Near La Paz lies Tiwanaku, an archeological site, a culture, a belief system, an ancient empire, and one of the most important precursos of the Incas... Not much is known about them... According to historians, they buried their piramid and main ceremonial center by themselves. Some calendar-based theories explain that they did so because predicted their fall, and a legend says that 4 important Tiwanaku brothers went to Cuzco to create the Inca empire.
Their ruins are impresive by their agriculture technology, their monolites, and their piramid of sevel levels. The number seven was very important for them. According to them, seven are the levels of the development of the spirit of a person:
- the first level is represented by a condor, the spirit is in the air
- the second level is represented by a fish, the spirit is in the water
- in the third level, the spirit arrives to the earth, represented by a puma, which is also a symbol for teenager age
- the fourth level is represented by a snake, a symbol of fertility and knowledge about the world
- the fifth level is represented by a llama, symbolizing further knowledge, specially in the sense of a deep respect and appreciation for nature
- in the sixth level, the spirit goes back to the air, again as a condor, but this time with white neck, representing high knowledge.
- in the sevent and last level, the spirit is represented by the sky, and there the spirit works for the benefit of the people in the world.
They believed that knowledge is not gained with the head, but with the heart... And they also believed that after death, we all are reborn into the world, unless a person reached the highest level of the development of the spirit... They even buried the corpses covered in the shape of a fetus, to help the dead person find his way in the after-death, a fetus was his next state... The Tiwanaku venerated Father Sun, and Mother Earth, and believed that past and future can be changed only in the present moment.
I liked many things about them... they promoted personal development, to be gained by knowledge, they promoted living in the present, and they promoted appreciation for nature and for everything in the universe.
However, at first, my "modern-thinking" part of mind belived wrong to "venerate" Sun and Earth... But later I realized that our "modern-thinking" mind venerates other things, such as football teams, tv celebrities or expensive cars... if I had to choose to venerate something, the Sun and Earth are much more beautiful objects of veneration, to be honest...
But Sun and Earth are not only beautiful... if you think about it... just as we were born from our mother, we were born from the Earth... and continue to be part of the Earth, eating from it, living on it... We would not be who we are without the air, the water, our friends, our society... the Earth was created from the Sun, and as much as we need our heart to survive, we need the Sun to survive... You may even look at it as if Earth, Sun and the entire universe are our second body... we would not be the same without them...
If we ignore our second body, we may fight against everyone and everything, trying to satisfy our first body, but in the process... we are hurting our second body, and usually the second body fights back against our first body as well... But if we realize that everything around us is like part of us, we can learn to apreciate the world and everyone living on it, and know that is important to take care of it... However this makes sense to me, I don't really "know" it yet... my habit of thinking too much on myself is still very strong... as it's in most of people... but it's always good to work on changing bad habits...
