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Soul Retrieval – Dr Alberto Villoldo

Once my lnka mentor and I were walking in the Altiplano, a high arid region in the Andes. We came to a village where it hadn't rained in many months, and the water supply was drying out. Because this man was a renowned Laika, the villagers implored him to call the rain.

He went into a hut where he prayed, fasted, and meditated for four days. When he came out, I asked him, "What are you going to do?"

And he said, "l am going to pray rain."

Not understanding, and thinking we were having a language problem, I asked him, "You mean you're going to pray for rain?"

"No," he replied. "l am going to pray rain."

He walked to the edge of the mountain, where a cliff wall dropped 3,000 feet to a white-water river below, and began to meditate. When he returned four hours later, there were big thunderheads in the sky - when they broke, the rains came.

Everybody in the village was ecstatic, for the rain was their salvation. They came running to him, and cried, "Thank you! You called the rain!"

And he said, "No, it rained."

I finally understood what the old man meant: He'd taken himself out of the equation. He'd prayed, and it rained, but he hadn't prayed for rain. There was no one to whom to pray to make it rain; there was no "other." He had become one with Spirit. There was only Spirit praying, and it rained.