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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.” Such a designation sheds light on the reason 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 picture of the silver toned Urubamba visually coheres, in my opinion, with Pablo Neruda’s 1945
poem “The Heights of Machu Picchu,” in which Neruda 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 went to Peru to see its archaeological sites, but more than that, to discuss extraterrestrial sightings with Peruvians. In Peru, UFOs and extraterrestrial 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 perceived crafts come
out of the lake, and go up in the sky. Tthis 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 ship with lights. A type of abduction must have occurred because when he woke the next morning he found himself quite a distance from the spot in which he had fallen asleep. Why did the extraterrestrials come, and why did they 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 mystical experiences and brushed up against the paranormal ever since
the beginning. UFOs, NDEs, OBEs, apparitions, and
clairvoyance are universal experiences, spanning all eras and cultures. These anonalous 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, energies and beings
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 in my dreams, In one, I am alone in an empty street watching an enormous light-filled UFO rotate
above. "Come out," I yell uslessly at people who hide in their houses. "Come out. This is as important as anything in your
churches." The descending craft increasingly shrinks in size and is puny when it lands on the tip of my middle finger, pushing it down a few inches. A tiny drop of blood forms as the object penetrates my finger. After waking up I can't shake the pressure on my finger, symbolic dream language that reinforced my connection to the cosmos.
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