“You don’t have to know the mystery, you have to love the mystery.” — Tito la Rosa

Tito la Rosa is a short, unassuming man. At 70 years old his long, wavy gray hair reminds me of a bust of Beethoven and indeed, Tito is a musical titan in his own right. He is a Grammy award-winning artist, instrument maker, curandero (healer) and ethnomusicologist who has cultivated, through direct experience, the healing power of sound. With a peaceful and often silent presence, it would be easy to pass him on the street without recognizing his knowledge. Like so many geniuses of indigenous descent, Tito la Rosa is obscure in our modern culture, but for decades he has patiently uncovered and shared the musical wisdom of his ancestral land — the Sacred Valley of the Peruvian Andes. His teachings may be summarized as a musical cosmology, interwoven with symbols, mythology and symbolic words from the Incan culture. “A nation without myths is empty,” he says. “The myth sustains us, it connects us.”

Fundamental to this cosmology is Tito’s statement that “everything in the universe has its mother, and silence is the mother of sound.” Silence is a womb from which the sounds of creation are born, and so he sometimes refers to sound as a seed. The number 0 is also a seed, symbolizing infinite potential. When he refers to sound as a “luminous vibration,” Tito implies that sound and light are interdependent. Similar to cymatics experiments, which study the visible effects of sound, he describes the interactions between these luminous vibrations as “acoustic mandalas.”

Incan cosmology is interwoven with numerology. Unity, duality, and trinity appear in many forms. The principle of “Pacha'' expresses unity and wholeness, suggesting that everything in the universe, including the universe itself, is complete unto itself. A flower is a pacha, a human heart is a pacha, a star is a pacha, even a word is a pacha. Therefore, “Pachamama” is the divine mother of all pachas, the mother of worlds. There are three worlds fundamental to this cosmovision, or conception of the physical and spiritual aspects of the universe, which Tito refers to as the “Three Spaces:”

1. Hanan Pacha
2. Kay Pacha
3. Ukhu Pacha

Hanan Pacha is the world “above,” although this term does not refer to a place that is literally above us. It is what he calls a “symbolic word” and must be understood as a metaphor. In a sense, it suggests a visionary, transcendental dimension wherein we create new realities. It can be related to the future and the principle of manifestation.

Kay Pacha is “presence,” the strength and force of life that is engaged here and now. In a sense, it is the vibrant force of the world in which we live and perceive.

Ukhu Pacha refers to that which is “below” or inside of all things. It implies lineage, history and can be connected to the past giving rise to things in their present state.

These worlds are interwoven, and as individuals we exist along this continuity, between the inherited energies of the past and our creative power to reinvent reality.

In conjunction with the “Three Spaces” are the “Four Directions” which correlate more literally with the cardinal points — East, South, West and North. Each of these directions is associated with a series of energies, keywords, deities, elements and teachings that help orient a person throughout their life. For instance, Ilya Tiqsi Wiracocha is a deity connected with the East, where the sun rises, and is considered to be a source of divine light. Wira refers to the power of combustion, the energy within all matter — a masculine principle — while cocha is the container of knowledge and wisdom which holds this energy — a feminine principle.

When Tito constructs his beautiful and elaborate altars, he places “sacralized” objects and instruments to connect to these principles expressed in the Incan chakana or square cross, which Tito believes is one of, if not the oldest universal symbol used by humanity. His altars feature relic stones, seeds of corn, flowers, candles, clay vessels filled with water, feathers and other items of power which have been made sacred by intention, and by virtue of their own spirits as pachas in their own right. To paraphrase, he says that sacred instruments are spirits, which accompany a person through life and even beyond.

Only with this profound context established does Tito begin to work with sound in the format of a healing ceremony or ritual concert. He opens with the invocation or call, to ask permission to conduct any ceremony. This call is typically done with a large conch shell, which he says is essential to invoke the spiral force, a fundamental geometry of nature. The shell is accompanied by a strong, deep drum. In order to blow this conch, which Tito does with great volume and continuity (since he has mastered the art of circular breathing), he believes that his breath must be infused with munay, the energy or power of love.

Once the invocation is complete, Tito may choose to open a number of what he refers to as portals of sound. Although he usually teaches workshops on the “Nine Portals,” he acknowledges that there are 13 or more in reality, including four portals which exist “outside of time.” These portals may be summarized as:

1. Silence
2. Invocation
3. Inner Space
4. The Voice
5. The Mother
6. Love
7. The Inner Child
8. Prayer
9. Purification

Each of these portals is associated with specific sounds — instruments and songs that Tito uses to facilitate the journey into various dimensions of consciousness, such as the charango, chakapa (percussive leaves) and a range of flutes often built or invented by himself or his son Omar, both of whom learned bamboo flute construction in part from a Chinese master. The names of the flutes say a lot about their intentions: the flute of love, the flute of heaven and the earth, the grandfather flute and the double hemispheres flute. Other ancestral instruments indigenous to Peru, such as the antara flute of feathers, an ancient ceramic pan flute tuned to a rare scale, and a clay vessel filled with water that whistles when tilted are also used, the latter handmade by his sister and referred to as the guardian of the tradition.

All of these instruments and tools are used to establish a connection, through an inner portal, to some aspect of Andean cosmology. This relationship is linked to the principle of ayni, which is commonly translated as “reciprocity,” although the word hardly captures the depth of the concept. “I exist to the extent that I interrelate with others,” he says. When Tito discusses ayni, he stresses the importance that all people must both give and receive in order for relationships to be balanced. In our time together, he expressed that we help each other, each giving and receiving what is proper. It is not only “serve, serve,” he says.

Tito’s concerts, ceremonies, workshops and private lessons are co-created experiences. Although many archetypes provide structure to his work, there is a tremendous amount of improvisation, intuition, empathy and soul-to-soul communication. He listens as much, if not more than he plays. In that sense, he is a profoundly patient man. “Paciencia [patience] — paz [peace] y ciencia [science],” he reflects. “This is what we have to do with peace: make peace a science.” In this way he uses, “the art of breath, the art of creation,” to project the highest vibrations possible — peace, joy, love, freedom — states of consciousness which he believes, regardless of how the music sounds, are the energies people truly connect to, the vibrations they go home with.

When I asked him what it means to heal, he said, “to heal is to return to the family.” We are all on that journey home from our birthplace in the womb of silence through the world of sound, light and form. In his own words, “There are sounds to open, sounds to affirm, sounds to walk and sounds to close; a sound to search, a sound to return.”

The music heard on this recorded article is taken from ‘While You Are Awake’ by Adrian DiMatteo, featuring Tito la Rosa”