
The Shamanic path is found in cultures all over the world.
Virtually every "native" tradition has its healers, its wise men and women, its "medicine men"
and "witch doctors". These wisdom lineages vary in their preservation, as some Shamanic heritages
are nearly lost to us while others survive intact, or very nearly so. The Shamanism of the
Andes, the "Incan" tradition, is one of the survivals.
Of course, to obtain these teachings would be impossible if
not for the willingness of lineage-holding Shamans to make themselves available to students from
the West. We are all fortunate that don Riccardo's visions (that we must become the new caretakers
of the Earth) have led him to open up the Incan Shamanic teachings to us, and that his student
Alberto Villoldo has been
tireless in bringing this wisdom lineage to the modern world.
For this to happen, we must come to re-learn the realm of the
Sacred. We must learn to journey beyond the tonal, the daily world of personality and ordered
linear reality. We must learn to move within the nagual, the place "where power hovers".
We must rediscover the viracocha, the "Creator" of the Incas, which is the field or force
that patterns all things and allows us to reach out for "extraordinary health" by bringing ourselves
into line with it. We need to learn to walk the "medicine wheel", taking the Shaman's journey from
the South to encounter the Serpent and to shed our pasts; to the West to meet the Jaguar and learn
impeccability from her; to the North to hail the Masters in their crystal cave and come in touch
with the mastery within us; and to the East to summon the Eagle to bring us vision that we may become
co-creators in our own reality, true Incas, children of the sun.
