The Eagle and the Condor
B Y   J O N E T T E   C R O W L E Y

Chapter 9: Peru Calling

ONCE I RELENTED AND AGREED to organize a group tour to South America, I contacted my friend, Asa Levine, in Stockholm. She led trips to Peru annually and highly recommended her tour guide and travel agent, Mallku. "Nothing bad ever happens when Mallku is around," she reassured me.

I emailed Mallku Arévalo in Cuzco. His itinerary fit my plans; his price was fair. He is also on a spiritual path so as an added bonus he was willing to conduct special Andean ceremonies. His emails to me were straightforward and clear, signed sweetly, "Your Andean Brother." His website was well done.(1) His photo showed a strong aquiline nose and the high cheekbones of a Peruvian Indian, thirty-something, quite good-looking in an indigenous way. His straight, black hair fell well below his shoulders. The photo showed him dressed like a shaman, wearing a headband and ceremonial costume with the emerald green mountains of Machu Picchu in the background. He had published several books on Machu Picchu and Andean spirituality. He was also an artist and professional photographer. I was convinced. He would be our guide in Peru.

Deep within me something else was stirring. I could sense Mallku. It started when I first saw his photo on his website. His energy came to me when I read his emails. He was prompt and thorough in responding to my endless logistical inquiries. There was never anything personal in the correspondence yet I felt powerfully and personally connected to him. When he signed "Your Andean Brother," I knew his soul! He truly is my brother. My heart was opening in a most surprising way. I had never experienced anything like the feelings I had for Mallku. It wasn't like me to have a crush. I began kidding with my friends that I was in love with our Peruvian tour guide, whom I had never met. Did I say that I had just turned fifty and was happily married? I told my husband Ed what was happening. "I promise not to run off with him," I said as we both laughed.

Chapter 13: Grand Chief Woableza

A month before we left for South America, Dad's friend, Chief Woableza visited me in Denver. A Lakota Sioux from South Dakota, Woableza is a native healer, teacher, keeper of prophecies and member of the Council of Spiritual Elders of Mother Earth. The vision of this Council began in 1999 when Don Alejandro, a thirteenth generation Quiche Mayan High Priest, dreamed of connecting spiritual elders in South and Central America with those in North America. He sent the sacred Staff that his family had held for generations to help North American elders unite. The Staff guided the elders to unite with the respect, knowledge, wisdom and courage of the people.

Ceremony in the Yucatan
From 2002 until the summer of 2004, we heard little from Chief Woableza, as he was recuperating from a serious head injury. One evening in July 2004, just weeks before our expedition to Peru, Chief Woableza showed up at our house unexpectedly. Woableza is a master storyteller. He travels around the country performing sacred ceremonies and sharing stories of indigenous myths and legends. He is a gentle man, short of stature, soft-spoken and always smiling. No matter what challenges he faces in life, and he has had many, he greets each one with compassion and love. He arrived on a Monday night and so joined our weekly Mark meditation class. Many pieces fit together for me as he enthralled us with a magical story of how he had participated in an ancient ceremony led by a high priest of Incan descent:

Woableza's words, especially about the Incan priest who wore a golden disc on his chest, intrigued me. His story brought to mind the legends about the Sun Disc of the Incas being brought originally to the Andes from the lost continent of Lemuria. Somehow, I too had a spiritual connection with a golden Sun Disc.

My Twin Soul
I had one more major surprise before our trip began. While dining out with Brad Johnson, a dear friend who was also going with us to Peru, I admitted to him that I had unfounded and inexplicable feelings of love for Mallku, the man I had employed to be our tour leader in South America. As I tried to explain my feelings, Brad remarked, "He's here."

"What do you mean?" I questioned.

"He's here. Mallku's energy just came in." In that moment, I felt the spirit of Mallku's powerful presence in front of me in the restaurant. Tears streamed down my cheeks as an immediate and full knowing pierced my consciousness like a lightning strike. In one single flash of illumination I remembered everything about Mallku and me.

"He is of my soul, he is my twin!" were the words I blurted out. Overcome with emotions of indescribable love, yet afraid of what this might mean, I shook my head and vehemently exclaimed, "Oh, no! I don't want this!" For five minutes, using up both our napkins and two from another table, I cried, holding Brad's hand for comfort and to steady me.

What could I do with Truth like that? How do I accept absolutely knowing something I didn't want to know, something that might disrupt everything I have so carefully set up? I didn't even want to believe in the existence of twin souls or twin flames. The only information I had heard about them was from Shirley MacLaine's recent book The Camino.(2) While she walked on a solo pilgrimage for 500 miles on Spain's Camino Santiago de Compostela, she received visions. MacLaine wrote of a time in ancient Lemuria in which luminous, genderless beings split into perfect counterparts, male and female - twin souls or twin flames.

What do you do when you come face to face with the truth that it is a bear paw print in the mud? Ignore it. After all, you've only seen the bear print, you haven't seen the bear.

Chapter 15: Twin Souls in the Amazon

August 2004. Twenty-three of us from the United States and Europe came together for the South American adventure, including nine of the same people who went on the trip to Nepal. I was delighted to have my middle sister, Erin Crowley along too. Our journey began with three days in the Amazon rain forest upriver from the Peruvian town of Puerto Maldonado.

My first glimpse of Mallku, our Andean tour guide, was when he boarded the plane in Cuzco for the final leg to Puerto Maldonado. He was short, yet with the powerful build of an athlete. He faced the other way as he walked down the aisle looking for his seat. Recognizing his long, black hair from the photo on his website, I called out his name. As he turned and smiled, the brown skin crinkling softly around his eyes, my heart flooded my chest. I remembered... something... everything. In that moment of deep soul recognition I knew then that the insight I had in July about Mallku was true: "He is my twin flame!"

I could no longer ignore the bear print in the mud, pretending it was something else, because in front of me was the bear! Tears came unbidden into my eyes, streaking down my face. As I took a seat beside him on the plane, I quickly apologized for my surprising emotions. "I'm so sorry for crying... umm... it's nice to meet you, Mallku... this isn't like me... I'll be okay and back to myself... just give me a moment," I stammered. He seemed understanding; of course he didn't have a clue about what was going on for me. In a few minutes, I willed the vast feelings to pass.

Once we arrived in Puerto Maldonado, an old bus was waiting to take us to a pair of wooden boats for the trip upriver to our lodge. As the group leader, I had much to organize - luggage, rooms, meals and a late afternoon nature walk through the jungle. The Eco Amazonia Lodge had clean, quaint, thatched huts with no electricity. My husband, Ed, couldn't come to the Amazon but he planned to meet us later in Cuzco. At the very last minute, the woman I was to share a room with cancelled. I had no roommate. Mallku needed a room. No problem. We could share.

Very Married
Fine. My armor was up. I was totally businesslike, showing none of the emotions that had escaped earlier on the plane. Single beds. I wore shorts and a tee shirt to bed. I chatted a lot. I had so many questions for Mallku about Andean spirituality: "Do traditional people here believe in star origins? Is there evidence of Lemuria? What's the connection to the Himalayas? What kind of ceremonies will you be leading for us?"

While I was talking nonstop in the dark, Mallku spontaneously sprang out of his bed and came to mine! It happened so quickly! He simply asked if he could hold me. "Is this okay?" he queried as he pushed my pillow to one side.

What could I say? It felt wonderful. It felt infinite. It felt perfectly ancient to have this man next to me... but this was not the Jonette I knew. She immediately piped up, "I am very married."

There was some silence, then Mallku's voice, "I am very divorced."

"Oh, great," I thought. "Where do I go with a comment like that?"

He assured me that I was safe. He respected me. I knew to my bones that this was true. Safely enveloped in his arms, I remembered simultaneously every life I had ever had as a brown-skinned woman in the embrace of a dark skinned, black-haired man. At that instant I accepted that he was with me for a much higher purpose than either of us understood. It was too well orchestrated from Above. I checked in with my inner wisdom and heard, "This is beyond karma. All is as it should be. This is a moment of choice that is offered only once in many lifetimes." Before the reasoning part of me could catch and edit it, a thought exploded fully formed from my subconscious, a thought that scared me more than anything I've thought for many years. It was an inner statement unadorned with either emotion or rationalization. "I would give up everything to sleep in these arms every night." In an instant, my normal self regained control of the situation and pushed the errant thought back into the unexplored recesses of my soul, slamming the door shut with the non-negotiable ego command of, "That's just not in my plans." Period.

Whatever the metaphysical ramifications, it all boiled down to one question, "Do I allow him to stay?" My inner voice seemed unequivocal; "This is a window of spiritual growth that will not open again for at least another 500 years." I could choose the path of my soul or be limited by my guilt and fear. Here we were, against all odds - I, a married businesswoman from the United States, and Mallku, an Andean shaman - twin souls lying next to each other in a thatched hut in the Amazon rain forest.

An Initiation of Leadership
He stayed. I rested my head on his shoulder, smiled at the blessing this was, and closed my eyes. The intimacy was simply that he held me - that and nothing more; yet it was everything. Did it last a moment, or was it lifetimes? With no prelude or explanation, I heard the voice in my head say: You must initiate his third-eye.

"Okay," I thought, dreamily, "Lake Titicaca will be a good place to do that." I had no intention of rousing my sleepy self from Mallku's arms.

Now! came an inner command. I've learned that it's better not to ignore such insistent guidance. So I leaned over, and whispered to Mallku that I was supposed to give him an energy initiation. Half asleep, he assented with a nod. I touched the center of his forehead; sending power and light through my hands into his third-eye chakra, his spiritual power center. He became comatose... he didn't stir... for hours.

Finally, when he moved I whispered, "What happened?"

"I went on a journey," he mumbled, only half present, "Some kind of confrontation..." and he drifted off again. Mallku slept deeply, his back to me, my arms around him. Holding him I experienced electrical currents weave through my chakras, spiraling into his energy centers then back into mine in a continuous tying together, as if we were one being. It reminded me of shoestrings lacing in and out through the eyelets. Each of my cells seemed to become magnetically polarized in a new way. Our proximity alone was bringing a profound and vital change to my body. It was an energetic as well as a spiritual transformation. It was a communion of twin souls. This was his gift to me.

I initiated Mallku with the symbol of the eleven-pointed star and the energies of spiritual leadership. I wish I could say that I felt galaxies of suns or rainbows of colors moving from my palms to Mallku's forehead, but as often happens with these powerful but extremely subtle high energies, I didn't feel anything moving from my hands. I simply knew that something life changing was being transferred through me to him. And I knew when it was complete.

Initiations, such as the one I administered to Mallku, frequently mark the next level of spiritual growth. Most of my initiations have occurred spontaneously during my meditations. Fourteen years ago I was taken on an inner, mystical journey in which I was told that I was moving from the path of teacher to a path of greater responsibility - the Way of the Leader. At that time, I perceived a golden, eleven-pointed star, which is a symbol of transcendence, between my brows.

Mark once explained that in order to continue to grow spiritually, we must graduate from understanding things based only on our senses - what we can feel, see, touch, hear or experience. He said that our reliance on feelings or experiences alone keeps us in the third-dimensional reality. The higher worlds cannot be experienced through our senses. According to Mark's teaching, the first and most common level of understanding and learning is based on our own experience. The second developmental step is to trust our intuition. This is because at the higher energetic or vibrational levels sensory experience may be non-existent, so we must rely on trust. The third step, beyond trusting, is to know that something is so without any evidence. I knew that I had given Mallku the gift of a high spiritual initiation. I also knew, without the need for proof or confirmation, even from him, that Mallku was my soul's twin or other half, much closer than even a soulmate.

In the cosmic sense of masculine and feminine, Mallku and I played out our roles when he first held his protective arms around me. He made me know that I was safe. It was that knowledge that enabled me to move into the divine feminine role of initiator. The woman brings spiritual knowledge and energy into the world and then gives it to the man, who helps bring it into action or form. The most powerful initiations on Earth are from a woman to a man; especially if they are twin souls. Some spiritual breakthroughs are so intense that they cause shifts in the physical body. People may feel achy, ill, or out of sorts for several days following such an initiation.

For the next day and a half, Mallku was sick. He later confided to me that he had never before received an initiation that had made him ill. No doubt, the aftermath of my touching his forehead surprised him. On a conscious level, he knew me only as a woman who hired him to guide a tour group through Peru. That night he skipped dinner and was in his bed by 6 p.m., with his clothes on, where he stayed unmoving for twelve hours. For several minutes I stood watching him as he slept. So much tender love and compassion poured from my heart to his. I was all at once his mother, his sister, his daughter and his lover.

We Are the Eagle and the Condor
Ever since meeting White Eagle in the mid-eighties as I meditated in Sydney, I carry the energies of the Eagle. To the North American Natives the White Eagle is the highest creature in our world: It is the "Messenger of the Gods." I casually asked Mallku, whose birth name is James, what his spiritual name "Mallku" meant. He said it was given to him to mark a higher step in his spiritual evolution - it means "the Spirit of the Condor."

"Oh, my God," I thought, as the legend of the Eagle and the Condor that Chief Woableza had shared, burst into my mind. "Was Destiny rearing her head into my well-organized life? Do Mallku and I have something to do with the prophecy?"

(1) James Arévalo Merejido (Mallku), www.machupicchumagicaltravel.com
(2) Shirley MacLaine, The Camino

© 2007 Jonette Crowley, All Rights Reserved

Excerpted with permission from The Eagle and the Condor by Jonette Crowley, published by StoneTree Publishing, (ISBN 0978538447). Available for purchase from www.theeagleandthecondor.com, www.amazon.com, or your local bookseller.