Its civilization in ruins and looted of its treasure, its sacred shrines buried under Catholic churches, its people decimated by slavery and smallpox, ground under the boots of the Conquistadores, treated like and disrespected as no better than savages, the Inca Empire died.

     One of its sons wrote a manuscript which he entitled “The First New Chronicle and Good Government,” which he sent to the King of Spain as a plea for respectful treatment of the indigenous population by Spanish soldiers and priests. He wrote in detail of the Inca's culture and spiritual beliefs to show the king that Inca culture was worthy of respect. In 1616, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala let fly his cry of the heart.

     It did not have the desired effect. Spain’s tyranny continued unabated. So, you might ask, “Then why bother?”

[This colorized page from Guaman Poma's manuscript is from here .]

The point is what happens energetically, outside of space and time, when you utter a crie de coeur (French for cry of the heart). This is a function of your quantum consciousness, by the way.

The result, to date, of Guaman Poma’s 400-year old crie de coeur is at the end of this essay, which I dedicate to Peter Canova, whose own beautiful cry of the heart can be explored at www.popeannalisa.com.

Hucha

In Quechua, Guaman Poma’s native language, there is a word for heavy, dense, dark energy, the kind that hangs like a cloud over the heads of people at times when they feel really down emotionally. (Trust me, I’m an expert on this. I could walk into a room and put everybody on a bummer without saying a word. Dealing with my clinical depression without using psychiatric drugs has taken me deep into a study of subtle energy [see NOTES below for definition], and much consequent relief from depressive symptoms.)

Hucha, the Quechua word for dense energy, is what many erroneously call “negative energy.” There is no negative or positive subtle energy. That thinking will not lead to control of the energy, merely to futile attempts to suppress it or grasp at what we consider “positive.” If instead you think of subtle energy quality as a grey scale, then you open the door to control and utilization.

These are your emotions, after all. Suppressing misery and grasping at happiness is for children. Quantum consciousness is for the mature, awakened soul.

In my studies of Peruvian shamanism, I came across this word hucha early on. (Thank you, Alberto!) When I began to compile a glossary of terminology of the study of Andean shamanism, intuition told me there was more to it. Then one day I came across the following in the definition of hucha: “business (or affair) or plea…. * ”  

We are now going to digress, at least geographically, and go to Tibet for a concept that will fold right in to this line of thought that dense energy is an emotional plea.

Karmic Seeds

"The Sanskrit word Karma … literally means action. In Buddhism however, karma mainly refers to one's intention or motivation [energy] while doing an action." **

If we plant a seed today, it will sprout tomorrow. When emotion arises, it often energizes motivation and thought. Our motivation is the energetic investment in this seed. If this energy is not neutralized, then a karmic seed results. (There are energetic techniques for achieving this which I will not go into here.) Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche writes,

"Any reaction to any situation … that is rooted in grasping or aversion, leaves a trace in the mind. As karma dictates reactions, the reactions sow further karmic seeds, which further dictate reactions, and so on." ***

Most of us think of karma as a bad thing because we have conditioned ourselves to misunderstand karma in a Judeo-Christian context of sin and retribution. We ignorantly behave and think in ways that plant seeds for all future events. This IS how we create our future and why we are absolutely responsible for our experience.

However, what if you use this space/time mechanism consciously, deliberately, to create a desired future? The spiritual technique has been around for a very long time.

Poison Into Medicine

A Buddhist concept from the study of lo jong that I love very much is turning poison into medicine. This means you take the hucha and convert it into its lighter counterpart on the gray scale: sami.

In Quechua, sami means refined energy. (Sami is only refined relative to hucha, and vice versa. An elightened person’s hucha would be sami to another less mature soul.) As hucha is formed by our resistance to the energy that flows through us continually, sami reflects a relative lack of resistance. Hucha only becomes a problem when there is too much of it. If it is released, it becomes food for the Earth and the lower organisms. It can even be turned into fuel for one’s pleas for the future!

How we respond to life's inevitable sufferings is the key. Negative, painful experiences are often necessary to motivate us. One Buddhist scripture describes illness as awakening the desire to seek the truth. Likewise, people have been inspired to a lifetime commitment to peace and justice by their experience of war and injustice.

The process of changing poison into medicine begins when we approach difficult experiences as an opportunity to reflect on ourselves and to strengthen and develop our courage and compassion. The more we are able to do this, the more we are able to grow in vitality and wisdom and realize a truly expansive state of life.

Suffering can thus serve as a springboard for a deeper experience of happiness. From the perspective of Buddhism, inherent in all negative experiences is this profound positive potential. However, if we are defeated by suffering or respond to challenging circumstances in negative and destructive ways, the original "poison" is not transformed but remains poison. [Source here.]

The Result of Guaman Poma’s Plea

Although the Spanish continued their conquest despite Poma’s book, that was not the end of it. The King of Spain gave the book to the King of Denmark, who put it into his vast library, where it remained for a few hundred years. In the 20th Century, it was rediscovered by scholars, scanned onto the internet, the pictures colorized, the text translated into several languages, and published properly into printed books. [An English translation has recently become available on Amazon.com. Because of what Poma wrote, we can learn much today of the culture that the Spanish and the Catholic Church did their utmost to obliterate. In part because of Poma’s crie de coeur, a resurgence of native Incan spiritual beliefs is flourishing, the original teachings are being rediscovered for the many people who appreciate their power and connection to the Earth.

So let fly your own cry of the heart. Do it with love and faith in the Living Universe. Polish it, make it something to be proud of and to persuade. Energize it with pleading from your heart. It may not have the effect you are grasping at now, but the Universe will make sure it will be appreciated in its proper context. You will be planting a seed for the future. If enough of us do this consciously, we can create a future free of war and poverty, where selfishness and hatred and violence are not tolerated as means to an end. An Andean peasant who died 400 years ago has shown us the way.

Notes

“Subtle energy is difficult to define within the current scientific paradigm. Ancient and modern wisdom traditions describe human bioenergies referred to by many names (chi, ki, prana, etheric energy, fohat, orgone, odic force, mana, homeopathic resonance, e.g.) that is believed to move throughout the light energy body and thus is difficult to measure using conventional instrumentation. In addition, many of the complementary and alternative therapies that are becoming increasingly popular appear to involve the flow of these subtle energies through the dense physical body. In addition, it is traditionally accepted that expansions of consciousness often are related to changes in subtle energies that cannot be quantified. These latter "energies", which are said to be associated with interactions and with transcendence, may not actually be involved with known physical fields.”  -- The International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM).

  * William Sullivan. The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time. Crown Publishers (New York), 1996.

 ** www.viewonbuddhism.org/karma.html

*** Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Snow Lion Publications (Ithaca, NY), 1998.