The Healthy Management of Reality - Stanford University

Introduction: Sculpting RealityIn my native Perú, one can see large mountains literally sculpted into lifegivingfields for crops. The Andean people who accomplished these marvelousfeats of irrigation and engineering inhabited these difficult geographic locationslong before they were conquered by the Inca Empire and the European colonists.More importantly, they still maintain the waterways and reservoirs that make thesemountains a living sculpture of awesome proportions.What one sees as one approaches these terraced mountains from afar is, atfirst, a smoothly curved green mountainside. Gradually, the eye can distinguishthe angular shapes of vertical stonework walls, creating gigantic steps down themountainside, with the greenery of growing crops filling in the horizontal part ofthe terraces. As one walks among the terraces, one notices the many details thatmake these eminently practical structures true works of art. For example, onenotices the care with which stones were put together, or the almost playful way inwhich longer slabs of rock, flat on top, are inserted at just the right places in theterrace walls so as to create steps leading from one level to the next.These "andenes" or Andean terraces are impressive examples of the humanability to sculpt one's objective reality. The magnitude of the effort to build thesehorizontal surfaces in a predominantly vertical setting is mind-bending. Onewonders how the idea first took hold, and how this glimmer of a potential way tofeed one's family was transferred from someone's internal reality into theactualized reality of the first terrace. The individual internal reality gradually waspassed on to others. The massive works of cultivation throughout the Andes speakloudly to the need to involve large numbers of people in the process, and to theHMOR.July2005.Muñoz.doc 9