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    Incan Anatomy of the Soul
    Incan Anatomy of the Soul
    Incan Anatomy of the Soul
    Ebook201 pages2 hours

    Incan Anatomy of the Soul

    By Marc Torra

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    About this ebook

    Upon entering the age of materialism ―around 5000 years ago― knowledge about the anatomy of the soul became a part of various esoteric traditions. It was therefore kept private among a few initiates.

    In the Himalayas, it was knowledge passed down orally, from master to disciple, and recorded in texts like the Puranas or the Tantras. In ancient Egypt and Sumer, it was transmitted through various mystical schools. With the arrival of Islam, many of these schools became Sufi brotherhoods. In the West, because of the power associated with this knowledge, various secret societies were founded, keeping it only for a few initiates and limited primarily to those few who were members of the upper echelons.

    It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that such information began to transcend the circle of disciples, initiates and followers to become accessible to the remainder of the population.

    However, this was not the case in the Andes. As this book reveals, the Inca civilisation conveyed such knowledge openly. It was communicated in their myths and legends, in their urban planning, ceremonies and festivals, dances, symbols and emblems, and in the language. It was ‘written’ for everyone to ‘read’ because, by definition, in a culture without a formal writing system, there cannot be illiterate people.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMarc Torra
    Release dateSep 10, 2015
    ISBN9780994427717
    Incan Anatomy of the Soul
    Author

    Marc Torra

    Marc comes from Urus, a community in the Pyrenees, the land of the Cathars. The name Urus is of Indo-European origin and it means ‘a place where the water springs’. He went abroad in 1995 after graduating from the University of Barcelona, and since then has lived and worked a little in every continent. Through living in other countries, Marc has associated with many different cultures and ways of thinking, especially with those he calls ‘earth people’. From them, he has learned a different way of reasoning, and discovered that the future of the planet depends on our ability to learn what such cultures have to offer.As an author, he writes about spirituality and new tendencies, developing and intermingling genres, making use of both narrative and essay writing. He tries to understand and experience things for himself in order to build bridges, both to unify different cultures and spiritual traditions across the globe.

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      Book preview

      Incan Anatomy of the Soul - Marc Torra

      About this book

      UPON ENTERING THE age of materialism ―around 5000 years ago― knowledge about the anatomy of the soul became a part of various esoteric traditions. It was therefore kept private among a few initiates.

      In the Himalayas, it was knowledge passed down orally, from master to disciple, and recorded in texts like the Puranas or the Tantras. In ancient Egypt and Sumer, it was transmitted through various mystical schools. With the arrival of Islam, many of these schools became Sufi brotherhoods. In the West, because of the power associated with this knowledge, various secret societies were founded, keeping it only for a few initiates and limited primarily to those few who were members of the upper echelons.

      It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that such information began to transcend the circle of disciples, initiates and followers to become accessible to the remainder of the population.

      However, this was not the case in the Andes. As this book reveals, the Inca civilisation conveyed such knowledge openly. It was communicated in their myths and legends, in their urban planning, ceremonies and festivals, dances, symbols and emblems, and in the language. It was ‘written’ for everyone to ‘read’ because, by definition, in a culture without a formal writing system, there cannot be illiterate people.

      Introduction

      Apu. Anonymous mural. Picture by the author. Creative Commons

      The Andean Complementarity

      THE ANDEAN WORLD does not distinguish between good and evil, between positive and negative. Rather, it speaks in terms of a range of densities of energy: heavy (Hucha) and light (Sami). The denser energy comes from the underworld (Ukhu Pacha) and the lighter energy comes from above (Hanan Pacha). The world in between—which we inhabit (Kay Pacha)—is the cross (Tinkuy) or the point of intersection or between the realms.

      The Andean view of the Cosmos is not based on duality, but rather, it seeks for complementarity. When taking the Andean view, we do not try to do good by simply denying our dark sides. We would instinctively know that when one denies a certain aspect of ourselves, rather than defeating it, we end up dominated by it. For example, when we project some evil intention onto others, while at the same time imagining that there can be no evil in ourselves—believing that we are only good—we end up turning this pretended ‘good’ into something malignant.

      For this reason, Andeans neither perceive the underworld or lower chakras—nor the serpent that represents them—as something evil that must be feared, avoided or annihilated. Instead, they see the underworld and the lower chakras as something to be integrated and evolved, so that the serpent can grow wings and fly. They seek to transmute the reptile into bird, the caterpillar into butterfly, giving continuity to the process of the evolution of consciousness. We also find this metaphor in the Toltec Quetzalcoatl, the Mayan Kukulcan, the Uraeus of Ancient Egypt or the Greek Caduceus, among many others.

      Uraeus of Ancient Egypt

      From the Andean perspective, the underworld is the place of origin, the pakarina, that which gives birth to life, the Lake Titikaka, the womb of Pachamama (Mother Earth), the centre of the Chakana cross, the reality from which we were born. It would not make sense to see it as something negative or malignant; that would be like saying that children are evil for not having attained adulthood, or that animals are wicked for not yet having taken on the human condition.

      Someone with an Andean perspective does not need to make such distinctions. This helps to avoid many of the dilemmas that trap the three main religions of book (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). The duality between good and evil brings with it paradoxes— a God who is omnipresent (it is in everything) but does not include evil (as if evil were separated from everything), or a fallen angel one who incites us to do evil acts, the very symbol of darkness, whose name Lucifer comes from the word ‘light’ This system creates a dual universe in which God is seen as pure love and Satan as complete evil, without any middle ground: a world of extremes and paradoxes.

      The Eastern world, unlike the West, did in fact learn how to perceive these concepts in more relative terms. They uphold that nothing is good or bad per se, given that these represent relative concepts. Things and deeds could be interpreted as being good or bad depending on how we use them and how we look at them, just as people could be perceived as acting saintly or wickedly depending on our beliefs. However, none of them are intrinsically good or evil—they are simply things, deeds and people.

      This is why in Samakhya, an ancient philosophical school in India, darkness is called tamas: signifying inertia and apathy. There is nothing malignant about it—it is just an underdeveloped expression of Nature, something to be refined until it is enlightened by Spirit. The light, on the other hand, is known as sattwa: purity, harmony, beauty and balance. Between the two, there is the quality of rajas, signifying movement and energy, typical of the intermediate world.

      These terms, sattwa and tamas, are much closer to describing the characteristics of the Andean upper world and underworld than the typical Western concepts of good and evil or heaven and hell. In spite of that, neither the Andeans nor any of the other indigenous people of America have ever felt the need to apply such dual concepts. They have not made them relative, like in the East, and much less have they expressed them with the typical absolutism of the Western world.

      This is why, before the arrival of the Castilian conquistadores, there was no specific word for ‘bad’, ‘wicked’ or ‘evil’ in the Quechua language. In this ancient Andean language, the word to refer to something good is ‘allin’. One of its uses, for example, is to say good night (allin tuta). In contrast, no word exists to say ‘bad’. And this is how it was up until 500 years ago, when Europeans arrived with such concept. In order to incorporate this word into their language, the Andean people had to translate it as a negation of the good. So they invented the expression mana allin kay which literally means no (mana) exists (kay) good (allin).

      The same is true for the concept of ‘evil’. The Quechua speaker says mana allin sunquyuq, where mana allin means does not exist, and sunquyuq refers to the heart. Therefore, evil is expressed as someone having no heart. At this point, one must ask: Who had no heart? The Andean people, who founded a society based on the three fundamental values of service (llankay), love (munay) and wisdom (yach’ay); or those who arrived with the sword in one hand and the cross in the other, accusing them of evil acts, in order to justify to the world their own acts of cruelty...

      Presently, the Andean indigenous people seek to recover the knowledge lost during the long, dark 500 year period out of which we are slowly emerging. They seek to recover it from the records that are still preserved, those that were salvaged after what has been called the extirpation of idolatryi, performed by the Catholic Church. Other civilisations were not as fortunate. The Maya codices literally fuelled an enduring fire.ii However, because the Inca lacked a formal writing system, their knowledge was recorded in multiple forms so now it can be easily restored. This so-called illiteracy might have been perceived as a disadvantage by many; instead, it has become a strength as it allowed them to preserve their wisdom.

      Inca Writing

      THE INCAS, WE are told, had no form of writing in the strict sense of the word. However, their lack of a conventional writing system that communicates words, syllables, and phonemes did not prevent

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