On states of consciousness in the light of Andean and pre-Columbian wisdom
THE EXPANDED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS (HANANPACHA)
The Search
For millennia, humanity has known by experience that expanded states of consciousness are naturally generators of genuine knowledge, insights, of creative gifts, and for this reason has been investigating and experimenting with various methods to generate these creative, noetic and numinous states. We intuit, through the imagination, or from a personal experience (a day of clarity in the heart of nature, an ecstatic state experienced in childhood) that there are states of high performance, states of superior quality. This intuition can motivate a search, beckoning an evolutionary path. Two essential impulses motivate and determine the search for expanded states of consciousness:
1. the desire to find remedies for the feeling of disintegration and malaise typical of Uju-Pacha (existential malaise);
2. the manifestation of a proactive impulse in search of ecstasy, of the realization of our oneness, of jubilation, of glory.
Trying to make life a more meaningful and lucid, beautiful, joyful and jubilant, loving and full experience is one of the basic motivations of the human being. Subjective elements, creative ideas, arts, images, visions and metaphors, new sensations, serenity and harmony, well-being, the set of virtues that generate happiness, are as attractive and pleasurable to humanity as the physical resources necessary to sustain corporeality. To be human implies not only making efforts to provide for the support and maintenance of the organism and of life, but equally the development and cognitive progress, evolution in a broad sense, spiritual realization, the incorporation of creativity. Throughout history, countless techniques have been tried to generate expanded states of consciousness. Elements such as chants, dances, fasting and specific diets, exhausting physical trials, flagellations, prolonged emotional stress, sensory or sleep deprivations, emotional states induced by relaxation or by the effective use of surprise (ergotropic hypnosis), meditation, intensive concentration, prayers and mantras, music, dances and rhythms, special breathing, sexuality, contemplation, have been and continue to be used by various cultures, sects and isolated practitioners. Other technologies, such as psychoactive plants and vapors containing various alkaloids (substances capable of interacting with neuronal receptors) have been and continue to be used in the form of smokes, teas and potions originating from various plants and roots, in almost all cultures. Psychoactive, 'psychedelic' elements are undoubtedly useful instruments for triggering these states and experiences, no more reproachable than others.