called this wisdom spirituality. Not religion, which is a fixed set of beliefs and dogma about who your enemies are and how the world works. Spirituality is about exploring the nature of the mind and the fabric of the cosmos through what the ancients called the experience of Oneness.

The invisible world exists alongside the visible one, ever present and accessible. We can bring its wisdom into our world at any time to provide healing and balance. The way we do this is by activating the circuitry in the brain that allows us to experience our interconnectedness to all things and all beings in the cosmos. These higher-order neural networks, like all neural networks, are made up of brain cells connected to each other, of neurons that fire together and wire together. They are in a region of the brain known as the neocortex, or “new brain,” which thrives on bliss and the experience of Oneness, while other parts of the brain are more concerned with survival and separation of friend from foe. This more recently evolved part of the brain has a favorite food source: ketone bodies, or fats, which are like jet fuel for the brain.

Our LEF is a gateway to the invisible matrix of wisdom where everything is intertwined, where every thought we have impacts every cell in our body and every molecule in the cosmos. Quantum physics offers us an apt metaphor in the phenomenon known as entanglement: two particles can be mysteriously interlinked in such a way that even if they are at opposite ends of the galaxy, if you change the direction in which one particle is spinning, the other immediately reverses its spin. At first scientists thought entanglement might be a demonstration of faster-than-light communication. Later they understood that it was simply the nature of related particles. The sages of the Amazon and Andes that I studied with believe that entanglement is the nature of all of creation, that we are all related. That is why they—and many Native Americans—refer to all living beings as “all my relations.

This is called ayni, or reciprocity, and it is a core principle in shamanism: give and you will receive.

Valter Longo, Ph.D., a cellular biologist at the University of Southern California, found that starving a mouse receiving chemotherapy or other targeted therapies will protect normal cells and organs while making the therapy up to 40 percent more toxic to cancer cells. In human clinical trials, Longo found that periods of no food for two to four days at a time during a six-month period killed older and damaged immune cells and triggered the generation of new healthy ones.

When the mind is behaving tyrannically, it’s running ancient programs belonging to the limbic brain that focus on survival, and the primary emotion is fear. When we’re in its grip, we see danger everywhere. The programs of the limbic brain are known as the Four Fs—feeding, fighting, fear, and fornicating. The limbic brain craves sweet comfort foods when you are feeling sad or insecure. Feed it sugar and this brain keeps operating at a dull level of awareness that does not lead to an experience of Oneness. This brain helped us to survive the Ice Age and is obsessed with having food and sex; it craves mind-dulling alcohol and drugs, and is biased toward aggression, emotional withdrawal, and self-preservation. When we cut off its supply of sugars, its instincts can be overridden by the neocortex, the “new” brain, which allows us to learn, create, and envision new futures. The neocortex is programmed for beauty, whether it’s found in a Mozart concerto or an elegant mathematical solution. The new brain needs ketones to override the programs of the more ancient limbic brain. On a carbohydrate diet, it sputters along, coughing up the occasional creative revelation but no lasting insights.

The limbic brain, driven by pleasure seeking and emotional drama, does not thrive on spiritual experiences. It settles for religions that turn its biases and prejudices into divine commandments that address its basic survival needs. It does not long for an elegant dance with Oneness. The limbic brain evolved while we were sitting quietly by the river’s edge or watching the sun set lazily over the African savannah, and is not geared to the rhythm of the digital world. Under stress, primitive emotion overtakes us, and we become blind with jealousy or rage, paralyzed with fear, or so riddled with anxiety that we can’t think straight. When it becomes overstimulated, it hijacks the entire neural apparatus, restricting blood flow to the frontal lobes of the brain, so we can no longer come up with creative solutions to problems.

Valter Longo, Ph.D., a cellular biologist at the University of Southern California, found that starving a mouse receiving chemotherapy or other targeted therapies will protect normal cells and organs while making the therapy up to 40 percent more toxic to cancer cells.

One form of intermittent fasting involves not eating any grains, or anything that turns into sugar in your bloodstream between 6 P.M. and noon the next day. This daily 18-hour fast will bring you into ketosis, a metabolic change that happens when your cells exhaust the energy from carbohydrates and sugars, and break down fats into a powerful fuel known as ketones. Then your brain starts burning ketones for fuel.

The purpose of intermittent fasting is not for weight loss. That’s a dangerous misuse of the practice. You fast in order to go into ketosis and turn on the body’s fat-burning system and repair mechanisms. Fasting brings about detoxification at a cellular level. Reducing the intake of sugars and processed carbs for more than a few hours triggers a process called autophagy, in which more than 90 percent of the “waste” inside the cells is recycled into amino acid building blocks the cells can reuse for repair, and the remainder is eliminated as garbage.

When we stop utilizing carbs as our primary fuel, even for a few hours, we go into ketosis. This allows the body to recycle waste and repair itself. It triggers the production of stem cells in the brain and every organ in the body. It also awakens the higher order neural networks where we can have a spiritual experience, even when we are not looking for one.

Dann ist uns klar, dass all unser Tun heilig ist, und wir suchen nicht mehr nach Sinn, Wahrheit, Schönheit oder Zweck. Wir blasen die Suche ab und erfüllen all unser Tun selbst mit Schönheit und all unsere Begegnungen mit Wahrheit.

Nature will only reveal her secrets when we are willing to become her keepers.

Luminous warriors build collaborative relationships with others instead of trying to conquer them; consequently, we get much closer to finding common ground and solutions to our mutual problems. Instead of clinging to our belief that we won’t have enough or that we’ll be taken advantage of, we bravely extend trust and find win-win solutions. This seems naive, of course, and part of us says that real life doesn’t work this way. But the most successful organisms in nature are the result of collaborations.

We can’t possibly see the whole picture as well as Spirit can. We might not realize that there is tremendous growth and learning in store for us if we actually take a course different from the comfortable one we would select from the level of serpent or jaguar. While we may long for material wealth and comfort, our soul was drawn to a family where we might have lacked these things. While we may have wanted loving and caring parents, we may have ended up with those who didn’t give affection easily. Yet the perception from the level of hummingbird is that everything is perfect as it is, that nothing needs to be changed. From the level of eagle, we know that “the Father and I are One.” There is no longer an “I,” there is only Spirit, and there is no will other than that of Spirit.

The minute you have a back door, you’re blocked from creating what it is you want because your energies are divided. Failure becomes inevitable because you don’t fully commit yourself. It’s far better to burn your bridges behind you, lock all those back doors, and be completely engaged in the path you have chosen.

In the information age, we don’t embrace knowledge that goes beyond mere facts and the logical arrangement of them. We have religions—along with countless practitioners of those faiths—but too often the spiritual essence of the teachings has been lost. We learn about interpretations of interpretations of the great truths, and we analyze and dissect those ideas, but we wouldn’t think of going out into the desert for 40 days, as Jesus did, or sitting in meditation under the Bodhi tree, like Buddha. It’s as if we’re spending our time poring over hundreds of cookbooks filled with complex recipes and endlessly discussing the nutritional value of certain foods and diets, yet we never actually eat anything.

We typically perceive someone with a very different assemblage point as strange or foolish, and we may even think that they’re stupid because they can’t perceive what we can, or loony because they sense what we don’t. We don’t realize that our perceptions are limited by our beliefs and life experience. Just like the blind Indian men who examined an elephant in the ancient story, one of us feels the elephant’s tail and pronounces that the creature is like a rope, another feels the tusk and insists that it’s like a sword, while another wraps his arms around the beast’s leg and swears that the elephant is like a tree. For each man, the limited reality he perceives seems to be the only reality.

When we step out of the “arrow of time” and experience infinity, we reclaim our original nature, which is God. When we return into time, we lose that awareness so that we can experience life in our clock-ruled world, which is what we’re meant to do. We return to everyday life unaware that we’re God and are dreaming everything up. So as we go about our daily lives, the knowledge of our original nature drives us to serve our experiences rather than expecting them to serve us. That is, instead of cooking a meal with the expectation that it will nurture us, we nurture ourselves in the preparation and serving of the food, infusing the experience with meaning. We no longer search for meaning in situations, but rather bring meaning and purpose to every encounter; we no longer search for truth or beauty, but rather bring truth and beauty to every situation.

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.

Spirituality is about exploring the nature of the mind and the fabric of the cosmos through what the ancients called the experience of Oneness.