Wisdom, Power, and Grace of the Earthkeepers, Los Angeles: Hay House, 2007.
The Four Insights chronologically is the last of the three books by Dr. Alberto Villoldo that I review here, as it was the most recent at the time I drafted these reviews.
The book is structured very differently from the preceding ones, in that it condenses the teaching into Four Insights.
Part One: Understanding the Energy of Perception
The Four Levels of Perception
Your Energetic Anatomy
Part Two: The Four Insights
Insight One—The Way of the Hero
The Practice of Nonjudgment
The Practice of Nonsuffering
The Practice of Nonattachment
The Practice of Beauty
Insight Two—The Way of the Luminous Warrior
The Practice of Fearlessness
The Practice of Nondoing
The Practice of Certainty
The Practice of Nonengagement
Insight Three—The Way of the Seer
The Practice of Beginner’s Mind
The Practice of Living Consequently
The Practice of Transparency
The Practice of Integrity
Insight Four—The Way of the Sage
The Practice of Mastering Time
The Practice of Owning Your Projections
The Practice of No-mind
The Practice of Indigenous Alchemy
In a way, and perhaps logically so, this book is much more condensed than any of the former books by the author. Every sentence, and every word counts, and is full of meaning, and you are not going to read this in the same speed as, for example, Shaman, Healer, Sage. This indicates perhaps that this book is more conceptual than the earlier books, and that the author has in the meantime created a concise framework for his teaching. To give an example of this density that reminds the highly focused content of theosophical writings, the author writes in the Introduction:
The Earthkeepers teach that all of creation—the earth, humans, whales, rocks, and even the stars—is made of vibration and light./x
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./xiii
There is another elucidation forwarded by the author about his teaching that I consider extremely important—and that he should perhaps have provided in earlier publications. It’s the fact that the Laika tradition he was initiated in is not to be confounded with mainstream Inka tradition.
All those who know about the Inka tradition are aware of the fact that it was a Sun God cult, what Joseph Campbell came to call a ‘solar culture’ that practiced ruthless slavery, the oppression of the female, violent warfare, torture of prisoners of war, and human sacrifice. The author explains:
As fortune or destiny would have it, I ended up meeting my mentor, don Antonio. He was one of the last of the living Laika, and he took me under his wing and trained me for nearly 25 years. He was a man of many lives—during the day, he was a university / professor; in the evenings, a master medicine man. He was born in a high mountain village and worked with the tools and practices of the 15th century, yet he was conversant in the way of the 21st. Although he was a descendant of the Inka, he would tell me that the Laika are much older than the Inka, whose culture was masculine and militaristic. The Laika’s teachings were from that earlier time, when the feminine aspect of the divine was recognized. /xi-xii
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 [Luminous Energy Field]./xiii
The powerful message of this teaching is that we can overcome our negative individual and collective karma by rejoining the original pattern, through overcoming and healing what the Kahunas call complexes, and what Dr. Villoldo calls imprints in the Luminous Energy Field (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./xiv
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./xiv
It is a daring perspective, and I can only admire the courage of the author to forward his wonderful mission in a time of change that perhaps really contains a vortex, an opening for the new to emerge from the old.
The book contains much more than the little window that I opened here in my book review, and perhaps contrary to my other reviews, I restrain myself here. And for good reason. It’s a symbolic act. Discover for yourself, and see what more you can learn from this extraordinary book! I feel unable to convey it.
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