5/22/08

Tour Falco

Bartoldo—name of truck

sandflies gather around our chemical messages

senan= little old wise man

pluri-nationality—

Beban—foreign vegetation

Africa miniflora

ultraviolet

green

destroy forest --> fire

free enterprise

no original vegetation

displaced, relocated—

original vegetation/introduced vegetation

growing tomatos—“a very painstaking job

of tying knots—“

live fence posts

Orlando Falco, Senan Gardener, Hester Kroeze and Maarten (?)

O: The details of anything tend to change, you know.

S: What is this plant to our right?

O: This is the castor oil bean, castor bean.

S: Ahhhhh.

O: It’s been introduced. It’s poisonous but it is medicinal if you know how to use it. The castor oil. For the liver.

O: Birdwatchers and travelers of the earth consider the Cloud Forest vegetation of the world the coral reefs of the land. Colorful, diverse, and attractive. It’s one of the most panoramic and attractive areas that I can think of as an ecosystem in the world as they would originally have been forested, you know, forested mountains with echoes of birds and animals reverberating everywhere. And a lot, a lot of epiphytes, plants who are attached, not parasites, but epiphytes, which are sitting, using another plant for support. It’s a three dimensional world, the forest in the tropics. So many plants live on top of others. You could say easily a third of the species. In some cases even more, in some cases a bit less. So you can see the surface expression of some earth minor faults, a crack, in this case a, I remember checking on a topographic map of the military once I grabbed, I think I have it at home, and it showed, look at the birds plunging there, it showed this section as a fault that runs right underneath the village and it shows up as a dip in that ridge across the village, where the road goes to Loja. So it is about three, four miles long. And it’s one of hundreds, of course, of these minor faults, running the length of the Andes. Faults become, like everything, more abundant when they’re smallest and least abundant when they’re biggest. But some giant faults maybe hundreds of miles long, if not occasionally up to, perhaps, many hundreds. And these faults are crunching, in the way that the Andes react to the compression effect between South American plate and the Oceanic plate, in this case the Nazca plate off shore, in the Pacific. The Nazca plate is crunching up against South America, this much per year, 3-4 inches per year. And South America is going the opposite direction by less, a lot less, almost an inch a year, on the average. So the conflict of the two plates creates, by plate tectonics, the whole Andes. If it is not against the Nazca, it is against the Pacific plate or against the Cocos plate. The Pacific is the hugest most, the biggest plate on earth.

M: So are the mountains also still moving then? Because of the effect of the plates moving?

O: Yes, the mountains are, in a way, the effect of these motions at the edge, between two major plates, in this case.

H: They’re still growing, right?

O: They are actively growing but at the same time they’re actively decreasing by erosion, by the transport of material to the ocean. So wherever the equilibrium is in the favor of growth, like Himalayas, the mountains on the average, still are on the average gaining by uplift what they lose by downfall and erosion. And the positive therefore is constructive. When forest, when mountains like this have remained relatively stable, with no new volcanoes, no new lavas filling the surface, no new upwelling of magma from below the surface, but erosion takes the upper hand and the mountains get smaller and smaller and smaller, like here. This is an older section of the Andes. These are, therefore, the remains of preexisting loftier, higher mountains, more then two million years ago and before. Somewhere, if you go back 20 to 30 million years, all hell was breaking loose at different times, around here. With active volcanoes and growing part of the Andes. But that growth has picked up pace to the north and to the south of us, Cordillera Blanca, the inter-Andean corridor where Quito and Ambato and Rio Bamba sit on. In other words, from Azuay, the transverse ridge of Azuay, Cuenca, to the north, the Andes are actively growing over and above, like Tungurahua, the deep down grading, except piece meal differences here and there, but from here to the north, all the north Peru low, as it is known, is an elder, 30 to 40 million years, or up to 50 million years, originating Andes. The people even say that the Amazon river, before 60 million years ago, instead of going east to the Atlantic, was going west through here more or less, into the Pacific, and it was that rising of the Andes and the tilting of the whole continent on the inner sea that for 5 or so million years, and still on swampy as it is, made the transition of these motions which created the Andes within the last 80 to 90 million years, all over the place, from the oldest to the newest.

M: Where was the inner sea?

O: In the Amazon. That swampy area, that’s why you have, lots of fish there are evolved from salt water fish, including dolphins, fresh water dolphins, skates and rays.

…

O: It is that gradual transition from sea to fresh water facing, the gradual transformation of that immense basin over the last hundred million years, that developed all of these richness of fauna, many of which originate in Oceanic sources, right?

H: Is it also so that, this is an older part, and here to Riobamba and Banos is a newer part, where the volcanoes are more active?

O: Exactly…

H: But…

O: But not all of it. Not always.

H: These used to be volcanoes as well.

O: Of course, yeah, inactive, downgraded, covered up with metamorphic belts of the Andes. This is another thing: volcanoes are not the only thing that made different kinds of rocks. Compression and heat, in the process, sinking, rising, moving, mulching, melting, which is constantly chemically transforming. Most of the rocks here are transformed by surface action, are near surface action, they are mostly metamorphic rocks, which are metamorphosed from sedimentary or igneous, by the process of compression and heat over time.

H: Which are these?

O: Those, igneous…mostly, because they are sea floor spreading, they are areas of…

H: Is that the same?

O: Yeah, igneous, it’s simply because igneous rocks have been deeper down, heated to molten condition, and they came to the surface first time, they’re virgin rock. That virgin rock degrades, chemically down grades, crunches up, changes, compresses, and turns into sedimentary, what we got here, and metamorphic, the chunks that are part of the sedimentary material that were formed maybe a mile deep or two, or half a mile, in the process of Andean compression between the South American plate and the Pacific plate. The Pacific plate being heavier, ducks under the Continental plate, because it is denser. It comes with igneous rock, denser, heavier then metamorphic and sedimentary. So it has to go down and the other over rides. So it crunches up. And there are lots of lots of faults along the way, including this fault, running north-south more or less, but many faults can be transverse and, but notice, in general the Andes have a main order going north-south, perpendicular to the compression force, and then, the ribs, from the dorsal Andean spine, the ribs transverse east-west like these ridges, at the end of one of them, down there, is Rumi Wilco. That scooped up place there, filled with gullies. Gully 1, gully 2, gully 3, the main one, and gully 4, in front of that shinny tin roof of sorts, but a bit further down. Look at the antenna of my neighbor, down there. And then the cliffs of the approximation trail and the flood plain that develops, where the greenest part of the village really is there. We are lucky to be where people don’t want to be, that’s why I live by the river, I prefer to deal with rivers then people, and so we put our house on stilts, enough to label it the ‘pole house’, and we live on the flood plain. The rivers coming down from the Andes, on the way to the Pacific, leave in the first resting spot, where the angle of water-drop decreases.

H: Where is the north?

O: That’s north. We’re going south. That’s east and that’s west. And so these rivers are going a short distance to the west, but over the top of those mountains, every drop of water that makes it to the Amazon has to travel at least three thousand five hundred kilometers even from here, four thousand to get to the Atlantic ocean. So the Continental divide of America, South America is tucked against the western edge of the continent. And over these mountains civilizations of human beings developed, and now we are getting the better picture of it, over and above archeological, modern western convolutions, people have been around for tens of thousands of years in America, not just the last 11 to 13 thousand years, then came the founding fathers, and the pilgrims and all of that. Finding their ready-made land for them my ass, they took over, with steel, the cross or whatever it was like everybody else.

…

O: So the melting of the ice of Podocarpus, which today there isn’t any, but during the ice age the top of the mountains were covered with ice, glaciers, and these U-shaped valleys are left. The melting of these glaciers created, in cyclic waves, because the seasons have been always there, these intermittent big water washers, mud slides, marais, filling these valleys hundreds of feet, and then the valleys, in the inter-glacial, since they receive a lot less material from the highlands, the erosion wins over deposition, except for garbage. Look at it here. Let’s take a look, this is well worth for you to see, what the modern world’s action, including tourism garbage.

Oh my god.

O: This is a relatively new garbage dump of Vilcabamba, which is now becoming a sham…becoming? Ha! Here the people started living off the garbage, that’s when you know there’s lots of garbage, when people begin to live off the garbage.

Oh my god.

O: Look at the view. I would make in this spot, this very spot, a big nice veranda, with some coffee and marmalades and juice and this and that and tables to enjoy the view, the sun rises from behind you and the sun sometimes gorgeously sets in front of you, and this is the first time that from Vilcabamba you are high enough and behind the Mandango to be able to take a peak to the West and those mountains out there are the Inca Trail, the ancient Inca highway that moved from Cuzco to Cajamarca to Saraguro and on to Cuenca, all the way to Quito and south of Columbia, and men went over those mountains, and here it is not difficult to see, archeologists have been doing research, they know, they proposed it, although remains are hazy…so there is archeological interpretation and geologic and the beauty and there’s lots to interpret or show to people here. Instead, we are in the pitiable condition, including tourism, which never asks “what do they do with my garbage in Vilcabamba,” proper zone of Podocarpus National Park. They just throw it, ends up here. Maybe a 5^th or a 6^th of all garbage these days may be touristic garbage, from people all over the world, who pay no fee to the people who deal, like them, with their garbage. So it is. We’re all in the wrong here, not just Ecuador. I just wanted to let you know that the government is made up of people who are not ecologists or able-minded in understanding long term consequences, they are chosen for a few years, they do their thing mostly indoors or inside the village, out of sight out of mind, they simply ignore these places, and this is a policy of the government, because there is the lowest investment in garbage management, there’s always a shortage of money in governments like this. Then this is the best solution, just find a grove on the mountains, throw it in, and let nature do the rest. And set fire regularly to it, set fire. This is the windward side of Vilcabamba, the Valley of Longevity. Thanks to the health, water, and air. So all the wind, especially in the dry season, is smoldering this, takes the smoke right into the valley, and it pollutes the transparency of the air, which is good for picture taking, but worse, people breath the air, with toxic fumes. It’s an insidious, silent poisoning process. And to make matters worse, we’re in the buffer zone of a national park, and we’re in a recently declared “Earth Biosphere Reserve.” All of this southern Ecuador chunk, limiting Peru, all the way from Saraguro to the border, was this year declared by the UNESCO a “World Biosphere Reserve” and a cultural reserve, it’s all part of it, with the people and everything of Saraguro, I have the, in my house, the declaration and all the details. So, we are the first polluters of waters that people who live down stream from us, we’re a mile high, as the rivers go into the ocean they flow past cities, towns, villages. So here’s Vilcabamba and its tourism poisoning the water of the people downstream, and the air of the very people that…policy of the government. This is one of the major dramas of societies worldwide, the incredible volume of garbage. All of this didn’t exist here, this is a one time use, a hamburger, a little bit of chips, french fries, or water, water containers, food containers, dog food containers, containers and containers and containers, all kinds of things. And the people today simply live like there is no problem, we just worry about our own life. I find it very serious the problem and we are to be blamed. Generations coming up are going to not believe the way we treated the earth.

…

O: Lots of chemicals dilute in that rainwater and they end up polluting the entire length of the rivers, and this is only one village, and there’s another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another. We are now this week, we have the news, that the province of Zamora, which is a visitor site, gold-mining place, famous, has the policy of the municipio to dump their garbage, 2,000 tons a month to the river. Directly to the river. All of this, plus many times more, from big big towns, to the rivers. Policy.

…

O: Possums, they come and they eat here, so in the process they get diseases. Some of those diseases may be virally contagious. In Galapagos the sea-lion pox was introduced. A canker, or avian pox was also a major problem that causes the birds to have twisted beaks and warts all over their faces, or their feet. So the fauna suffers in the process, not just the… but you can say well, it is a small section of the earth, look at all the clean places…some small sections actually spread wide and the sum total of the very crowded earth, that’s an ethnosystem, the entire land scenery is man-made, all of these mountains were covered with the same forest vegetation we’re going to visit later on, same, not exactly the same but a mosaic fashion. Forest changes with altitude, with inclination, with time, with this and that, so different kinds of forest, but forests none the less. So what you see here is the product of fire, many fires, several fires, and then the horses carve, and the cows mostly, carve those terraces. I would do the same if I was a cow, because you don’t want to walk up and down straight on these mountains, but always sideways, everything within reach of their neck, wherever the necks, wherever the cows are able to walk, you can see that they carve lots and lots, they look like Inca terraces.

When did the deforestation really begin? Were the indigenous, Incas and others, doing it? Or was it predominantly when the Europeans got here?

O: It’s a different form of things. I wouldn’t say that the Incas did not do their share of damage but after all, humans fragment the earth and we have to make room for ourselves. It is the systematic way, and the sheer volume of destruction, that makes things different.

…

O: The methodology, the fact that we live in a different kind of society, the Incas were parametal, and parametal societies meant that the authority was properly and dully placed at the very top. Each person that owns a chunk of land, here, a private property, is free to do about its lands, in reality, I don’t mean by law, is free to do what it pleases. Some laws may put restrictions, but many of these laws are idle laws, not active. People don’t enforce them all the time. Some laws are practically sleeping, hibernating permanently.

…

O: It makes those mudnests, with a side entrance, wherever there is one there is a pigeon, wild, and the yellow finches, and then the ani, with the long tail, that bird there. Notice that birds tend to flock together, different species, they like to flock together. It is a natural form of food finding quite frequently seen in far places like Podocarpus park.

…

O: …a few minutes, and then you walk on for half an hour or an hour you don’t even see a single bird.

…

O: … a summary of the state of the earth: and the consensus was that we’re in deep shit.

…

O: …we’re not behaving ourselves. We’re guided and abetted by belief systems that make us perceive reality in, what I consider personally, a distorted way. The scientific way. We live in the mattress of science, and I don’t trust it. Part of a method of inspection of the earth, and its mysteries, which has created it in the first place. The mess we are in is mostly a scientific mess. There are lofty words to justify it, “Saving Lives”, is one of them, “Freedom”, “Creativity,” “Enterprising.” A then they tell you that they’re no better then mosquitoes when it comes to their rights and origins. But like somebody was saying, there’s two things on earth, People and Property. Everything else is Property. But of course we are the same.

…

O: …really are. Like people in the past have recognized it and respected it, for thousands and thousands of years. They never said that we came only from primates, they said that our kingdom is not of this earth. And they respected that, be it the Incas, or the Persians, the Romans, the British, until a couple of hundred years, or three hundred years ago. Maybe five. And now we have to live with this incoming crisis which will force an incredible amount of people into major major suffering. This is for sure. Inevitable.

…

O: Before, when the forest was here, only the places that were most exposed were subject to mudslides. The forest is like a clothing, so it would have slowed down the erosion of the land, but now the land is naked, or nearly so, with only a fine gossamer of greenery, the cow fields. And those touchy trees planted by the military at the top, which don’t even belong to South America, they’re pinus radiate from the Caribbean or eucalyptus from Australia, that they call reforestation, which, obviously, is not. It is a monocultivar of a perennial form of tree. When you put hundreds of thousands of pines, one next to the other, where before was one of the world’s record levels of biodiversity, you can hardly call that reforestation. And yet, that word is the main reason that people donate money to institutions and projects, government or private, of reforestation.

…

O: From the 60’s of last century onward there was an agrarian reform, that gave the land to the people that worked it, instead of landlords, who would decide when and where to burn. Instead, when it was given to lots of people, people started burning. One of the big land owners of the area where we live, Yumburara, was actually the Church. In this case, by agency of the priests or the nuns, they owned haciendas. The Church had their own major tracks of land, with their different denominations…

O: Those families who turned to industrial enterprises in Loja, used to be the landlords of the past. So now there is practically no big haciendas anymore… they were all broken down.

…

O: Vilcabamba was originally know, as you’ve probably heard, originally in the recent decades, as the Valley of Longevity. That drew the attention of the world in the 60’s and the 70’s, to a certain extent, so that scientists, and doctors and people interested in finding out more about longevity, came to see it here, more or less with serious intent and what they found was not convincing to them. They found dubious dates for people’s ages. So, in a way they burst the bubble of longevity, to the serious scientific community. But in the process the fame was started and Vilcabamba switched to a place for visiting, for tourism, and now to living.

How did the word first get out? Wasn’t there a census by the Loja government?

O: Yeah, originally it was startling because somewhere in the early 60’s there was a population roughly in Vilcabamba of 800 people let’s say, around that many, in the area, and they came up with more then 60 people that were 100 or over, out of those 800. You know what that is? That is about 350 times the average of Europe, that on average, I read, clumsily, that in Europe one person every 100,000 is over a 100 or so. That in 800 people more than 60 who claimed to be over 100 is a very large proportion, indeed. So that awakened suspicion and intrigue, the desire for some people to see whether it was true or not, and they found out that most of the ages of the older people were not to be trusted, there were reasons to doubt them, valid reasons, so that eventually, there is no credibility now to the stated ages of these people, scientific credibility. The common people are bound to believe what they hear. If someone says, “I am so old, I am…” say “95”, there is no reason for you to question that, right? But scientists will question that. And indeed they found out that many people are named after their fathers or grandparents with the same name, so that the name may transfer from father to son to son to grandson, and sometimes the confusion may be aroused. Documents that prove your identity were not issued until the 40’s in some cases, people that were born before that had only church baptismal records, and since the records of the past century were burned in a fire, for example, that happened in the church of Vilcabamba around the mid-1800’s, there you have a problem too. So in other words, there is no sure, official way to know whether a person who is over 80 or so, today, is truly so.

…

O: It’s there. Where you see the, there is a sunny place and then there is a mountain with a sharp cliff to the right, that sharp cliff to the right of the low mountain, down there, that’s Mandango, right in front of the Rumi Wilco, that people go up to, there is a cross. So that is 2000 meters above sea level with Mandango, and to the right of it below is the valley of Vilcabamba.

…

O: Other peoples in other civilized societies have their own name-calling for constellations and their meaning that they had. For the Inca’s constellations were seen as the Condor, the Llama, the Toad, the Snake.

S: I was in Cuzco and there was this astrology map there, and they showed how the Incas named the different dark parts of the milkyway.

O: Yes, they named the dark parts. Very much so, they were of the highest importance, perhaps more even so, so much so that constellations were just the decoration of the dark parts in some instances.

…

O: When you walk in these forests of cloud forest, and you see these trees with odd looking shapes, they resemble ghosts, especially if they move with the wind.

...

O: …The Secret of the Incas by William Sullivan.

H: But why is it so different now? What’s the big difference…

O: Very simple, I ask you, what will happen to you after you die?

H: I believe in a God.

O: You do?

H: Yeah.

O: God bless you, because you are one of a kind. I don’t know how truly you believe but most people do not, most people in the West do not. They live Christian worlds. But we’ve lost it, we’ve lost authentic faith in spirituality.

The connection with the cosmos.

O: Yeah but because we want to prove it with scientific, that science that I told you, that is an insidious malaise, has actually done without millennia of people serious connection, or intent of connection, to our origin, which is not of this earth, as Jesus said. Although we’re incarnated in a primate body, people of the past seriously accepted, whether they could see it or not, had faith or belief, or conviction, or intuition, they accepted that something about humans is not the same as our nearest relatives the chimps or the orangutans or gorillas or the whales. That there is something there. That something is what people of the past paid allegiance to, everywhere. Built temples everywhere, cities.

H: Science is now registering that pre-European cultures also had a lot of knowledge from the stars and everything, and we’re rediscovering this.

O: But that knowledge has to come natural to us. We can not force ourselves into faith, into belief-systems that our rationality stands against. When today we trust our science, we trust it because it works, but they trusted their own brand of explanation, because to them it worked too. And it worked a long time.

…

O: The focus was not on physical reality but on an intuitive form of reality that we felt within, rather then without. Within. So there were a lot of ego-trippers, people who went traveling deep inside.

…

O: I may say without shame, cause I quote, the 3 L’s are not a property of physical nature: Life, Light or Enlightenment, and Love.

…

O: Oh my goodness, that’s why today we don’t have that human criteria to put a brake on our greed, on our overpowering dominance of the earth, paradoxically we say we’re the same as everybody else but never before have people so decimated and plundered and taken over as if they owned the place, like we do today…. Flowers, of sorts. Cowlie flowers, flowers on the stem. Cowlie-stem. This is a tropical trait, flowers on stems rather then on the tips of flowering branches. Sometimes flowers develop on tree trunks on trees that are 20 meters tall, and nothing but the tree trunk shows up with fruits and flowers, like the cannon-ball tree in the Amazon. Adapted forms, scientists will tell us and we repeat it and accept it, because these flowers, which are reproductive organs of the plants, cater to animals that crawl, instead of fly to the flowers.

…

O: …show how much connection there was between the living and the dead, because they knew, intuitively of course, nobody knows until you die, that the dead were not dead, they were alive but in another dimension.

…

O: That other dimension is referred to as timeless….

…

O: Mind, an organ of the body human, of the ape, everything that comes from the mind is ape matter, but why is the ape matter capable of coming up with this conversation, between us who have only less then 2% genetic differentiation from our nearest relatives the monkeys, the chimps, less then 1.5% some people would say, of our genetic make-up is different from our nearest relatives.

S: I think it’s less then .1%.

O: There you are. Well have you ever found any scientist that has pin pointed the seat of humanness in that less then 1%, which they ought to know by now. I haven’t heard anything, let me know when you find it.

S: Well there’s very interesting research into the brain.

O: Brains researching brains.

H: But you think that humans are not so relatively relative to the apes as scientists say?

O: Oh yes, the body yes. But I have to take it as an element of faith, what I read from somebody who claims to know this from experience, a luminary, Jesus. Or somebody after or during. Every society may have had its own form of Jesus. For the Incas it was Viracocha, the very luminary that set the stage for the society’s development.

H: What’s a luminary?

Prophet?

O: No, much more then that. A prophet is a being who can tell the future or the past, which is actually physical. If we, for lack of a better word, call a luminary to Jesus, we are saying that that person happens to be consciously awake in two dimensions at the same time, in the physical dimension where all of us live and dwell, plus the spirit dimension, which has no, which is the polar opposite of the physical dimension, and yet the best they can do with it is to speak in terms of analogies, metaphors and parables, because the relationship to it is impossible through the mind. There is no time, there is no…there is a form of space which is not like ours, and there is eternity. There is no effect, there is only cause in that dimension, how can we, it makes no sense, how can, what is it in us that has from that dimension in us? The only thing we speak of is the soul, but in fact the soul is the energy of it, it is the self, the human self, embedded, imbued, permeating our ape body, including our mind that enables us to think in a qualitative way differently than animals, that enables us to create, animals can not create, no animal can create anything. Nothing in the physical world moves by creation, it moves by inertia. It has no cause-making anything, it’s all effect, effect, effect, effect. We are cause of things…our action is spiritual. Otherwise we would be like the monkeys, living inside an ecosystem, changing along with the ecosystem but not being the instigators of that change as we are the instigators…

H: That’s the reason why people can destruct.

O: Of course. Because we have that freedom. Could ever a monkey build that such a thing out in the grass, look at it! That’s only humans. 60 meter tall, for cellular phones, private company. They’re putting thousands of antennas all over the nation in the last 2 or 3 years. As their global cellular phone companies mushroomed like an explosion.

…

O: You will find lots of words of our currant speech, whose Latin origin refers to that nether world, the beyond. Lots of them.

“Desire” is one.

H: You find lots of words from Latin?

O: From the Greek, from the ancient world, from the world that still took spirituality seriously.

H: Yeah but, you’re saying that the words we use from the Latin refer to the spiritual world?

O: No, today we have given them a much more practical, down-to-earth meaning. But remember, words were invented, by very few and far between.

H: But the words we use now from the Latin world, back then they referred to the spiritual world.

O: Mingled with the practical, because we are a duality, right? We are a dual being. We’re not only from this earth, and yet we are from this earth. But our true nature, the one that will continue on after we leave behind our body, is of the spirit. In effect, we are like outcasts.

H: Outcasts?

O: Yes. Human beings, not the body, we were outcast by will, they say, luminaries will say to you that human beings are on physical nature because of an act of will, which is the only force that actually does things in spirit, will-power, not wish, not want, desire with a force in it, with a compelling force, the force of creating your own kingdom, because in the spirit, the fantastic thing is that there’s no, no one reality, each individual self has its own kingdom, so there are as many kingdoms as there are entities in the spirit which call themselves human. And they occupy not this planet, but humans have incarnated in an on-going recurrent process in millions amounts of planets in the universe and in each and every one of them there are luminaries, to help them out of their predicament, our predicament.

H: So out in the universe there are planets with people just like we?

O: I will even go more daring, just like the forces of nature are the ones that shape each and every form of these forests…

H: Just like the forces of nature?

O: Forces of nature…physical forces. In the universe they apply, and spiritual forces apply equally throughout the physical universe. So the forces specific that make a human body in physical nature will have made another human body in all of the universe quite similar to us.

H: It’s the same force?

O: Yes. And the same forms, similar forms, so that we could recognize them.

H: So if we go to another planet with life we’ll see…

O: We will see other human beings in other earths. Sounds crazy, you’re going to have to erase that.

…

O: Luminaries are truly people who come here to give us a hand. To ease our return, which is known by the Mantric people as “Back to Godhead.”

H: So people are from another dimension but here on earth they are stuck in science so they can hardly return?

O: No, they do all return, whether you’re stuck in science or not, you can not lose your self, whether you believe in it or not. Your beliefs will not effect in nothing the reality of the universe, absolutely. At least the beliefs that you harbor in your mental body.

H: But people just don’t know that they’re from another dimension?

O: Apparently some people, for example, what makes me say these things? I don’t know. I trust it. I think it is that way, not think, something makes it think.

S: Faith?

O: A form of it, but little, not much.

H: It’s like the religion is actually a religion in the other dimension? The God and the heaven is the other dimension?

O: Yes but watch out with the word religion. Religion may have been degraded ad nausea by people who congregate. Here’s a crucial thing that a luminary like Jesus said, and I think that if we paid attention to that phrase probably we would disassemble congregations in mass. Jesus said, “There where two or at most three of you are gathered in my name, I will be there.” Two or three. Not 10, 100, or 100,000. Check on that one. Very important. You can go alone, so it is your own inner quest, or at most, with two, a husband and wife couple, great, or three. To interchange inner impressions of what you searching, he’s searching and the other’s searching can come together to boost each others quest. The moment you are more then three, or more then two, you are forced to believe conventional congregation dogmas, and then you are virtually hypnotized.

H: I don’t understand…religion is…

O: Is sometimes an opium of the masses, like somebody said it, you know? If you are in need of help, seek like minded people, in groups of no more then two or three. Very simple rule.

...

O: that relates to the capacity to heal, the gift of healing, is not rare in human nature, and yet it is not found everywhere, but some people have it in the form of subtle energy which they can move, mobilize, between the personality of their patient and the personality of the shaman, it’s independent of the urine or whatever other treatment, the egg or the herbs or whatever, it is the person himself…

...

O: The wishes…the new train of people that used to pass by here, they could never pass by without making a wish around this place, and including throwing coins, so there may be coins buried in the mud at the bottom. Half jokingly and half true, I used to ask them, what kind of wishes did you have, “Oh, much of the time I wished that the weather would hold good while we walked through here.” They say that 40-50 years ago there was a lot more humidity, moisture, it was more miserable to walk through here.

…

O: Walking on the surface tension, is even creating waves. Those insects, those insects there. Without getting wet, like Saint Peter, they walk on the waves.

S: We call them pound skaters.

O: The genius of them that I remember reading from Galapagos times, I was surprised by that, is Halobates. There are a few dozen species of water conquering insects, that have actually invaded and used as a habitat the surface of the sea, the surface of lakes, and ponds. And amazingly because insects, in the world of animals, are the most abundant. We know at least a million, and maybe as many as 3 or 4 or 5 million insect species. But only 40-60 species in the world are the ones that live exclusively on liquid surfaces, fresh or salt, so it is a very difficult habitat, even for insects, and yet they manage to make it. Below water, if you see anything moving it would be the larva of a dragon fly, because there is supposed to be no fish here. And right there, you can see where shamans perform some from of ritual of sorts. For example, you see the fruits there? Those are a, what do you call them? Not oranges. It’s like an orange but bigger.

S: Oh, grapefruit.

O: Grapefruit! And I found, if you want to know things that may relate to the kind of purposes of these shamanic treatments, I found underwear, women’s bra and panties and male underwear lying around and on the water. I even actually once found one that was in good shape and I washed it and I used it for months on end. Honestly. Yeah, it’s a form of recycling, very much so. After all, they just left them here because it’s part of the ritual. And that, I was told by somebody that, it’s very funny that ritual, having to do with perhaps with sex matters. A man told me once that if somebody wants badly the favors of a woman and she doesn’t pay attention, that he may have recourse to a shaman who will, if, again by stealing some underwear from the woman that he loves, or wants to love, and making use of it in this ritual, he can in a way modify events, so that she will be more receptive. Believe it or not, sometimes people go away with such a self assurance after the treatment that, it may be that rather then the treatment, but they nail, they end up successfully…