Guy Spiro: Oscar, what’s new since we last spoke in 2005?

Oscar Miro-Quesada: There have been numerous opportunities that have coalesced around our service work through the Heart of the Healer Foundation that have resulted in partnerships with various indigenous communities as well as social justice and environmental activists both in the U.S. and in Peru, that are quite exciting. This has manifested in becoming the custodians of almost 15,000 acres of primary rainforest in the most bio-diverse area of the southeastern Peruvian Amazon Basin, Vio Las Pieres. It’s a forty-year lease from the Peruvian Government and the rainforest area there is remarkable. We’re implementing various ecologically restorative and environmentally sustainable forms that include social equity for the local communities. With these forms, we can model all of the ways we have to start waking up to turning into partners with our earth if we are to survive.

GS: That’s excellent.

OMQ: So that’s one aspect of the larger organizational level that includes many other areas. At the personal level, I’m married to my beloved Cynthia Louise Weaver. We were married by a Hawaiian Kahuna, just the two of us barefoot, with our altar, on a beach in Maui. That’s very exciting personal medicine for me.

GS: Congratulations.

OMQ: Also, I have been developing, for the first time ever, a cadre of Heart of the Healer Foundation endorsed mentors of the Pachakuti Mesa tradition that I originated. We have 26 people who have been trained personally by me and we are launching a two year series on the Pachakuti Mesa tradition of cross-cultural shamanism. In Quetois, the language of the Andes, Pachakuti means, Pacha— world or realm or space or time, much like the notion of the Bardo in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It’s a state of consciousness that can become very physically tangible, but mostly it’s associated with earth or world. And kuti means turning or reversal, so Pachakuti literally means “world reversal” or the turning of time. Mesa is, of course, a Spanish derived name that refers to a shamanic healing altar. That’s the term we use to define our medicine work as cross-cultural shamanic healers throughout the world. I have been humbled by the caliber and dedication of these good brothers and sisters who are willing to carry out this work in the world and I’m turning it over entirely to them. That’s freeing me up to establish alliances and build my network with various other world organizations to collaborate in keeping the great work alive.

GS: It sounds like you’re making tremendous progress.

OMQ: Yes.

GS: What else is going on?

OMQ: You know I get these inspired visionary downloads, if you can call them that ...

GS: Yes, I use that imagery myself.

OMQ: It is what can gather good people together in a way that will harness the powers and forces of the natural world through the tactics of core shamanic rituals and ceremonies and influence not only the human social reality in which we live, but the actual atomic substructure of the material world. I hope I’m not sounding too grandiose when I say this.

GS: Not to me.

OMQ: So, if put simply, I often receive in my dreaming, as well as in some of my vision work at my home medicine lodge, a very strong directive. And whether or not the source is my mentor Don Celso Rojas Palomino, that I had the honor of apprenticing with from 1969–1982, it seems like it’s coming from him. He is on the other side, and he’s the one who bequeathed me the task of bringing our shamanic traditions of northern Peru to developed nations. He continues to visit me and drop me these little hints as to what we need during this critical time on the planet. And one of those not so gentle nudges was a fully developed three year program of events that were intended to bring self culture and nature into balance. So we began last year with a series of events that were held at sacred sites around the world, mostly in the United States and Europe and in Peru. In these I engage the various indigenous or tribal nations of the area. For example, in the U.S. we went to Black Hills and Mesa Verde and to Canyon deche Chaco canyon, and even to Walden Pond, and places of that nature. We brought in the traditional caretakers from the tribal nations of that area and cooperated in honoring the natural world and all of its beauty as well as its wisdom, and fed the Mother through our ritual and ceremonial arts. We built bridges of cooperation between people who once were a bit reticent about allowing round-eye paleface types of European descent ...

GS: Hey, wait a minute ...

[laughter]

OMQ: Well, you know what I mean. The doors were opened in such a magnificent way that it’s created quite a list of reciprocal partnerships among people, helping them preserve their languages, and other forms of art and culture that would otherwise not have been possible. The next year, which is this year, we need to bring this concept to the culture which is represented in our world today, the urban environments and metropolitan areas. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, because nothing happens by chance, it’s really in cities where most of the transformation in the arts and sciences has occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries. So this is a hot bed of potential and possibility. This year we have a series of gatherings that, instead of at sacred sites, are at sacred spaces within urban centers. That’s what this program in Chicago is about, in cooperation with Columbia College, that will be assisting us with our activities in Grant Park. They have this program called Critical Encounters with their community affairs department. So we’re getting some mainstream organizations very excited about integrating the wisdom or our shamanic peoples in a way that co-creates a sustainable community and its practices in urban environments. That’s what we’re doing this year. The program name is Sacred Space, Urban Grace, reconnecting spirit of place with people of soul.

GS: Good stuff, the work just continues on. It’s good to do interviews with you every few years because you’ve always got such good stuff to share.

OMQ: If I may share a quote by a famed visionary architect and city planner called Paulo Soleri, he says, “The sacred space is where reverence constructs the future more and better than where reverence sings nostalgia for the past.” In essence, he captures what these events in urban environments are about. This is not trying to re-establish or reclaim the ancient ways of our shamanic peoples in a way that usurps their traditional use. On the contrary, this is about integrating the wisdom and the ceremonial arts, specifically of our Andean ancestral nations, into the consciousness of city dwellers in the future, so that people can experience true heartfelt reverence in their daily lives and through that set up networks of cooperation among various other community organizations.

GS: As we’ve agreed in the past, there’s no going back. We’ve got to go forward.

OMQ: There’s no other way..

GS: I really like what you’re saying about integrating, rather than, what so many people are still trying to do, go backwards.

OMQ: Right.

GS: We’ve always agreed that the bitterness has got to be let go, and we’ve got to build on what there is.

OMQ: Yes, and I can’t think of a better place to do it than in these urban environments that have been built on top of what were originally tribal sacred grounds. If you look throughout history, throughout the planet, not just in developed nations, every cathedral, every courthouse, every gathering place that marked the height of any civilization was built upon the most sanctified pagan ceremonial space. In the same way, in the Americas, most of our major cities were built at the confluence of rivers that were extremely sacred to our aboriginal peoples of Turtle Island.

GS: Even in an innocent sort of way, you would do that because, of course, the indigenous people would have understood the importance of those places, the same as the people who came after them.

OMQ: Exactly, and it’s all about spirit of place. It’s all about recognizing that the earth is a very animated, living, organic being, known by many names, depending on what tribal nation or modern persuasion you are. Gaia is a beautiful name, I like that. Yet she is alive and animated, you and I know that, but a lot of people have forgotten about it, and desecrated her.

GS: That leads me to something that I want to ask your opinion on. Now, obviously, we shouldn’t be polluting, that goes without saying. But it’s starting to look like climate change might be going on quite independent of what we’re doing and is just part of Gaia’s natural cycle.

OMQ: I would have to answer that in the following manner ... it depends who the audience is as to how to answer this question. Because anything can be statistically as well as historically validated depending on one’s ideological or epistemological bent, depending on the results you want to see, you can find the facts to prove that that’s the case.

GS: Right, and I started by saying that clearly, we shouldn’t be contributing to global warming ourselves, but at the same time, there do seem to be cycles within cycles, some quite beyond the earth’s cycles.

OMQ: Always. As you well know, there have been various mass extinctions on this planet way before humans ever set foot here.

GS: So we’ve got to stop pooping where we eat, obviously, but it’s starting to look like we need to be thinking about how to respond to these changes, rather than trying to figure out how to stop them or reverse them.

OMQ: Yes, there’s no reversing, unfortunately. In my opinion, we’ve come to a threshold that is irreversible, and right now it’s about really managing the transformation that is on its way in a manner that in a few generations will, in fact, produce a humanity that is, instead of eco-sapiens, Eco-Sapien Galacticos, as I term it. A human civilization that has reached a level of consciousness of its interdependence with the universe itself. one in which we work cooperatively with the beauty, bounty and renewable energy sources in creation rather than plunder the earth.

GS: We’ve got to stop being stupid, that’s clear. I like the term that you chose, I’ve been saying that we’re morphing into Homo-Luminoso.

OMQ: (laughs). It would be Homo-Lupes in Latin. We are. We can’t tell everybody that, yet. There is some stuff coming down. Our prophesy is very clear in warning us that we would come to this point of no return. Now it’s time to prepare by making changes in ourselves first, and through community involvement and participatory politics and social and environmental activism. All without having to force change, but understand the Great Work is not only about transforming our world, but transforming ourselves in the process.

GS: Well, it starts at the individual level.

OMQ: I pray that we can build sustainability in both social and ecological dimensions through sharing of the beauty of ceremony and the power of the healing rituals of our shamanic peoples, and help us get our act together.

GS: Well, we clearly can. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we can do it. The question is, do we wake up enough individuals to summon up the will to do it. I’m optimistic about that as well, especially when I talk to people like you and hear the things that you’re doing.

OMQ: I’m just one of a hundred million souls out there. That’s the incredible thing, that there are so many people getting it.

GS: In so many ways.

OMQ: Correct. There’s so much we can talk about, from an off the grid Wisdom Convergence Seminar called Sipapu, after the Hopi name. We have seventy acres on the Dumpopapa River in southeastern Amazon Peru, ideally suited to build this place. We’ve had our first meeting with sustainable architects and experts in renewability and design, and now we’re moving into the fundraising aspect of it. Yet the quality of people collaborating on building this residential eco-restorative village is outstanding. I’m hoping that this will be one of hundreds of thousands, not modeled necessarily out of the one that we’re putting together, yet with the same intention of keeping it local and making sure we don’t take more than we need from the Mother.

GS: Do you think that they need to be built at a certain elevation?

[laughter]

OMQ:: You’re tricky aren’t you?

GS: It’s an honest question.

OMQ: I can just answer my personal preference would be at least two hundred kilometers inland, not necessarily in altitude, but inland. By 2050, things are going to start getting very tricky for the coastal communities of this planet.

GS: And since I’m planning on living well into my 100s, I plan on seeing this.

OMQ: You have an open invitation to come down and see Papu, you’ll have a room with a view and a rainforest canopy, with rainbow colored macaws flying all over the place.

GS: I’m going to hold you to that. Is there anything else you need to let our readers know?

OMQ: Two things. The five C’s of urban revitalization, commune, consecrate, compose, connect, cooperate. Those are the five phases of Pachakuti Mesa tradition ritual that we will be apprenticing to people from all walks of life when they attend these urban gatherings. To commune, to consecrate, to compose, which is to co-create, to connect, and then to cooperate. This is a heartfelt mentorship in ritual shamanism for the eco-spiritual revitalization of civil society.

            Also, there is an awesome two anda half-minute YouTube blurb that is a beautiful portrayal of what we are doing in these Sacred Space, Urban Grace events. Just go to Heart of the Healer on YouTube and you’ll see. The title is Eco-Spiritual Revolution.

GS: I’m sure all our readers will definitely do that.

OMQ: All the information is there, it has a list of the areas in the countries, the cities where they’ll be occurring, and contact information and all that stuff.

GS: Alright, sir, I’ll see you in a few weeks.

OMQ: Much love to you, brother, thank you for doing the good work and getting the information out there.

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