THE MAGIC OF LOVE - AYUN

In the majority of ancient civilizations and the great indigenous pre-Columbian cultures there remained vestiges of a superior knowledge that included the fundamental laws of the celestial homeland from where humans "descended". And this "stellar communication" remained condensed in a few sounds, in a few "power words" which still evoke a glimmer of past greatness. And "ayun", "LOVE", is typical of those words that we could designate as "universe words" - words that enclose such profound ideas that they coincide with the limits of the vast concepts of the universal all.

It seems that the true punishment for humanity, the most tragic divine sanction that man has deserved, was that which occurred when a man, an incarnated spirit, mechanically repeated a sound like an arbitrary code, forgetting himself and blinding himself to the light that emanated from that magical sound. When the word stopped being transparent to the infinite resonance of the internal world and the infinite understandings of the cosmos, that is when the human species started degenerating, that was the original sin and the confusion of Babel - the loss of conscious speaking.

To speak consciously in the language of the Mapuche, mapudungun, is to make the symphony of the elements of water, earth, sky, fire speak, and it is to make all the realities of the intrapsychic world of the speakers speak and intervene on the points of their tongues. Therefore, to pronounce an indigenous word is to make all things dance: all articulated sound is an energy invoking movement, whose centrifugal waves end up affecting even the farthest borders of the universe. Even more so is the case with the word ayun: "LOVE".

Beauty, light, transparency

Ayun encloses three basic notions in its root: "beauty", "a special kind of light" and "transparency". Its matrix, aywon, in turn means "birth of the light" or, literally, "light that sees" (LOVE would be a lucid clairvoyance and not a blinding passion). Aywon also translates, in some Araucanian zones, as "dawn", "rising sun" and in others this word designates the transparent quality of glass and crystals and very particularly, the surface of mirrors. It would be the type of light that reflects in transparent waters and that has the virtue of returning the image

LOVE would be a form of solar illumination, the luck of sunrise, for the spirit, a kind of recuperation of the internal dawn, a state of hopeful rebirth when the clarity of certainties overcome reality and make transparent the artificial dullness of things.

She who LOVES, she who has fallen in LOVE, that is, she who has allowed her internal sun to rise, clearing away the shadows of his night, sees in the other and in all things. She sees in others and in all things the marvel of her own radiant light, as well as the clear truth of herself placed in front of her….

She who LOVES, contemplates and learns of her own nature on seeing it mirrored in others. That state of self-observation through the "mirror feeling", would take the lover to total openness, to a humble internal sincerity, to a state of total transparency. And this transparency will move her, from the inside, to a total surrender. Finally, such a surrender will make her compact and indestructible like a crystal.

Another way to go deeper into the meaning of this prodigious word "ayun" is to try to clarify the opposing notion. In mapudungun the denial of LOVE, what in our language would be "there is no LOVE", "I do not LOVE you", "I do not have LOVE for you" is nelay ayun. Literally it means, "my eyes died to the vision of your light". But in the Mapuche language there is no denial, "no" does not exist. Underneath this lack of "no" is the cultural notion that "all is possible". Nelay ayun, then, really says, "for now, my eyes are asleep to the revelation of the light", leaving open the possibility that these eyes, at a future time, could wake again to that light. This idea is so profound, honest and moving, that if someone should speak it consciously, at that very moment he would start to recuperate the same capacity of LOVE that he states he has lost.

Because the nelay ayun, the dying of the eyes to the luminous beauty that all beings radiate, would make the speaker vulnerable, it would be like a cold and hard self criticism, it would be the violent lash of a false posture in front of the real, it would come back to one like an uncomfortable sensation of not being in sync with the truth of the universe; because all the beings of the cosmos shine, radiate a type of light, that is, are "lovable". All things are worthy of LOVE the moment they exist, and their ultimate being is nothing more that a form of condensation of radiant energy.

Without ego

Ayiwiyengu, Mapuche for "falling in LOVE", translates literally as "they have let go of themselves": both lovers - seeing each other in the mutual light that their faces reflect - "they have released their egos and are one". The lovers achieve unity, they LOVE each other independent of their personalities which have been abandoned to make possible the miracle of unity of two essences. This elevated concept of LOVE can be even better understood when the opposing notion of ayiwiyengu is explored which, again, is not a denial, but a type of degraded LOVE, existing at a lower vibrational frequency. This is called gulkun which has three possibilities of literal translation: "LOVE myself too much", "take too much" and "get angry": because I LOVE I get angry. This is, of course, the typical concept of "western LOVE" which includes the emotional levels of possession, selfishness and jealousy.

In the Mapuche gulkun, the LOVEd one is not allowed to be and the loving impulse is perverted in order to feed the saturated ego. The capacity to give and receive is lost and the natural irradiated movement becomes slow, dense and very dark and very little energy is generated. Ayun, on the other hand is "making oneself smaller". This translates into as an explaination for the western mind set as: the more the lovers let go of their suctioning armor, the more they let go of their external and stingy securities, the smaller their socialized and conditioned personalities, the greater the possibility for generating radiance, transparency and the growth of the internal and essential center, the inche, the "I".

In mapudungun there are no opposites like in the Western culture in the concepts of "LOVE" and "hate". To the Mapuches Guden, "hate" is merely a distant point, far, but still part of the phenomenon of the generation of light. Guden's literal meaning is "fear of the light", that is, resistance to producing light, a kind of black hole of the soul that suctions and buries its own luminous rays and those of nearby stars. But probably this too is only a phase, the last phase before this black hole turns into a sun, bursting with light.

The Mapuche language leads us to an understanding of the core of the Mapuche culture and cosmology - its concept of nature. Nature, for this prodigious ancient Chilean race is not the dialectical world of Good and Bad, of God and Man, of spirit and matter; it is not the irreconciliable opposites of beauty and ugliness, masculine and feminine, angels and demons, deaf stones and golden eagles. No, nature is one big uterus beyond the sacred and the profane where transformations and germinations are incubated, these being processes, aspects and moments, apparently diverse but also identical and necessary in their one, sole base, the same one, sole base where LOVE, ayun, and hate, guden, are nurtured.

So we see that the vast, profound and full meaning of ayun contrasts with the poverty of what the much-used word "LOVE" has come to mean in Western culture.

In common usage, "LOVE" today is a product of certain personal attributes given in transaction, "LOVE", more often than not, means "making LOVE", that is, a hormonal exchange at the level of bodies and glands.

The indigenous Mapuche world of the south of Chile, in contrast, teaches us that LOVE relates more to the illumined peaks of the spirit, rather than the mere chemical instinct of the bodies. LOVE relates more to the passion of being and growing "towards the rising sun" rather than a mere sentiment of the heart or a hormonal convulsion of sex. Of course, these last are also included in the concept of ayun for the wings of Spirit can surge from the fire of flesh and blood, but only as a beginning. To unite the bodies is a beautiful instinct but an easy one, - not like the final and ultimate essence of LOVE where the work of "making oneself into light" is what is difficult and sublime.

Finally, the Mapuche ayun prepares us to understand the final and forgotten wonder of our own word LOVE. It awakens us so that we may recuperate the lost magic of our own language. LOVE, according to a traditional European etymology, means "that which does not know death". Therefore, LOVE of someone, the LOVE of truth, a cause, a land, an ideal, is a way whereby Spirit can illuminate and be able to defeat death. And, like the Mapuches, when we pronounce this word, "LOVE", we can do it consciously, and thus invoke the dance of radiant light on this Earth.

(Translated by Consuelo Luz from an article written by Ziley Mora Penroz excerpted from the book "High Magic Mapuche Truths to Re-Enchant the Land of Chile)