The Four Insights Quotes

“We often confuse love for a warm glow we sense in our bellies and as something we can offer and withdraw, like a cat who comes and goes at its pleasure. It’s easy for us to extend love toward those who are lovable, but loving people and situations that are not to our liking isn’t so easy. We give our love “unconditionally,” but when we don’t receive what we feel we deserve, we withdraw it. We then reinvest our love in a new person or situation that we think will give us a better return, but we find it difficult to maintain when we don’t feel recognized or acknowledged. If things don’t work out the way we want them to, we too readily exchange our loving feelings for hatred and resentment. Our initial excitement over a new job, for instance, may sour and become disappointment and bitterness. When we’ve been jilted by a lover, the intense, starry-eyed passion of infatuation can turn into loathing so great that it consumes us. To an Earthkeeper, love is not a feeling or something you barter with. Love is the essence of who you are, and it radiates from you as a brilliant aura: You become love, practice fearlessness, and attain enlightenment.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power and Grace of the Earthkeepers

“When we step out of the “arrow of time” and experience infinity, we reclaim our original nature, which is God. When we return into time, we lose that awareness so that we can experience life in our clock-ruled world, which is what we’re meant to do. We return to everyday life unaware that we’re God and are dreaming everything up. So as we go about our daily lives, the knowledge of our original nature drives us to serve our experiences rather than expecting them to serve us. That is, instead of cooking a meal with the expectation that it will nurture us, we nurture ourselves in the preparation and serving of the food, infusing the experience with meaning. We no longer search for meaning in situations, but rather bring meaning and purpose to every encounter; we no longer search for truth or beauty, but rather bring truth and beauty to every situation.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power and Grace of the Earthkeepers

“We typically perceive someone with a very different assemblage point as strange or foolish, and we may even think that they’re stupid because they can’t perceive what we can, or loony because they sense what we don’t. We don’t realize that our perceptions are limited by our beliefs and life experience. Just like the blind Indian men who examined an elephant in the ancient story, one of us feels the elephant’s tail and pronounces that the creature is like a rope, another feels the tusk and insists that it’s like a sword, while another wraps his arms around the beast’s leg and swears that the elephant is like a tree. For each man, the limited reality he perceives seems to be the only reality.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power and Grace of the Earthkeepers

“The minute you have a back door, you’re blocked from creating what it is you want because your energies are divided. Failure becomes inevitable because you don’t fully commit yourself. It’s far better to burn your bridges behind you, lock all those back doors, and be completely engaged in the path you have chosen.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power and Grace of the Earthkeepers

“Luminous warriors build collaborative relationships with others instead of trying to conquer them; consequently, we get much closer to finding common ground and solutions to our mutual problems. Instead of clinging to our belief that we won’t have enough or that we’ll be taken advantage of, we bravely extend trust and find win-win solutions. This seems naive, of course, and part of us says that real life doesn’t work this way. But the most successful organisms in nature are the result of collaborations.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power and Grace of the Earthkeepers

“We can’t possibly see the whole picture as well as Spirit can. We might not realize that there is tremendous growth and learning in store for us if we actually take a course different from the comfortable one we would select from the level of serpent or jaguar. While we may long for material wealth and comfort, our soul was drawn to a family where we might have lacked these things. While we may have wanted loving and caring parents, we may have ended up with those who didn’t give affection easily. Yet the perception from the level of hummingbird is that everything is perfect as it is, that nothing needs to be changed. From the level of eagle, we know that “the Father and I are One.” There is no longer an “I,” there is only Spirit, and there is no will other than that of Spirit.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power and Grace of the Earthkeepers

“In the information age, we don’t embrace knowledge that goes beyond mere facts and the logical arrangement of them. We have religions—along with countless practitioners of those faiths—but too often the spiritual essence of the teachings has been lost. We learn about interpretations of interpretations of the great truths, and we analyze and dissect those ideas, but we wouldn’t think of going out into the desert for 40 days, as Jesus did, or sitting in meditation under the Bodhi tree, like Buddha. It’s as if we’re spending our time poring over hundreds of cookbooks filled with complex recipes and endlessly discussing the nutritional value of certain foods and diets, yet we never actually eat anything.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power and Grace of the Earthkeepers

“Dann ist uns klar, dass all unser Tun heilig ist, und wir suchen nicht mehr nach Sinn, Wahrheit, Schönheit oder Zweck. Wir blasen die Suche ab und erfüllen all unser Tun selbst mit Schönheit und all unsere Begegnungen mit Wahrheit.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power, and Grace of the Earthkeepers

“When I eat at restaurants in Peru, I always load up my bag with the extra rolls that are served, because I know I’ll have an opportunity to help someone out by giving them a roll that may be their only meal of the day. Once when I was traveling with a Laika elder, I found myself in a bus station surrounded by several children who had gathered around me in the hopes that I might give them some coins or candy. I began to take the rolls out of my bag and distribute them, but the elder told me, “This is not the bread these children need. The kind of food my people need is the food of the soul, not the stomach.” He took the rolls from me and distributed them to the children himself, but as he did, he also began telling them stories about their Inka ancestors. Afterward, the elder explained, “These stories are the nourishment that they are craving. I gave them not the bread that will feed them tonight, but the bread that will feed them throughout their entire lives.” He was perceiving with the eyes of the hummingbird—to him, the stories were nourishment for the soul. When he saw me handing out rolls, he intervened at the level of the sacred by offering these children the mythology of their people.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power and Grace of the Earthkeepers