Difficulty understanding a passage

[highflyer8]

The Quechua world is submerged, so to speak, in a cosmic magma that weighs heavily upon it. It possesses the rare quality of being, as it were, interjected into the midst of antagonistic forces, which in turn implies a whole body of social and aesthetic structures whose innermost meaning must be the administration of energy. This gives rise to the social organism known as the ayllu, the agrarian community that regulates the procurement of food. The ayllu formed the basic structure of the whole Inca empire.

I have no idea what 'cosmic magma' is supposed to mean, or what the second or third sentences mean.

Any help would be very helpful.

[lichtrausch]

The first two sentences sound like some of Deepak Chopra's obfuscating wish-wash. "Cosmic magma" is meaningless, except as a poetic expression. "a whole body of social and aesthetic structures whose innermost meaning must be the administration of energy". Meaningless nonsense.

[YesNo]

"Plasma" would make more sense to me when used with the adjective "cosmic": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)

I agree with lichtrausch about the second sentence: It sounds like BS. The third seems to be talking about an Incan form of community called an "ayllu" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayllu) which might have meaning were it not linked to the second sentence.

[highflyer8]

The first two sentences sound like some of Deepak Chopra's obfuscating wish-wash. "Cosmic magma" is meaningless, except as a poetic expression. "a whole body of social and aesthetic structures whose innermost meaning must be the administration of energy". Meaningless nonsense.

Thanks for clearing up my confusion. I'd been thinking all along that I had been missing the significance of the passage.

This passage actually comes from Barron's GRE prep textbook. What bothers me is that this passage (and a few subsequent paragraphs) were used to set reading comprehension questions, even though no questions were asked which explicitly had to make use of the above paragraph.

[highflyer8]

Thanks for clearing it all up!