Alberto Villoldo
How We Change Our World with Perception
All of us want to affect the world for the better. We look around us and see problems—crime, pollution, child abuse—and because we’re a society of rules, we believe that laws and religious commandments will help us make changes. For example, Americans elect legislators to Congress who pass more and more laws every year in the hopes that these rules will make citizens’ lives better. By contrast, the ancient Greeks were a people of the concept—they knew that there was nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Because they manipulated ideas so elegantly, they were able to invent democracy, develop philosophy, and systematize mathematics. Their Roman neighbors, on the other hand, were great lawmakers, and Roman codes have influenced many modern Western laws. When faced with problems, the Greek philosophers conceptualized new systems, while the Romans called on their armies to enforce the precepts.
The Laika, the shamans of the ancient Americas, don’t live by rules or ideas. If they want to change their world, they don’t pass new laws or come up with new theories. Instead, they choose to change the way they perceive a problem. By changing their perception, they transform a challenge into an opportunity.
In the West, we tend to associate our perception with the dozens of states of awareness we’re familiar with. For example, we’re in one mode of awareness when we’re just waking up or drifting off to sleep, another when we’re in reverie, another when we’re enraged, and so on. In each one, a different part of the brain is active—so we refer to them as “states of consciousness,” which are products of the mind. Perceptual levels, on the other hand, exist independently of the mind.
There are four perceptual levels through which a Laika engages the world. These levels correspond to the four domains of manifestation of vibration and light: the physical world (our body), the realm of thoughts and ideas (mind), the realm of myth (soul), and the world of spirit (energy). These perceptual levels are associated with the four energetic bodies that make up the human energy field. They’re stacked inside each other like Russian nesting dolls, with the physical body innermost, the mental body enveloping and informing the physical shell, the soul enveloping the mental and physical, and the spiritual body outermost, informing and organizing them all like a blueprint.
When we shift from one level of perception up to the next, we retain our ability to function at the lower realm, but we have a much wider view of what we’re experiencing. I’m reminded here of an old story about a traveler who comes across two stonecutters. He asks the first, “What are you doing?” and receives the reply, “Squaring the stone.” He then walks over to the second stonecutter and asks, “What are you doing?” and receives the reply, “I am building a cathedral.” In other words, both men are performing the same task, but one of them is aware that he has the choice to be part of a greater dream.
Albert Einstein once said that the problems we face in life cannot be solved at which they were created. To that end, being able to shift to a higher realm of perception can help us find solutions to our problems, resolve conflicts, heal disease, and experience oneness with all of creation, whereas before we were only experiencing distress and separation.
By his mid-20s ALBERTO VILLOLDO was the youngest clinical professor at San Francisco State University. He was directing his own laboratory, the Biological Self-Regulation Lab, investigating how energy medicine and visualization could change the chemistry of the brain.
One day in his biology laboratory, Alberto realized that his investigation had to get bigger instead of smaller; Alberto needed to find a system larger than the neural networks of the brain. The microscope was the wrong instrument to answer the questions he was asking. Many others were already studying the hardware – Alberto Villoldo wanted to learn to re-program the SYSTEM. Anthropological stories hinted that there were people around the globe who claimed to know such things, including the Inka in Peru, the few remaining “shamans” in today’s modern civilization.
As he did initial research into the Inka, Alberto decided that he needed to personally investigate the roots of the Inka civilization itself to collect the vestiges of a 5,000-year-old energy medicine known for healing through Spirit and light.
A few weeks later, knowing this investigation was not going to be a “part time” pastime or a brief sabbatical for a few weeks’ time, Alberto Villoldo resigned his post at the university.
One day in his biology laboratory, Alberto realized that his investigation had to get bigger instead of smaller; Alberto needed to find a system larger than the neural networks of the brain. The microscope was the wrong instrument to answer the questions he was asking. Many others were already studying the hardware – Alberto Villoldo wanted to learn to re-program the SYSTEM. Anthropological stories hinted that there were people around the globe who claimed to know such things, including the Inka in Peru, the few remaining “shamans” in today’s modern civilization.
University colleagues thought Alberto Villoldo was absolutely mad.
Not to be dissuaded, Alberto Villoldo traded his laboratory for a pair of hiking boots and a ticket to the Amazon. He was determined to learn from researchers whose vision had not been confined to the lens of a microscope, from people whose body of knowledge encompassed more than the measurable, material world that Alberto had been taught was the ONLY reality. He wanted to meet the people who sensed the spaces between things and perceived the luminous strands that animate all life.
Scattered throughout the remnants of this ancient Amazonian empire were a number of sages or “Earth Keepers” who remembered the ancient ways. Alberto traveled through countless villages and hamlets and met with scores of medicine men and women. The lack of a written body of knowledge meant that every village had brought its own flavor and style to the healing practices that still survived.
For more than 10 years, Alberto Villoldo trained with the jungle medicine people. Along the way, he discovered that his journey into shamanism had actually been guided by his personal desire to become whole.
In healing his own soul wounds, Alberto Villoldo walked the path of the wounded healer and learned to transform old pain, grief, anger, and shame to sources of strength and compassion.
From the Amazon, Alberto Villoldo trekked the coast of Peru, from Nazca, the site of gigantic markings on the desert floor that depict power animals and geometric figures, to the fabled Shimbe lagoons in the north, home to the country’s most renowned sorcerers. Then, in Lake Titicaca – the Sea on Top of the World – Alberto Villoldo collected the stories and healing practices of the people from which, the legends say, the Inka were born.
Through it all, Alberto Villoldo discovered a set of sacred technologies that transform the body, heal the soul, and can change the way we live and the way we die.
These ancient teachings and understandings explain that a Luminous Energy Field (LEF), whose source is located in infinity, surrounds us. The LEF acts as a matrix that maintains the health and vibrancy of the physical body.
Today, Alberto Villoldo is a best-selling author and founder in the world-renowned Institute of Energy Medicine, The Four Winds Society. In all of his teachings and writings, Alberto shares the experience of infinity’s easy ability to heal and transform us, to free us from the temporal chains that keep us fettered to illness, old age, and disease.
Over the course of two decades with the shamans in the jungles and high mountains of the Andes, Alberto Villoldo would discover that we are more than flesh and bone, that we are absolutely fashioned of Spirit and light. This unending Luminous Energy Field exists in every cell of our bodies … it is up to us to recognize and work with this awesome gift to change the very nature of our living.