MAYA ENERGY

Often visitors to Chichén Itzá Ruins, about a five minute stroll from my hut, return to the Hacienda speaking of the "energy" they felt when standing next to big Kukulkán Pyramid, the ruin's impressive centerpiece. I personally don't feel any special energy when I walk by the pyramid each week on my fruit-buying trip to Pisté, but I'm curious about this matter of "spiritual energy." I asked my shaman friend José about the Maya concept of spiritual energy, and how it relates to pyramids.

"There's just one spiritual energy," he said, "but it has two faces, day energy, and night energy. During the day energy descends from the sky onto the pyramid's apex, then spreads out along the pyramid's flanks to enter the Earth all around. In the night, the opposite occurs, energy flowing from the Earth up the pyramid's sides and shooting out of the top, skyward. Your Maya hut is shaped like a pyramid, with energy coming and going off the roof's crest. Over a twenty-four hour period the day and night energies equilibrate. If you live in a traditional Maya hut, the result of the daily and nightly ebb and flow of energy is peace and contentment. When you dream, that's energy gathering from the Earth all around you, passing through you up into the hut, then shooting off the roof's crest, carrying your spirit far away, where you have experiences you recall as dreams... "

At this point we'd only begun getting into the matter. We hadn't even addressed how the shaman heals by harmonizing the body's energies, or how standing water loses its energy, but its energy can be restored with a certain ritual, holding the hands a certain way above the water, seven turns one way then seven the other...

But, though we'd only begun, that day at this point I stopped José, saying that, for the time being, that was enough to think about.

For, already I was looking forward to going to sleep that night, there in the hut's calm darkness, visualizing the day-energy that had been gathering on the land all day, now coming in from all directions around me, concentrating in the ground below my Cedro-plank bed, gushing up through me, up through the silent hut, the hut's sloping roof sides focusing the energy at its peak, then that energy like a flame in pure oxygen exploding into the night sky, drawing up unknown parts of me inside its dazzling, swirling currents and waves, diffusing parts of me out into the unified world of pure, loving energy...