On states of consciousness in the light of Andean and pre-Columbian wisdom
THE EXPANDED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS (HANANPACHA)
The culture of oneness
When will the humanity of the third millennium finally be able to adapt its feelings and experiences to the new paradigms of modern science? How can this ancient feeling of isolation and separation be overcome? We need to understand and feel urgently that we are not strangers in the universe, that we were not thrown onto this planet by divine whim, that we did not come from outside, that we did not arrive as migratory birds to spend time in foreign lands; we grew on this world like plants, flowers and fruits. Alan Watts — free translation.
The difficulty in accepting and considering that our emotional and existential postures, the management and categorization of our perceptions, determine to a marked degree the quality of our lives and achievements, induces, as an epistemological consequence, the emergence and maintenance of various beliefs such as 'we are exiled beings on the planet and condemned to suffer'; or 'the world is an external object and we are separate subjects inserted into it, struggling to survive'. These ideas belong to the past, myths of previous millennia. Despite the demonstrations of ecology and the new Physics, teaching that individuals and environments integrate a single system — with the multiple manifestations of unification, of present and creative space-time — much is still missing for humanity to incorporate this knowledge, opening spaces for a more integrated level of consciousness, life and responsibility. The experience of the state-of-being does not need to mean a struggle to dominate the environment; it can be felt as it actually is: a creative process where the action of the subject and of the context are integrated, one. I am that which the unified field, the entire environment (the universe), is bringing about. We pretend that the origin of our actions is located within each one of us; to limit the 'I' to some center of decision and energy located within a membrane, a layer of skin, is in fact a convention, a social consensus.
The force of habit makes it difficult to realize and feel that we are in fact reverberating, with some degree of responsibility, the fabric of the universe. This would be a sense of identity consistent with and compatible with the current scientific description of organisms and entities. It would involve the sensation of 1. the external world, 2. our bodies and 3. our minds and consciousness (cognition in a broad sense): this trinity, as a unity, revealing our beings as fractal expressions of universal being, demonstrating the oneness of the state-of-being. The rational, intellectual understanding of this oneness is an important point, but its apprehension and knowledge at the level of feeling, of experience through mystical union, is the fundamental goal, the realization of the essence, of the phenomenon. To experience our identity with the cosmos is essentially and by definition a pantheistic goal, but it is part of the program and aspirations of many immanentist spiritual traditions, such as Taoism, Zen and other Buddhist sects mainly. In some more reserved way, such experience occurs in the most esoteric core of some sects of a more philosophical orientation, with Christian, Jewish and Islamic roots.