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 Journey
to Ecuador: Part 3Salcedo/Rumipamba, Otavalo
May 7-9, 2001
The Spiritual Traveler
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I
arrived back in Quito Monday evening, in time to attend the HU chant at
the Eckankar center. I brought my digital camera, and after
the chant stood up and started taking individual photos of all the
people. My actions created quite a
sensation. There was uncontrollable laughter that didn't die
down for a long time. The reaction was so different, so much
more light-hearted than what one was likely to encounter in the United
States. There, one might have expected the people to
grumble, to resent the intrusiveness of the camera, or to put up with
the process stoically, but certainly not to laugh, to giggle like
children. It was clear that there was a far greater sense of
innocence and joie de vivre here that in the States.
 The
next day, I decided to try to visit Don Alberto. I didn't
even know if he was in the country or still in the U.S., but I thought
I might as well try, anyway. I set out from my hotel in
Quito around 10:30 in the morning, hailed a cab, and asked to be taken
to the bus terminal. The driver actually dropped me off at a
bus stop, rather than the terminal, but there was a bus to Salcedo
taking off right at that moment, so even though he'd only driven me
half way I didn't mind paying the full fare. There was about
a two and a half-hour bus ride before I arrived in Salcedo around 1:00.
Germán had told me to look
for a camionetta to take me to Quilajalo, but I didn't even know what a
camionetta was, although I assumed it was a small truck. I
stood awhile at the corner, and didn't see anything that remotely
resembled a taxi or a truck that would take passengers. So
after asking a few people for directions, I finally picked up on the
direction in which Quilajalo lay, and I started walking. The
day was still early, and I doubted the walk could be that long.
After about fifteen or twenty
minutes I saw a large arch on the left-hand side of the road with the
name RUMIPAMBA written in a large arc across the top. This
was the village neighboring Quilajalo. I crossed the road,
and followed the main street under the arch and through the
village. Eventually, I came to a place where the road
crossed a creek and went up a small slope. I paused at this
place, with an eerie feeling that it seemed familiar.
 There
was a jumble of ambivalent thoughts going through my
head. Why was I visiting Don Alberto? What did I
hope to learn from him, or from this experience? What did he
have to teach me that I couldn't learn through Eckankar? It
wondered if I was still suffering from the romanticism of the '60s,
when people fantasized about setting off to far-off places like India
in search of a personal guru. But then my thoughts shifted,
and I began to felt that my quest to visit Don Alberto was not so much
a search for a guru as it was a visit to a spiritual
friend. Thinking about it this way, made is much less a
matter of conflicting loyalties. The idea of having a
spiritual friend was useful because it worked to break down the
artificial boundaries that separated different spiritual groups from
one another. As I continued my walk, I began to visualize
myself not as a person, but as a light-a light that was simply on a
journey to visit another light.
I started on my way again,
having left Rumipamba behind. As yet, however, there was not
another village visible beyond the surrounding fields. A few
trucks passed me, loaded with children dressed for
fieldwork. Then I met a curious group-a small native woman
with two children and a comparatively tall young man with the features
of a Norteamericano. As I passed them, they stopped and
asked where I was going. I hesitated for a
moment. I was going to say "Quilajalo," but something told
me that this was already taken for granted, and that their question was
more specific. So I said "Don Alberto." There
were smiles all round, and then the young man addressed me in
English.
 I
had run into members of Don Alberto's inner circle. The
woman, whose name was Florentina, ran a hostel on Don Alberto's
property. The young man, Nadav Tanners, was an American
student from Swarthmore, on an exchange program in
Ecuador. He was working with Don Alberto, through
Florentina, on a research paper on the indigenous religion.
"Is Don Alberto around?" I asked.
"He's in the country, but
he's in Quito at the moment. He should be back in a day or
two," Nadav told me.
"Where are you headed?" I questioned them.
"Otavalo," they said.
"Can I come with you?" I asked.
Nadav translated my request
to Florentina, and the response was immediately in the
affirmative. A small pickup came by, and we piled into
it. It took us to a bus stop. From there, it was
another two-and-a-half hours to the Quito terminal. I got
into an intensive conversation with Nadav right away, and pumped him
for information about Don Alberto. Nadav said he was
majoring in religion, and I proceeded to tell him about my own academic
background, as well as my association with Eckankar.
"Is there a tradition of reincarnation in the Andean tradition?" I wanted to know.
 "Yes,
there is," he replied. "Spirits are believed to shed
bodies. The word 'spirit' is not an accurate
translation. The word is ushai."
"I know. Ushai is
the fifth element-earth, water, fire, air, and ushai. In
Eckankar, we talk about the various planes of existence. The
first four, which we call the psychic planes, you'll find described in
any kind of occult literature. These are the physical,
astral, causal, and mental planes. Then there is the fifth
plane, which is the soul plane. The four psychic planes are
represented by the four elements, and they also correspond to different
faculties within the individual. The idea is that these
represent different levels of vibration exist within the same space,
something like a radio band on which you can pick up different stations
depending on the their wavelength. The idea is also that we
are existent on all these different levels of vibration. We
have 'bodies' on all these different levels that are like our physical
body, except that they are vibrating at a different
frequency. The bodies are essentially protective sheaths
that allow the individual to experience life at these different rates
of vibration.
"Although we're experiencing simultaneously on all these levels, our
consciousness is stuck at the physical level. Our
experiences on these other levels are therefore relayed to the human
state of consciousness via the various faculties that correspond to
these planes-emotion for the Astral plane, memory for the Causal plane,
and thought for the mental plane. It's sort of like
information being relayed from a company's branch office to its main
office.
 An
executive can get certain information about what is going on at the
branch offices, but does not receive the same information he would get
if he went there himself. Our emotions and thoughts tell us
something about what we are experiencing on the astral or mental plane,
but this is a far cry from experiencing those realms of existence in
full consciousness. Both Eckankar and Don Alberto's
teachings seem to be oriented toward giving the individual some
experience of this type. The difference that I see is that
Eckankar goes even farther and talks about many other planes beyond the
soul plane. These are pure spiritual planes-that is, they
exist beyond matter, energy, time, and space."
At the Quito terminal, I
finally asked where we would be staying in
Otavalo. Florentina replied that we would be visiting the
home of some musicians. I remembered that the person who had
given me directions to Don Alberto's village had also recommended that
I look up a musical group called Pakarinka, and especially its leader,
Oscar Santillan. I had the names written on the same sheet
of paper that contained directions to Quilajalo. I showed
the paper to Florentina and, sure enough, this was the group and person
we were going to be visiting. It wasn't that much of a
surprise to me, since I assumed there was some connection between this
musical group and Don Alberto. Nevertheless, the moment was
very similar to the one in which I had pulled out the flyer advertising
Don Alberto's apprenticeship program and showed it to Germán, and
seemed to make an impression both on Nadav and Florentina.
 From
Quito it was another three hours or so to Otavalo. By now it
was evening. We waited at the bus stop in Otavalo until some
friends of the musicians arrived in a Jeep. Then we bounced
along a rutted cobblestone road in the moonlight. The
natives around us all spoke Quichua to one another, rendering Nadav,
whose fluency was only in Spanish, as silent as me. It was
quite a turn of events. At midday, I had been heading south
from Quito, intending to visit Don Alberto in Quilajalo, and now I was
bouncing around in a Jeep on the outskirts of Otavalo, far to the north
of the capital. I was sitting next to a student from
Swarthmore, and surrounded by indiginas speaking Quichua. I
thought to myself that this is what I had intended my trip to be like
all along. I had wanted to see what would happen if I were
to just travel without a plan, and sure enough, it was
working. Things were happening.
We finally arrived at a house
on the outskirts of the city, and were given a room to sleep
in. It was an Ecuadorian farmhouse, very primitive by
Western standards. The ceiling of the room appeared to by
made of plywood, as was the floor. The rooms were unadorned,
except for a few calendar pages with Ecuadorian scenes pasted to the
wall. The bathroom, located on the other side of the
courtyard, was clean but had no running water and the toilet had to be
flushed with a bucket filled from a large cement trough in the
courtyard, which was luckily just outside the toilet
door. Dinner consisted of rolls filled with white
cheese. Along with that was honey, a kind of thin, dark,
soupy, vaguely sweet gruel made of quinoa that didn't appeal to me
much, and hot corn water for tea.
 After
dinner, Nadav told me a little about the paper he was writing, which
mainly described the rituals, beliefs, and traditional practices he had
encountered while living in Don Alberto's compound at
Quilajalo. Rituals in Don Alberto's community consisted of
morning exercises, called cuyuris, as well as blessings given before
each meal, called manyai. There were also cleansing
ceremonies, or limpieza (a Spanish word), of which I had experienced an
example in Michigan. The shaman gathered certain medicinal
plants, builds a fire. He placed the plants over the fire
until they smoked, and then held them in front of the person, shaking
them occasionally, while chanting in the native tongue. The
same was done to each side and in back of the person, so that all four
directions were addressed.
"Of course, the cleansing is
done only after the person has been diagnosed with a guinea pig," Nadav
added.
"What do you mean, with a guinea pig?" I asked.
"They cut open the guinea pig
and look at its internal organs," Nadav replied. "They did
that for Florentina. She was concerned that she had picked
up some contaminants from the environment, so they placed the guinea
pig in front of her, then killed it and looked at its internal
organs. They particularly look at the adrenal
sack. Guinea pigs are supposedly great at absorbing energy,
negative or otherwise."
 I
was somewhat taken aback by this. "I didn't expect that Don
Alberto's diagnostic methodology was quite so primitive. Why
do they have to sacrifice a guinea pig to diagnose someone?" I asked
Nadav. "Why can't they just use the tarot or some other
oracle?"
Nadav
shrugged. "That's nothing compared to the bee sting
therapy," he said.
"Bee sting therapy?"
"Yeah. They use
the guinea pig to find out what's wrong with you, and then they use bee
sting therapy. They used seven bee stings on Florentina."
"They got the bees to sting her in specific places on her body?"
"Yes."
"How do they do that?" I wanted to know.
"They just pick up the bees,
and place them on the spot where they want them to
sting. It's pretty easy, really. The bees are
just walking around. Some of them get stuck in
honey. They particularly like to place the stings on the
vertebrae. The medicinal effects of bee venom are well
known. There are books about it. The idea is that
it strongly stimulates the body's auto-defense system."
Nadav then outlined some of
the indigenous beliefs, which included myths of the creation of the
world and the origin of the Inca Empire. The word
Pachakamak, he said, was used to represent the ruling force of the
universe, and Pachamama the feminine essence of the
universe.
 The
word Inti represented the sun, Cuilla the moon, and Allpamama the
mother earth. Then there were the beliefs in the life
cycle. Life was broken up into periods of seven
years. There were, of course, the four elements, and the
importance placed on dreams. There was also a belief in
astrology. According to Nadav, astrological knowledge was
very well developed among the Incas. The Inca Calendar was a
lunar one, divided into thirteen months with 28 days each, with an
extra day every year. There were also beliefs in
omens. Birds flying in certain patterns, as in ancient Greek
culture, were said to foretell certain types of events.
Finally, there were
traditional practices, particularly relating to food. The
indigenous tradition was to keep salty and sweet foods separate,
somewhat the same way Jews kept apart meat and milk
products. Sweet foods tended to be eaten for breakfast and
dinner, with salty foods eaten at lunch. Acid foods were to
be eaten apart from everything else, so that if one were to eat
oranges, pineapples, or grapefruits at any time, that would constitute
the entire meal. Some foods were associated with the sun,
others with the moon, and the intention was to strive for a balance of
these foods in the body. Finally, there were certain
traditional agricultural practices, such as alternation of
crops. Corn and potatoes were planted in alternate
rows. The plants were considered to complement one another,
and this had to do with the properties of each food. Corn
and beans were planted right on top of one another so that the beans
could wrap their runners around the corn. Care was taken to
leave certain plants native to the habitat exactly in the places that
they were found, because the properties of these plants could indicate
what other types of plants could be grown there.
 "The
relations between the people in Don Alberto's group and their neighbors
is also something I'm going to address in my paper," Nadav
said. "What they're doing is reviving ancient traditions
that have been lost. Even among their own people, they can
be viewed as renegades. They believe that the Western and
Northern countries are going to come to a bad end because of their way
of life, and that when the way of the Eagle declines, the more balanced
way of the Condor will gain influence in the world."
"It sounds like a kind of apocalyptic vision," I remarked.
"Well, I may have overstated
it," Nadav replied. "Basically they're saying: Look at the
North. People are not happy with their way of life, and what
we have down here is something that we have to offer them."
"What most impresses you personally about them?" I asked Nadav.
"It's a group of people who
genuinely live according to a culture that's their own, and in which
they take pride," he responded.
"Can't you say that about a
lot of indigenous groups around the world?" I asked. "There
are still tribal enclaves in places like the Amazon or Borneo, for
instance."
"Well, I'm talking more about
indigenous populations that are more integrated into modern culture,
and therefore more threatened," he said.
"So they're hippies, really,"
I replied. "They're rebelling against modern culture."
 "Yes,
except that the problem with the hippies in our country was that they
didn't have a strong cultural base on which to base their alternative
lifestyle. That's why the hippie lifestyle eventually
collapsed. But Florentina, for instance, has had to take the
same kind of disapproval from the local people that the hippies did
from the majority of the population in the U.S. in their
day. The locals used to call her 'Florentina Loca' (Crazy
Florentina) because she wouldn't eat meat or drink
alcohol. What Don Alberto is engaged in is basically a
native cultural revival."
"But aside from his little
community in Quilajalo, is this being taken up by any other people in
the country?"
"It's still a very small
group," Nadav replied. "But it's very
well-connected. They obviously have a lot of connections
with foreigners, but the real focus is on working with the local
community."
I got up at about six the
next morning. It was still dark, and I passed through the
primitive-looking courtyard, where the chickens and dogs were still
barely moving, to get to the bathroom. When everyone else
had woken up, there was a breakfast of fried wheat-cakes, boiled corn
with fat kernels, the ubiquitous honey, which I passed up in favor of
salt to flavor the corn, and a weak herbal tea that smelled pleasantly
of barnyards and grasses. Oscar Santillan then arrived and
took us to his home, where he demonstrated his music and the
instruments used by his group. We sat on benches arranged in
a circle that looked like they were hewn from some kind of
palm.
 Oscar
said that they were made from a type of cactus that was used to make
many things, including a popular drink that Florentina had carried in a
large plastic bottle all the way from Quilajalo, as well as many of the
instruments, and certain kinds of hats. The flowers, Oscar
said, were also eaten. It was important, he noted, that the
cactus be harvested during the full moon to ensure that the material
would be of maximum utility for whatever purpose it was used.
Oscar and his assistant then
demonstrated some of his music, which was made entirely with flutes and
drums. The flutes were of several types-small and
medium-sized panpipes, as well as middle-sized and very large flutes
called sachachas. All were made of single reeds, except for
the panpipes, which were made from several reeds of different lengths
bound together. Oscar showed us how, in the case of the
panpipes, the joints of the reeds were utilized as the bottoms, since
they were already sealed. Then the individual pipes were
simply cut at varying lengths from the joint. The panpipes
differed from the other flutes because the sound was achieved simply by
blowing across the top of the pipe. Each reed was
essentially a sealed tube, as opposed to the other flutes, which were
open at the end. The drums were of far more complex
construction, but no artificial materials were
used. Goatskin was used along with the same cactus material
used for the benches. A flute could be hand-made in a day or
two, but the drums took two or three weeks to make.
 From
Oscar Santillan's house, we visited another friend of Florentina's who
was a weaver. He showed us a loom on which he worked, made
almost entirely of wood, the form of which must have remained more or
less unchanged since the sixteenth century. We had another
meal of large-kernel corn in the courtyard of the house, and played
with the affectionate dogs. Then we went to the market in
Otavalo. The items displayed were mainly woven fabrics of
sheep, llama, or alpaca wool. The market was very quiet,
with few tourists in sight.
While I was out wandering
around, trying to find the market, Florentina evidently placed a call
to Don Alberto. When I came back, she said that he would be
coming back to Quilajalo that night, then going to Quito for a day,
then back to Quilajalo for the two following days. It was
Wednesday, and I had only three more days left in Ecuador-Thursday,
Friday, and Saturday. The end game was coming
quickly. My goal was to at least see Don Alberto before I
left-whether on my own, with Germán, or ideally, with Germán and
someone who could translate for us. That could only be
Nadav. Nadav was going back today to Quilajalo with
Florentina, but was leaving the next day to go to Quito and then fly
back to the U.S. on Friday. In addition, I had only one more
good chance of seeing Germán-at 6 pm at the Eckankar center in Quito
that evening. I had Germán's phone number, and stopped at a
telephone center in Otavalo to try to call him. The woman at
the telephone center dialed for me, but it came up the wrong
number. I also now had Don Alberto's cell phone number,
which Florentina had given me.
 If
I could get hold of Germán, I could give him the number, and ask him to
call Don Alberto. In addition to all these factors, I still
had all my gear sitting in the hotel room in Quito. With no
way to contact the hotel, I would surely be charged for the room,
whether I was there or not. I was also by now very tired of
the bus travel.
I had several
choices. The first choice was to go all the way back to
Quilajalo with Nadav and Florentina, where I wold be sure to see Don
Alberto that evening, and could also have Nadav present as
translator. But I would also be very tired, would have no
way to contact Germán, and Don Alberto might be very preoccupied
himself, since he would be leaving again for Quito in the
morning. The other choice would be to part with Florentina
and Nadav in Quito, and meet Germán at the Eckankar
center. Then I could find out whether he wanted to get
together with me and Don Alberto and, if so, ask him to call Don
Alberto and make arrangements to meet in Quito the next
day. All sorts of things could go wrong with this plan,
however. First of all, Germán might not be at the Eckankar
center. Secondly, he might not have time to get together
with Don Alberto and me in Quito the next day. Thirdly, Don
Alberto might not have the time to meet with us, or Germán's
arrangements would have to be coordinated with Nadav, as
well. If all plans to meet with Don Alberto in Quito fell
through, I could still visit him in Quilajalo on Friday or
Saturday. According to Florentina, I had an open invitation
to come on those days. But in that case, I would not have
the benefit of a translator.
 There
was a third possibility-that I could stop in Quito, visit the Eckankar
center, make arrangements to move my stuff out of my hotel room and
store it in the hotel's locker, and still make it down to Quilajalo on
a late bus. But the time frame for that was very tight, and
I couldn't quite see myself making the walk from Salcedo to Quilajalo
in the dark, looking for Don Alberto's house, and possibly arriving
when everyone was already in bed. All these factors were
swimming around in my head. With my typical indecisiveness,
it seemed impossible for me to sort out the virtues of one choice and
compare it to the virtues of another. Eventually, I gave up
the struggle, telling myself that I still had the bus ride from Otavalo
to Quito to make up my mind, and that it might make the decision easier
if I just stopped thinking about the alternatives for a
while. This strategy worked. By the time we got
into Quito, I was so tired of bus riding that I had made my
decision. I said good-bye to Nadav and Florentina and headed
back to my hotel.
I got back just in time to shower, change, and make it to the
discussion group at the Eckankar center. Germán was not
there, but I stayed for the discussion. I couldn't follow
too much of what people were saying, but I was aware that various
aspects of spirituality were brought up in the course of the
discussion. These included the need to maintain an attitude
of neutrality in all situations, the necessity of giving freedom to
others, and most importantly, the importance of love.
 I
wanted to say that I felt that all these things were the same, but this
would have been a difficult concept to express even in English.
At the end of the discussion, I gave Don Alberto's to one of the
members of the group, who promised to relay it to Germán that
evening. A few hours later I got a call from Germán saying
that he had called Don Alberto and had arranged to meet him in Quito
the next morning. There was a possibility that we could meet
in the afternoon, and he told me that he would call between one and two
in the afternoon the next day.
The next morning I woke up
with the memory of a dream still fresh in my mind. In the
dream, Don Alberto had appeared to me and told me rather sternly that
he couldn't talk to me. His appearance in the dream was
unlike his appearance in real life, but I definitely identified the
vision as that of Don Alberto.
I was surprised, therefore,
when Germán called at the appointed time to say that Don Alberto would
be in Quito until the next morning, and that we were all invited to
Quilajalo in the afternoon.
We would meet at my hotel at 2:30 and take the bus to Salcedo.
This seemed like good
news. I would finally get my meeting with Don Alberto in the
company of Germán.
"The only thing," I said to
Germán, "is that I might like to rent a car for a day instead of riding
in the bus."
This idea didn't seem to
matter to Germán, who, on the contrary, seemed pleased at the prospect
that he would be spared the tiresome bus ride. So I went to
the rental car agency and arranged to pick up a car at 2:00 the next
day. Feeling the pressure of the limited time available to
me in Ecuador, I also called Marco and arranged for a small trip to the
summit of Pichincha in the morning. Cotopaxi, the only major
destination that I still wanted to include on my itinerary might be
possible see on the way from Quito to Quilajalo, or on the way back on
Saturday. |
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