I carry these rocks everywhere.

They're pretty cool.

These are some of my magical rocks. I love each one for different reasons. Physically each one is beautiful. One has a hole, one is practically a sphere, one is shaped like a skull with a honeycomb crown, and one is striped and almost a tetrahedron. That's why I picked them up. They’re beauty and rarity called out to me. They are probably kuhnyas. I have affection for them.

Kuhnya, I'm told, literally means affection in the Andean language of the Quero people.  I've delved into the mysteries of Andean shamanism. It's a system that came to me. I was looking for an indigenous wisdom tradition from the land I live in, or something intigral to it. I tried voodoo, and Lakota, and looked all over for Ojibwa. I attended a Native American Catholic church for a time. Nothing connected. Then, one day suddenly two misha carriers, pocos, flew into towne from Peru. Don Louis and Don Miriano. The leader of my Ayahuasca community arranged it. The Misha is what attracted me to the Andean way.  A misha is a portable alter full of kuhnyas, power objects, usually rocks, all wrapped up together like a pillow. It's often called a mesa.

I’m trying to understand what these rocks are all about. I have these that I carry around because they are not as precious as those in my misha, and conform to the size and weight restrictions of my pocket. And I keep the ones that I call kuhnyas wrapped nicely in a Peruvian weaving and leave it on a shelf in my plastic lined apartment.

My rocks, my kuhnyas, my talismans. They are lenses, each with it's own specialty of focus. I'm not sure what that is. Another student of the Andean way told me, “That mesa that you carry around is an eighth dimensional map of your soul.” Wow! Cool! I'm not sure what that is either. Whatever the misha and kuhnyas are, they are awesome. 

But as portable as the Misha is, I can just bung it into my messenger bag and take it anywhere, I can't have it around while I'm sawing a useless pipe out of the church basement. I can't hold it when I vacuum the dust out of disintegrating stone walls in the basement. So I gathered secondary awesome stones. 

Carrying them around, I feel, elevates then above my kuhnyas, because my relationship with them is stronger as a result of all this attention. There are other rocks that I sometimes put in my pocket, but these are the superstars. Well, more like, they are the off-Broadway stars. The superstars are in the misha…supposedly.

The skull stone is connected to the Pleiades, I found it after the Pleiadean karpays that I received when in that low-grade cult the Aya community. The karpay was genuinely administered  by the visiting pocos. The skull stone is connected to my crown chakra and a specific star in the Seven Sisters (either Maia or Pleione). We were instructed to gather one stone for each star, and they should match the colours of the chakra, “paint them,” we were told.

I thought it was a thing made up by the cult leader. She was always just making things up, and the pocos didn't tell us to assemble the rocks, she did.  I followed instructions, however, even though I was suspect of them, and I found six appropriately coloured stones and this skull shaped marvel. In my practice (haphazard as it is) this one stone retains that moment. The rest have moved into my cool rocks bucket 

The crown chakra doesn't exist in traditional Andean mystecism. They do have a place in the top of your skull where a seque (line, string) of Sami connects you to the living cosmos, but it's not the same thing. They don't have the seven chakra system. They have seven nawis (eyes). If we were to place them on a map of the Indian system of wheels it's very similar. However there is no nawi between root and solar plexus, and no crown nawi. The third eye is called the seventh eye because it is the seventh nawi. Each regular eye is also a nawi, numbers five and six. This skull stone is maybe a little bit lost then. 

Dons Louis and Miriano administered two karpays (rights), the Nustas and the Pleiades. Both involved the seven chakras. This is an adaptation to the Westerners. It's also, however,  a bridge to the Indian system. Ever since I left the cult I thought that all the chakra adaptations were worthless  bunk. I wanted the authentic practice. I realised recently, however, that magic is never bunk. Voodoo is an adaptation for example. Magic always evolves. Rather, like life, magic exists in a state of movement through changes. I now consider those karpays my bridge to India as well as Peru.

When I gather stones I am attracted first to their beauty, second to features like holes, or placement; one of my kuhnyas is non descript, but found it when I reached up and pulled it out of Devil's Doorway near Devil's Lake, an ancient power center of some kind in Wisconsin. It's got to be a portal. Even the domesticated homoEuromerican could see that when they discovered it and renamed it, adapting it to their cosmovision.

Photograph of Devils Doorway. Taken from the Devils Lake State Park website.

I picked up several stones from the Devils Lake area, the tetrahedron in the first image is one. I wanted one for my misha, and I wanted a few more to share with other power places: Lake Michigan, my soul-woods, and a rock formation off of I-94. I had a cockamamie scheme to connect them energetically with seques. Which I did.

Everywhere I look now it's, “oh, there's a pretty stone. What are you up to, buddy?” Every stone has become a potential kuhnyas. Here's a pile under the driver’s seat of my car. 

Stones that caught my eyes while communing with (see also: just plain swimming in) Lake Michigan.

Here's a few all polished up nicely for the consumer rockaholic market and sold to me in shops. Not kuhnyas.

These store-bought stones that callef to me with maybe something more than collectability. Yes, I took a bath with them, and there performed an impromptu ceremony using the carved eagle and owl. The ghost assemblage in the background is a towel crammed into the overflow drain of the bathtub, so that I can maintain a proper bathing depth.  Not part of the ceremony.

When a khunya is everywhere, does a khunya even exist?

I'm just a guy with entry level shamanism skills. And no knowledge of the linear symbols that form/articulate the everything all at once of the Quero. That's jargon for, I don't speak Quero, and so I don't know how the Quero conceive the universe, but I do know about how they do that. This keeps me twice removed in a state of perpetual observer. I have to figure it out on my own, just like art school. For instance, in all my training I never figured out what the misha is for or how to use it.  My teacher said, “Listen to your kuhnyas!” I held them up to my ear. These are American kuhnyas. I expected them to only speak some kind of American. They communicate in daydreams. And it seems in night dreams, too, though I can't actually verify that.

The Quero speak around a subject to describe it, to get at it, to investigate it. It's how they approach the ineffable metaphysical realities, and how they communicate it. It's how they pass on this wild illogical, non linear and, ridiculous thing, the knowledge of the Living Energy of the universe. I do it through daydreams. Spacing out.

The impromptu ceremony in the caption above, involving the carved owl and the carved eagle, was an imaginative exercise. I held them together in one hand and asked them to search for people that I can connect with; one by day, the other by night, by consciousness and unconsciousness, day world and night world. Bring them to me, I asked, holding the two stones in the air over my bath.These particular stones came to me on a trip to the woods where I grew up, my spirit woods. It's a state park now, and intact while suburban sprawl has devoured the farmers’ fields all around it. 

In the low grade cult they had “eagle stones” for us for when we finished the program. Four of us bailed, however, too pissed and hurt by all the manipulation and low level cruelty that was going on. Also, I witnessed a sexual assault which woke me up to the terrible reality I was mixed in. And if they were behaving like that, can anything they say be legitimate? 1

Yes, just as much as Satan quoting scripture, or a U.S. President throwing a Christmas party. I had several amazing experiences while participating in the low grade cult’s cobbled together program, and it's how I got my start on this path, so I reserve gratitude for that time. I actually hold no animosity. I left it before getting my eagle stone, though,  and that bugged me for months. I drew a comic about it applying sympathetic magic.

Two years later, on the road home from visiting my magic woods, I found a New Age shop in that sleepy spitwater burg, West Bend. I had to stop, this unlikely thing is right there like Sasquatch! I broke my hyperfocus on driving, pulled over, and went inside. On a shelf of trinkets sat a dish of Peruvian carved stone animals. I purchased the eagles, (and the owl, which is carved Tigers Eye, a meaningful mineral to me) scoring a major victory after the upset of leaving the program suddenly. I got my eagle stone. My wise friends got their eagle stones. We graduated! I took a bath with it and sent it on a mission. 

The eagle stone is not a khunya.

I have no idea what I'm doing, and I have no way to really verify the agency of anything that I do because the lag time is so long, and when the magic effects occur they are often nothing like I expect, or nonsense. Walking into a new age shop in my hometowne, for example. The story of the pecans, for another example. I'll tell you about it some time. It was nonsense.

I carry rocks around now; that's it. That's the theme. A practice given to me, sold, actually, by evangelists from the mountains. I'm eager to see where it goes.

Terra Osterling has a moment of love to share about rocks here. Her take is more down to earth, but in the end she concludes with my premise. The earth is alive and communicating with us.

https://suddenwriteturn.com/rocks-calling-confessions-petraphile/

khunyas and a crystal. Notice a difference between this and the first image? Anything special here? Can you feel the Hippitricity, that ineffable energy that is so famously invoked?

Above are the rocks in my pocket today. While writing this I decided to carry my actual kuhnyas plus a double terminated thing. That black one is black because the cult had us burn three kuhnyas. I love that guy. I stepped on him while wading in a cenote near Tulum. He and the scallop fossil below him, are two of three kuhnyas that I kept in my Mesa. The others were removed. In fact, after hearing that we burned them, Dun Louis was incredulous, and told us to remove them, during a Zoom meeting we had with him after we left. “Did you feel joy?” He asked.

Joy is the key.

1 - The pocos had nothing to do with this, they were out of the country for months at this point. This crime was strictly leader on student Ayahuasca community violation. The victim later gaslit me about it, saying that she didn't remember expressing to me confusion about the incident.

Writing algorithm:

Take a photo of contents of pocket

Tell life story

Cut out part about Enrique Enriquez 

Take a bath

Put new things in pocket, take a picture of that

Have Substack crash a million times while trying to publish, transfer to Docs, get better spell checking, cut and paste back into Substack

Fail to publish

Read a Substack extolling artists to work on their own website rather than driving traffic away from their own website

Publish on Freedom Cosmos