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| Maggie Marbry, Photo of Urubamba River, Top of the Peruvian Andes, 2000 |
"My friend Maggie Marbry took this photograph of the Urubamba River from the top of the Peruvian Andes. On that trip I learned that the Urubamba’s name in the Quechua language is 'Willkamayu,'..."
Notes on the Urubamba River - Machu Picchu - Extraterrestrials
My friend Maggie Marbry took this photograph of the Urubamba River
from the top of the Peruvian Andes. On that trip I learned that the
Urubamba’s name in the Quechua language is “Willkamayu,” which translates to
“sacred river.” This designation sheds light on why Inca
architects located the citadel of Machu Picchu 2000 feet directly above the
river.
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| Machu Picchu in Peru. Image by Pedro Szekely |
Maggie's photo captures the Urubamba's silver tone which inspired Pablo Neruda’s 1945
poem “The Heights of Machu Picchu,” in which the poet conflates descriptions of ascent to the ruins with allusions to an interior search. Among the poem’s
disparate associations are the site’s astronomically aligned
stone-architecture, its human builders, and the vultures that circle
its craggy peaks, my translation by Nathaniel Tarn: “Mother of stone and
sperm of condors, High reef of the human dawn.”
Come up with me, American love
Kiss these secret stones with me
The torrential silver of the Urubamba
makes the pollen fly to its golden cup.
I traveled across Peru to see its archaeological sites, but was equally intent of discussing extraterrestrial sightings with Peruvians. In Peru, UFOs and related phenomenon are daily occurrences. There, nobody gets worked-up about this subject. Peruvians are warm friendly people, so I invited them to be my guest for beer and discuss their experiences. We knocked back a lot of Pilsen Callao. Some told me crafts come
out of the lake, go up into the sky. This narrative in a sense aligns with the ancient
Andean mythology surrounding the creator-god Viracocha who made the earth, sky,
and stars, and pulled the sun and moon out of an island in Lake Titicaca. I bought a beer-top opener with the image of Viracocha in a local market. It hangs on my key ring.
A memorable story came from a Peruvian archaeologist. While camping overnight near an archaeological site he saw a craft with lights. He believes an abduction occurred because the next morning he found himself quite a distance from where he had fallen asleep. Why did the UFO come, and why did it move him? He couldn't be sure, but believed, “they wanted to teach me certain things, and they did not want me to remember they had come to do that.”
The way I see it, trying to understand UFOs and other paranormal experiences is the most important thing we can do. Think about it. Humans have had paranormal and mystical experiences since
the beginning. UFOs, NDEs, OBEs, apparitions, and
clairvoyance are universal experiences that span all eras and cultures. These anomalous experiences are usually interpreted in religious
and mythological terms. I'm inclined to think they are tied to the true nature of consciousness, which we don't yet fully understand. Perhaps we never will. Maybe our present level of
evolutionary development makes it impossible for us to know, for instance, that which Dr. Jacques Vallée
suspects is a non human form of consciousness beyond space time that manipulates
our physical environment. Might there be, as Dr. Jeffrey Kripal believes, a hidden
dimension of the self beyond space time that is primarily, fundamentally
consciousness, that shows itself in dreams, visions, apparitions, intuition,
altered states and weird erotic energies. For Kripal, the self is a “vast
unfathomable” presence that accounts for mystical experiences and sheds light
on our cosmic immensity.
I'm calling to mind Pulitzer prize winning biographer and Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry Dr. John Mack. Mack didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about if UFOs and abductions were
real. He cared instead about their effects. Mack likened these encounters to Near Death
experiences and apparitions of the Virgin Mary, events that seemed anchored in otherworldly
invisible realms, yet crossed over into our physical world. He wondered if they
were designed to shatter our materialist world view and open our consciousness
to a larger view of reality. Expanded consciousness might reveal a
multi-dimensional universe in which unfamiliar entities and energies exist. In other words, a non-ordinary state of consciousness that included a UFO opens us up to better knowing our cosmic nature. John Mack was
tragically run over by a truck and killed in London in 2004.
I have no conscious memory of seeing UFOs, but they come repeatedly in my dreams, A very memorable dream, one of the many I recorded because it was so vivid, has me alone in an empty street watching an enormous light-filled UFO rotate
above. "Come out," I yell uselessly at people who hide in their houses. "Come out. This is as important as anything in your
churches." The descending UFO gradually shrinks in size and is very tiny by the time it lands on the tip of my middle finger, with pressure pushing it down a few inches. The object penetrated my finger and left a tiny spec of blood on the tip. For me, startling dreams are one of the ways my infinite eternal consciousness speaks to my time space based ego self. The symbolic language here, an unknown reality penetrating inside of me, reinforces my connection to the cosmos.
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