This is a very readable and illuminating book explaining the author’s work as a shaman.

Alberto Villoldo reveals many of his own experiences of being healed and healing using shamanistic methods.

I found it to be an advanced book and I was not personally able to carry out the exercises he recommends that we do.

He tells us of his meeting with Don Antonio in Peru, who claims he can taste infinity.

The author witnesses Don Antonio assisting a woman to die, by freeing her spirit.

He sees the essence, the luminous body, of the woman, leave her body.

The essential healing process given in the book is called the Illumination Process.

He comes down with pneumonia which cannot be controlled with antibiotics and comes to Don Antonio in acute pain.

Antonio performs a healing on him. He begins to twitch, which is a sign of the toxic energy leaving his system, then falls asleep.

Later, the pain is gone and Antonio tells him he had a Hampe, or energy healing, and has spent the last hour in infinity.

After the healing session he was left with “an abiding calm and serenity that he describes as “a state of grace, of forgiveness and blessing” that has remained with him for years.

The way of the shaman is a path of power, “of direct engagement with the forces of spirit”.

“Tremendous healing takes place when we commune with the powerful energies of the luminous world.”

“You shed your identity with your limited self and experience a limitless oneness with the Creator and the Creation.”

When we enter infinity, the past and future are stripped away and only the here and now exists.

Infinity should not be confused with eternity. Eternity means an endless number of days. Infinity is prior to time itself and existed before time was born.

We are also permitted to read extracts from Alberto’s journals. He is given a mummified forearm by an archaeologist and when he goes out to receive the energy of a hummingbird ”which embodies the qualities that shamans must have for their epic journey”, its fingers seem to be moving and Antonio says she is tormented by her people massacred by the Spanish.

He whistles and sings for their spirits to come.”A string of entities appeared before us. Antonio ministered to them -- he called on the lineage of medicine men and women … to come and assist them, and one by one they were released from their pain.”

It went on all night. As the last of the spirits was healed, they buried the forearm.

He visits the Q’ero nation, the last remaining Inka, who live in isolated mountaintops in the Andes.

They are the legendary keepers of the Inka prophecies; their spiritual lineage is believed to extend back a hundred thousand years. The wisdom of their ancestors included “lessons about life, the journey beyond death into infinity and techniques for healing through the Luminous Energy field.”

The healing schools in Cusco were destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors and the missionaries who accompanied them.

The shaman-priests were persecuted by the Inquisition. When the Catholic Church outlawed the rites and ceremonies of pagan peoples, all that remained of their spiritual teachings were fragments.

‘The author and Don Antonio travelled through countless villages and met with scores of medicine men and women and “distilled the essence of their rituals”.

He tells us about his various teachers.

Don Antonio was a “seventh level kurak akuyek, the highest degree a shaman can attain”. He had been struck by lightning at the age of twelve. The lightning bolt had rewired his brain and awakened dormant abilities.

Don Manuel Quispe is ninety years old and the oldest living medicine man. The author helped him to get a new set of teeth, but his remaining teeth had to be extracted and he was in pain for days after each surgery. Because of this, Don Manuel punished him by making him jump into an icy cold lagoon in the middle of winter, It was ten degrees below zero. He was convinced he would have a heart attack.

But he survived, and afterwards Don Manuel began to teach him everything he knew.

Dona Laura was Antonio’s medicine partner. She was a “fierce old crone, one of the most frightening people I have ever met”.

She was fierce with her own students too and beat them with a stick when they committed particularly stupid mistakes.

Eventually, they became friends. She was a shape-shifter and could travel in the shape of a spirit eagle or jaguar while awake, in broad daylight.

Don Edouardo was a fisherman and “had a natural gift for seeing the luminous nature of life”. He could ”look at you and recite the story of your life, both the public story … as well as the more intimate, secret stories”.

When he sat next to Don Eduardo, the latter’s Luminous Energy Field made his seeing crystal clear.

He saw an intrusive entity, a spirit lodged inside a woman’s Luminous Energy Field. This parasitic entity was sucking her life force, and needed to be extracted and healed.

The author learnt that a person “does not automatically become holy because he has died”. There are as many troubled people on the other side as there are in the physical world.

For there the shaman there is no “"supernatural heaven” and there is no independent evil principle in the universe. We live in a benign universe that takes a personal interest in our well-being. “Evil exists only in the hearts of men and women.”

“When a dying person retains his awareness after death, he enters the light easily.”

There is an exciting chapter about death.

All this will give you an idea about the content of the book.

It is an exceedingly absorbing book and I urge you to read it.

P.S. Don Antonio used to say that Homo sapiens has perished, and that a new human, Homo luminus, is being born this very instant. We are that new human. ( )

Author, Dr. Villoldo, writes about how his path in life led him to be a healer that heals with energy medicine.

I enjoyed reading this and it was written in a nice quick flow. The doctor’s history with the many different communities where he practiced energy healing with was interesting.

If you are looking for a book that teaches you how to be a healer then this is not the best book. To be honest I don’t remember too much of the lessons. The author does have his own classes but for myself, I don’t have that kind of money. It is not a bad read, I just wanted to learn more about how I can become a healer and this made me think it might be out of my reach.

I would read more books by the author just because this was well written. It might be good for someone who is researching holistic healing but they have read nothing about the subject before. ( )

Written from the viewpoint of a psychologist/medical anthropologist, Alberto Villoldo describes his experiences with South American shamans/healers. Very similar in tone and message to the Don Juan/Carlos Cataneda book I read about thirty years ago, Villoldo does an excellent job of explaining what it means to be an Inka (his spelling) shaman. how their belief system works (which were surprisingly similar to Eastern spiritual beliefs) and how someone can use the information for their own spiritual development. Especially appreciated was a "don't try this at home" warning which I have found lacking in most books on energy medicine - it would stand to reason if the procedures are as powerful as is claimed that untrained use could be harmful. Villoldo makes it very clear that guidance from a trained healer would be appropriate if you wished to use the healing for others (and while he runs his own school I didn't find that he was pushing his school unduly). Well written, this book would be recommended for readers interested in South American primitive culture and those interested in energy medicine. ( )

While not a book that I would really use myself it is an interesting book that made me think about energy and it's use. It's something I want to explore more but the South American angle doesn't really float my boat but it would be something to explore from an Irish angle.

The book is all about manipulating the body's mystical energy and if that doesn't fit into your worldview, don't get involved with this book. He looks on the manipulation of the energy from a Incan point of view and it is interesting to see what he has learned. I'm pretty sure that he really hasn't gone as deep as someone from the culture can but that's the way of things.

It's interesting, sometimes from an anthropological point of view and sometimes from a energyworking point of view. ( )