An Interview with Alberto Villoldo
with Lotus Guide

As we look at our world today, it doesn’t take much extrapolation to see that we have created an unsustainable global society. This might not mean much to some people but there will come a day when it will mean everything to everyone in every corner of the planet. Yet when we look at all the madness going on we can find traditions that have sustained themselves throughout the ages, with the exception of those that were destroyed by the “New World,”of course.

Soul Retrieval

When I read Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval by Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., we thought this would be good information to draw upon, especially since we have shamanic groups and workshops right here in our area. You might also keep in mind that modern physics has shown that the past and future are just concepts and are inter-connected with this passing moment we call “now.”So find some “high ground”and let’s look off into the distance with Alberto Villoldo.

LG: You say we are all going to experience a quantum leap in our evolution in which we will grow new bodies that will age, heal, and die differently. Could you elaborate on that, and what can we do now, in our everyday lives in our community, to better prepare for this leap?

AV: In our journey to understand our personal evolution, we can look to the ways visionary individuals, groups, and cultures have understood evolution for centuries. In essence, we are looking for clues, trying to glimpse into the future to envision a healed state for ourselves and our communities. Evolutionary biologists use the idea of quantum speciation, which describes the ability of a small group or isolated population that develops new biological characteristics or technological capabilities almost overnight. This “leap”into the future contrasts sharply with the arduous incremental process we typically associate with evolution. They also talk about the famous “missing link”in evolution that has yet to be found, and they point out that we became Homo sapiens in a few very rapid evolutionary jumps, and a whole new brain, the neocortex, appeared across a small number of generations.

Quantum speciation also offers us a way to understand the destiny-retrieval techniques employed by the shamans we work with in Peru, and which are used by my soul and destiny retrieval students at the Four Winds Society. Using advanced journeying techniques for tracking and mapping a client’s timelines, the shaman throws a grappling hook into the future to see who that person has the potential to become. We all have many possible futures, but without taking the helm to steer the course of our own future, we find ourselves at the disposal of a probable future that has been informed by our ancestral wounds and personal history. Instead, we need to search for and find the best possible future that allows us to prosper and use our innate gifts, for these are the gifts that will become our tools as we face a new evolution.

Master shamans use this same set of destiny-tracking techniques to glimpse into the future and see who we are becoming as the human species. By retrieving the knowledge of a “best-case scenario,”the shaman helps to inform a healed future for her people and her planet. She envisions the opportunity to begin defining ourselves not by who we have been in the past, but by who we will become 10,000 years from now. She takes an active role in dreaming the world into being.

Many prophecies in the indigenous world speak of this time in human history as a period of great transformation. According to the Inka Prophecy, a new day is dawning, the “Last Pachacuti”and the doorways between the worlds are opening again – a tear in the fabric of time itself. It speaks of this time in human evolution as a chance to regain our luminous nature, to craft new physical bodies that age, heal, and die differently. Similarly, Mayan prophecies foretold of a new humanity that will be born from the ranks of the Upper World in the year 2012. What the Inka refer to as the Last Pachacuti, the Maya refer to as the 13th Baktun. Each baktun cycle is 394 years long and is considered its own age within “The Great Creation Cycle.”The 13th Baktun represents AD 1618-2012, and it is called both “the triumph of materialism”and “the transformation of matter.”The Maya predicted this final baktun would be a time of great forgetting, when humans drift very far from their sense of oneness with nature and experience a collective amnesia of sorts. But at the closing of the 13th Baktun, they expected a great reawakening, one that would usher in a new awareness of time and space.

LG: It seems to me that humanity is on several distinct layers of evolution. Some are centered in the limbic area, which values the law of the pack over individual freedom; some have become more centered in the neocortex, which values individuality and brings about things such as democracies. Yet when I look at the world today, it seems as though there is another level that’s evolving, and even though it probably has the least number of people, it is by far growing the fastest. It’s what is referred to by some as Samadhi, or the experience of oneness. How do you see this playing out on the world scene today with the global conflict going on?

AV: Both questions you asked tie beautifully together. Our environment and our governments are in a seemingly irreversible decline. But there are still many possible futures for us, and any crisis brings with it a marvelous opportunity to envision and transform our situation. As medicine people, we must envision not the most probable future, but the best possible future for ourselves and for the planet. I see the main problem as a spiritual one, not a resource problem, or a problem with this or that government, but a larger problem centered around human beliefs, the troublesome elements founded in our mythology. Our problematic mythology is collapsing all around us. It is a mythology that is predatory, that is abusive, that reaps the cream of the earth – timber, water, topsoil – and passes the furtive costs onto future generations. These are greedy and rapacious paradigms that pose humans as a dominator over nature and over one another. And these paradigms are no longer sustainable.

For this reason, I have turned my focus to soul and destiny retrieval. Soul retrieval builds a healthy foundation by locating the core wounds that keep us fettered to the past (unhealthy patterns, limiting belief systems, and mythologies that cannot support us during this time of necessary evolution). It employs mythic mapping techniques to reenergize and heal the paradigms that have led us astray, both personally and as a planet. Soul retrieval tracks through time past so we can heal and reinform old wounds. Destiny retrieval helps us throw a hook out to our highest future and bring back information that begins to inform us today.

Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval is available online at HayHouse.com, or at Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Waldenbooks. You can also order a signed copy through my office, at www.thefourwinds.com . At FourWinds.com, you can also find out dates and information about our Soul Retrieval Certification program, which I developed and continue to direct.