A Conversation With... don Theo Paredes, Ph.D

The Monthly Aspectarian: Theo, your very interesting background includes training from the age of eleven as a shaman in Peru. Will you tell us briefly about what brought you to where you are today?

Theo Paredes: I was born in Peru in South America, one of the countries that has the highest native population ... which even after 600 years of contact with European people have kept and are still practicing a lot of their own pristine beliefs and teachings. That's where a lot of my background comes from, because I was able to live among them and learn from them. Not from an academic or historical point of view, but just growing among their own beliefs and customs. It was my privilege to grow for more than 20 years with them, learning what now is called alternative medicine, shamanism, or what I prefer to call a technique for mindfulness.

TMA: When you say "they," who are you talking about?

TP: The Quechua people who are still living in Peru. They are descendents of the Inca people.

TMA: Are you Quechua yourself?

TP: I have part Quechua blood, and I have also Spanish blood. After that, I studied anthropology, which I am--an anthropologist--and I was also able to work in my profession. Life, I think, always leads you to what is to influence your path, and my work now is about recovering all this information and different aspects of it such as medicine, management of plants, and basically the spiritual aspects of the future which are very clearly defined in terms not only of religious rituals but the search for truth and reality.

TMA: You have a Ph.D. in anthropology?

TP: Yes.

TMA: And are you a recognized shaman among the Quechua?

TP: Yes. Many people think that to be a shaman is a kind of degree given to you by a master and it's not. The master is teaching you and has a special way to present unity to a society which you are involved in. The "degree" comes by itself from the recognition of the people you are working with as a healer. We don't have the word "shaman," we use words like curandero, a Spanish word, or hampeg, a Quechua word, which mean healer. It takes a lot of time to learn all of the techniques—which go from recognizing yourself, knowing yourself, and all the concepts of the body, harmony, different kinds of food. And how to handle the different kinds of sickness in different ways—with plants, with some exercises, with some diet, or going into what we might call the shamanic world, which are experiences that are not ordinary states of consciousness. In the shamanic world, you are able to deal with other fields of the body that we might call the spirit.

TMA: So you live in many worlds.

TP: There are not many worlds, there's only one. There is a big world from which we perceive only one little part.

TMA: I mean that in Peru you live in the Quechua world and the Spanish-European world, and you also live in the European and the American worlds.

TP: It's a privilege to be able to shift from one to another and understand and share [with the outside] the different approaches to the culture from which I come. In the beginning there were only "Indians" and they were ignorant, but now we begin to recognize that they are an ancient people who have some wisdom, some knowledge and something that we may learn from them or that they can teach us or maybe something that they have to share with us.

TMA: It seems to me that there are some things that the developed world had better learn from them.

TP: I think so. I don't like to put too many definitions into my life or my perception. I think we are all human beings and we should be open to sharing what we have.

TMA: But the Quechua and other indigenous peoples who still have their teachings have information that humanity needs very badly if it's going to survive.

TP: I think that everything in life is coming at the right time. Now, like never before, we are able to connect and share these things. Before, it took a lot of time to connect even one continent with another. Today, we are able to know immediately what's happening on the other side of the world and we have access to all this information. I think this is the time to be opening to all of this [ancient information] because we are searching for something. The information was always there. We were looking for it, and now I think we have better ways to access it.

TMA: What do you see as some of the most important things the developed world has to learn from the indigenous cultures?

TP: As an anthropologist, I can see that historically we have been having so many changes in society and social organizations. I think one of the biggest changes in the world was the French Revolution where they found three big principles--freedom, equality and fraternity--which every society of the world should be based on. But from that time until now, I think there were only two of these principles with which society has been trying to develop its own world. One was the capitalist world that we might call freedom, and the other was the socialist, or Communist world that we might call equality. But until now, none of these societies have been thinking about and developing the principle of fraternity " which is brotherhood, in which you don't have to be equal to another. You might be different, but you are accepted ' a society in which we are like brothers. That's something that's going to bring freedom. I think all these ancient cultures have that knowledge, some other kind of principles on which society might be organized. Maybe that's the main thing that this world can learn from indigenous cultures in order to rethink, to reorganize all this beautiful planet to make a better life for all of us.

TMA: How about the relationship between people and the planet?

TP: I think the Western mind has been thinking of the planet as a part of itself. It has been thinking that we are the masters, that we own everything, we deserve everything, and we are able to take from the earth what is possible for us to take. In the ancient cultures, and particularly in my culture, that's not [the way it's seen]. We are part of the world. Of course we can be served by this world, but this world is like a human being, a being alive, one that we can wound.

One of the main principles for us is that sickness comes when you break the energy, the equilibrium, in yourself, when you break the equilibrium between yourself and the people who surround you, and finally when you break the equilibrium between yourself and your environment. One of the main problems is not only to find through our science or our mind that we are causing damage to the planet; the important thing is to feel that we are part of the planet and that we are linked to it ... and that whatever we do is going to influence the whole planet. That, I think, is the difference between our perception of the world and the Western perception of the world.

TMA: It seems to me that science is not going to go away, but if we can become aware of our relationship to the planet and work cooperatively with it, things could be much better for everybody in the world.

TP: That's true, and it's absolutely a principle. Science is a beautiful tool for beginning to understand a lot of things which before we regarded only as beliefs of these primitive people. The new string theory scientists are talking about--that it's not that there are solids and between the solids there is empty space ... now they are talking about everything being linked to everything by these strings, as they call them, and everything is vibrating in different frequencies. Now we are learning about electromagnetic fields, and now we are hearing the same things that people thousands of years ago were saying ... that we are in relation to everything, that we are part of this world. I think science took its own path to find the same principles that these ancient people had, and now has to reinterpret it.

TMA: We spoke earlier about a shift in time. Can you talk about that?

TP: For the native people, the concept of time is different. We have a word, tacha, which means earth but which also means space and time. This concept of space and time is not like that of the Western mind in which you have a linear concept from the past to the present and the future. Our concept of time is cyclical. It goes and comes back in some period of years, and we call these cycles pachacutec. All these pachacutecs are cycles in which time and space change. We have cycles of 50 years, 100 years, 500 years, 1,000 years, 2,000 years, 10,000 years. And now, according to our calendar, we are getting into a big pachacutec, one which happens after 2,000 years. This shifting is going to come with a lot of changes, qualitative changes in the earth and also in human beings. These qualitative changes could be changes in weather, which not only could change the situations for other beings like animals, but is also going to be a shift in the mind of human beings.

I don't want to speculate that we are maybe going to be telepathic or something like that, but it's going to be moving into some shift in people's understanding of consciousness. All of what's happening now is like the pains that come before a baby is born, the delivery previous to the birth. Unfortunately, we have confusion, hunger, fighting--until something new happens. This is a time in which we have to be very much aware, because if we are cut by all of these different stages of consciousness that could be anger, that could be hate, that's where we can jump. Or we can be on the other side, which leads us into spaces that as rational beings we have the possibility to choose. We have to understand that you don't extinguish fire with more fire.

This is what is happening now, and it very much coincides with our pachacutec but prophecies from other cultures such as the Mayans or the Hopi Indians in North America, or some Africans, people who say yes, we are ending a cycle and the next cycle is going to begin. I think that now you see that all the world is changing. It seems to me that even time is going faster. The kids of today are more awake, are smarter. People live between these two worlds, finding themselves between the spiritual and materialistic worlds. All of these are examples that something is shifting, that something is happening.

TMA: There have been a lot of predictions about earth changes, and many of them have been pretty grim. But then, some have been more positive. We are in a birthing process right now. Are you hopeful or pessimistic?

TP: I am very optimistic because nothing that happens to us is for the worse. Sometimes things happen that are painful and the only thing that's going on is that we are not enough aware, we don't have enough information to understand what's happening. We may think this is bad for us, but in the long term it has its own explanation. It has been happening for something else--something that is good for us--to come.

TMA: What do you think are our prospects for healing our relationship with the planet?

TP: In the concept that we have of space and time, we don't see much progress. Let's see ... we say we cannot repair all the deforestation of the planet because regrowth requires maybe 2,000 years. We think this because our concept of processional time is so narrow. But in the process of the earth, a million years don't mean anything. If we don't take the consciousness in order to begin to live together, the earth is going to take care of itself.

TMA: That could be unpleasant.

TP: Well yes, so it's better to begin to be aware. I think our mind and our science have been much [at fault], thinking that we have control of everything, that we know everything, that we can handle everything. That's not true. Things have happened that we have not been able to see. We know the process that produces petroleum, right? Organic matter that has been buried by the earth takes time to change and becomes this material whose right uses we don't understand yet. Let's say we need at least several thousand barrels a day, which means a huge amount of this product. In order to have this huge amount, we have to consider that what was buried was huge extinctions of organic matter. It means that the earth has been sustaining extinctions maybe bigger than the whole Amazon. It has happened before. We don't see it. We think that because we have the atomic bomb, we control the earth. If the earth shakes a little bit, we will be the next organic matter to become petroleum for future generations. But maybe they'll use it in a better way than we are doing now.

The first thing we have to be aware of is that we are beings of consciousness. The main purpose for us to have come into the physical world is to grow in this consciousness which is the essence of us.

We were talking before about life, and how people are afraid of death. What we call a life is not really life. How could you put the name "life" to something in which the only thing that is sure is that it's taking you to death? If we could make a metaphor about it, thinking perhaps that life is like a race, what you do is to prepare yourself, train yourself, watch your diet, whatever, in order to be the best and by the end to reach the goal. We should be prepared to reach the end ... but that's the place that we don't want to reach. And yet for sure, that's the only place we're going to be.

TMA: People think they are from here, meaning this life, and that we go there, which is death, when it's the reverse. We're from there, and we come here.

TP: Exactly. Death is no more than a jump into another real dimension. Our energies are going to be expressed in a more full way, and we are parking here in order to grow in this consciousness. The big point is to reach that moment awake in consciousness. Otherwise, we are going to come back here and repeat the cycle until we learn the lesson.

TMA: You're going to be in the Midwest doing a workshop [see adjacent ad]. What will you be doing?

TP: We have started a lot of programs, and in particular one we've been calling The Art of Living. That's a very arrogant title, but the most important thing was to call to the attention of people that in order to live here, it's something we have to learn, an art to master instead of just thinking about wealth or prestige. The idea that you have to be "someone" is a most common expression that I hear. In order to succeed at something, you have to be someone. But what does it mean to be someone if you don't know who you are? We are trying to bring forward the ancient techniques and knowledge that we have in Peru to show participants how to reach a point in which they will be able to find who they really are. This allows you to see and play in this life from another point of view.