Perhaps you have met numerous travelers during your wanderings—strangers, simply attired, walking silently through the desert, in heat or cold, toward their unknown goals.

        Do not believe, because the garment is simple, that the stranger is insignificant! If his eyes are half closed, do not presume that his glance is not keen. It is impossible to discern from which direction power approaches.

-For millennia, secret societies of Native American medicine men and women carefully guarded their wisdom teachings and acted as stewards of nature. These "Earthkeepers" existed in many nations and were called several different names; for example, in the Andes and the Amazon they were known as the "Laika."

Homo Luminous

According to the prophecies of the Maya, the Hopi, and the Inka, we're at a turning point in human history. The Maya identified the year 2012 as the culmination of a period of great turmoil and upheaval, one in which a new species of human will give birth to itself. We're going to take a quantum leap into what we are becoming, moving from Homo sapiens to Homo luminous- that is, beings with the ability to perceive the vibration and light that make up the physical world at a much higher level. For the first time, all of humanity will be able to evolve not between generations but within a generation, which contradicts our beliefs about how evolution works. We'll take a biological quantum leap within our own lifetimes; and the physical, emotional, and spiritual traits we acquire will be passed on to our children and our children's children.

If this sounds hard to believe, consider that you create a new copy of your body about every eight months, as your cells replace themselves. By following the four insights contained within this book and implementing their practices, you can manifest a physical body that's free of the tyranny of the genes you inherited from your parents and the medical maladies they bring you. But even more important, you can unchain yourself from the limiting emotional and spiritual stories you've inherited or bought into over the course of your life.

Thanks to the discoveries of quantum physics, we've come to understand that all matter is densely packed light. But the Laika have known about the luminous nature of reality for millennia-they know that vibration and light can organize themselves into a thousand shapes and forms. First, there is a luminous matrix, and then this blueprint gives birth to life. Vibration and light swirl and condense around the luminous matrix and give birth to a whale, for instance, and then whales can give birth to other whales.

The human body also has a luminous matrix: We're enveloped by a luminous energy field (LEF) that manifests the form and health of the body. The LEF organizes the body in the same way that the energy fields of a magnet arrange iron filings on top of a piece of glass. Just as with the example of the whales, humans can give birth to other humans, but a new kind of human has to come from a new luminous matrix. Over millennia, the Laika learned to access the biological blueprint of light and assist Spirit in the unfolding of creation. They also learned how to heal disease and create extraordinary states of health, as well as to craft and shape their personal destinies, by changing the LEF.

We can think of the LEF as the software that gives instructions to DNA, which is the hardware that manufactures the body. Mastery of the insights lets us access the latest version of the software and allows each of us to create a new body that ages, heals, and dies differently. Without the ability to reprogram the LEF, we're trapped in the stories we inherited; that is, we age, heal, live, and die the way our parents and grandparents did, reliving their physical ills and emotional ailments. The four insights contained in these pages allow us to break free of the tyranny of our familial curses, the stories that haunted our ancestors.

Mastery of the insights even allowed the Laika to create new life on Earth-to bring forth a new species of butterfly in the Amazon, for example. It allowed them to move gigantic boulders up the side of mountains, as was required to build the Inka cities in the clouds. The Bible tells us that our faith can move mountains, but we've forgotten that we have the ability to do so. The insights teach us that the first mountain we must move is the one that blocks our perception of our own luminous nature.

In becoming Homo luminous, we'll give up the ways of the conquistador and discard the masculine theology that values command, control, and dominion over nature, a theology that justifies the exploitation of the earth's rivers and forests because they're seen merely as resources for human consumption. Instead, we'll embrace an older mythology that has become lost to most humans, a feminine theology of cooperation and sustainability.

The Four Insights

The wisdom of the Laika consists of four insights, each of which has four practices within it that allow us to move beyond mere understanding to actually experiencing shifts in perception-thus, helping us to transform ourselves and our world. The insights and their practices are:

. Insight 1: The Way of the Hero

 Practices: Nonjudgment, Nonsuffering, Nonattachment, Beauty

. Insight 2: The Way of the Luminous Warrior

Practices: Fearlessness, Nondoing, Certainty, Nonengagement

. Insight 3: The Way of the Seer

Practices: Beginner's Mind, Living Consequently, Transparency, Integrity

. Insight 4: The Way of the Sage

Practices: Mastering Time, Owning Your Projections, No-mind, Indigenous Alchemy