Like the Maya of Central America sitting atop pyramids downloading information from the universe, the Kogi sit high atop a mountain range doing the same. To understand the jaguar people of both cultures we must know something about quantum physics. To understand the Kogi we must also know something about the Overself, the Greater Consciousness, the Cosmic Mind – the umbrella of energetic information that can infuse the mind of Little Brother. Most cultures slumber below this life force of a much bigger consciousness.

It may be that the Kogi worldview began about the same time, or slightly before, Buddhism. The similar belief systems, antipodally created at about the same time a couple thousand years ago, may reflect a meeting point, a convergence in the Cosmic Mind that occurred via ancient astronomical observations.

The Kogi are a meditation and divination culture, survivors of the Tairona culture dating back millennia. Much like an isolated sect, but without hierarchical domination, they are extraordinarily isolative, mutually respectful, uncompetitive, quiet, and pensive. The men spend much of their daytime and most every night, meditating for hours. By day they quietly work their crops and by night they talk in the Ceremonial House – the symbolic womb of Mother. They have no written language – knowledge is not comprised of words, but rather it is an accumulation of experiences and insights arising from a deep meditative state.

They see themselves as the connecting link between the place of their origins (the depths of water), this middle world existence, and the vast and infinite world above and around Mother Earth. To be lost in the tiny dictatorship of a personal ego, separate from all the rest, is to be unconscious while arrogantly pretending to be learned.

The priestly shamans of this tribe are called mamas (the Enlightened Ones). They are revered community specialists, highly educated since over the span of a nine year period of isolation in childhood. Their job it is to guide, heal, and interpret the Law of the Mother.

To most people, the Kogi, especially the mamas, would likely appear strange, mysterious, or even scary. That I contend, is in part because we, the Younger Brothers, are so distant and detached from Nature. We have lost our true nature as human beings and relatives and have devolved into human doings and human accumulators.

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I responded to a mama’s “call” to deliver their message of survival to Westerners. Without a smartphone, or any phone, I headed to the mountains of Columbia to get their terse warning. There would be little socializing, just getting straight to the point, and then I was to “be gone.” And it was important that I not encourage other people to ascend into their homeland. They just desire to be left alone and want to protect their land from being further despoiled.

On the pilgrimage to an elevation over ten thousand feet, my ego and prideful determination was far stronger than my legs. My body just tagged along with my mind and experienced a “beat down” in the process. There was a motorcycle crash, I was thrown from a mule, and constantly fell on steep muddy slopes. Dehydration with its dizziness and confused thinking quickly developed after my guide and I ran out of safe drinking water. Then there was the heat stroke – fever and chills -- and eventually the gift of dysentery. Never-the-less, eating boiled roots every day and shivering cold each night trying to sleep in a hammock atop the mountain, did not distract from what proved to be a profound spiritual experience.

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Rich or poor, all Kogi live in similar huts. Some may have many cattle, others just a few chickens and turkeys, but they regard all community members as equals. The Spanish, Portuguese, and recent Colombian invader’s covetous attitudes, especially toward minerals like gold (Mother’s menstrual blood), is regarded as corrupt and obscene. Historically, the Kogi’s ancestors borrowed Her gold, melting and fashioning it into statuettes and effigies, eventually to return them to Mother as buried offerings – a display of respectful reciprocity. Over decades grave robbers from below have scoured the mountainsides desecrating sacred sites, ravenously digging and scavenging in search of beautiful relics, absconding with them, and descending the mountain to sell the gold figurines on the black market.

In contrast, the Kogi are a humble people who carry the internal strength of their close animal relative, the jaguar. They wear no gold bling and feel no need to “to toot their own horn” like some of us do on Facebook. From a shy social demeanor to their clothing and sexual practices, modesty guides them. Meditating on being honorable replaces any need for punitive laws. Their long held tenets of environmental ecology preceded our own by thousands of years and, extending from it, they developed a related social ecology, what Western psychotherapists might call “systems theory.” Everything on the planet, the Kogi assert, is intricately connected. To tamper with any part, person, or other animal will impact the whole.

The Kogi want to continuously receive messages from the World Consciousness -- aluna. Aluna is described as a cosmic intelligence and a life force by which consciousness creates matter – a tenet of quantum physics that Younger Brother is now first starting to understand. Their meditative minds become aluna. In contemplation they pick up on suffering throughout the world – plants, animals, water, climate, humans that are all talking to them. Above all they “hear” from the Divine Mother who communicates how we are harming Her and, therefore, ourselves.

Interestingly, plant medicines and psychedelic drugs are not used to suddenly enlarge Kogi consciousness, rather that ability must be developed by a person in a disciplined and continuous state of meditation. Yes, the men almost always have a plug of coca leaves under their lip. This, however, should not be confused with cocaine; it is a mere stimulant, much like coffee, and is used to keep their minds alert and their stamina up.

Like receptacles or transducers of cosmic information, in deep continued meditation and divination the Kogi invite “knowings” to come to them – wise guidance on how to live and how to protect Mother and all the creatures residing on Her surface. It is amidst constant reflection that this transduction and interpretation occurs -- how messages are absorbed and the future is foretold.

Like the proverbial “canary in a coal mine,” the Kogi on their mountain top (called the “Heart of the World”) sense Mother’s pulsing life force and Her warnings. Both of these animal relatives can portend unhealthy environments and death. The Kogi are aware of the mining, drilling, and mineral extraction going on everywhere below. They see us, the Younger Brother, greedily chasing technologies and busily accumulating money so we can purchase more and more things. So, it is the mission of the Elder Brothers to be 1) guardians of Earth and 2) guardians of profound knowledge garnered through contact with aluna.

As Younger Brothers we have technologies that remove us from direct contact with Earth and the World Consciousness. When we turn on our technologies we turn off our minds as well as our ability to communicate effectively with all life forms. Our constant companion – noise -- interrupts the inflow of energetic information and disrupts discourse with aluna.

Sensing this, the Kogi tribe wants to inspire a major ethical revolution throughout the world. We must evolve from current patterns of insatiable consuming and possessing to a simpler life of peace, responsibility, reciprocity (including making regular offerings to Mother), and complementarity (men and women living in balance, understanding each gender’s sacred functions). This is the only way we can survive, otherwise Mother will have to throw many of us off her belly by way of pandemics and global warming.

When the Kogi quietly walk down the mountain to the ocean for sea shells that are used to make lime for their meditations sticks (poporos, the symbol of a man) they eventually see Younger Brother carrying technological devices. The gadgetry is compared to distracting moths or mosquitos that must be constantly swept aside, being regarded as obstacles to direct and unbroken engagement with Mother. They don’t need, nor do they want, a technical version of the worldwide web. The Elder Brothers have elevated mental powers to a degree by which they have come to know people everywhere without using smartphones, emails, or physical travel. But today, by inviting me to their homeland, the Kogi reluctantly recognize the only way to reach Younger Brother is by way of modern Younger Brother messaging methods. That was my assignment, to help spread their message via the media, from books to Zoom.

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When the Kogi walk on Mother, literally they walk in the footsteps of their ancestors. This is very similar to grizzly bears in the gigantic Khutzeymateen Sanctuary of British Columbia who, during their seasonal migrations, literally step in the same deep imprints of traveling bears from hundreds of years ago. Each step is a meditation of sorts, a familiar and comforting connection to other bears and, presumably, a link to their ancient history as well. For the indigenous Kogi tribe, hiking the trails of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, is a somewhat similar trance-inducing experience. By going inward, they go outward. By protecting Mother, they are protected.

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With peripheral vision, the mama can read an individual’s body language like a book; in a way it is a form of speech -- a language of its own. Each person’s bodily movements are reflective of their attitudes, carried experiences, and strength of character. Before meeting me in a physical way, the community mama divined who I was beforehand and never looked directly at me upon my arrival. Yet he concluded, “This man has an evolved energy.” Very humbly, I accepted his discernment and vowed not to let him down.

Wellbeing, to them, is a state of harmony and they look for it in others. Contentment has nothing to do with ownership, possessions, or having a dominant presence. While men, led by mamas, reflect a male power structure and policing authority, women are the somewhat superior sacred ones who unobtrusively carry Mother Earth’s fecund powers inside them. The men believe that just as we honor the Great Mother, all of us must also honor the women around us – Mother spirits residing right here in the middle world, in our midst, in our homes. And there are extensions of Her spirit in all that exists on the surface of this Earth. We are in our essence, quite simply, Mother in human form.

Even minerals, including a meditation bead-like stone called a tuma, hold spirits. They are all parts of Mother. A mama, by putting a tuma in a divination bowl of water, awaits a clear message from Mother. This was the mama’s way of becoming acquainted with me. Getting clearance on my spirit, I was asked to kneel before a large well-hidden relic. Next I was asked to speak to the tuma, infusing my spirit into it which, in turn, was placed in a fissure of the larger rock relic that preserved knowledge like a book, my thoughts being added to the mix. The mama’s intent was to merge my best intentions (spirit) with those of the ancient ancestors preceding today’s Kogi. Once connected by thought, I would merge with the ancestors and today’s Elder Brothers, united in a cosmology upholding the shared beliefs of sacred preservation. Then, facing two mountain peaks, the mama and I stood and sang in an ancient language to the ancestors.

The world remains wondrous and mysterious, and the Kogi are exemplars of this phenomenon. Entering their territory I saw more than a foreign culture, I witnessed sentient vestiges of an ancient humanity -- a people who have never broken their conscious connection with the quantum realm. They have stayed entangled with the Vast Self while remaining protectively remote from the modern world with its narrowly focused consumptive habits and its fear-based penchant to be distracted by noise, gadgetry, and technological “communication.”

In comparison, the Kogi have chosen to foster silence, go inward, focus deeply, and stay coupled with the primal creative and sustaining power of Mother, to live in reciprocity with Her much like humans who want to remain close to their most recent birth mother. Their credo: broken concentration results in a broken connection with Mother and a premature death.

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The founder of Western psychology, William James wrote: “It takes a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange.”

[In preparing this article I am reminded of another indigenous jaguar culture in the Ecuadorian Amazon. There lived a powerful shaman who dreamed of two warring brothers he called USA and Russia, who selfishly fought for land, power, prestige, and wealth while heartlessly destroying everything in their path. The recent Ukrainian invasion is but one more iteration of this audacity.] 

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