It's All In the Playing (39 page)

Vitko left the craft resolved to improve his relationship with his family.

The next encounter stunned him. On the screens he was shown the beautiful mountain city of Yungay. It was his favorite place. Immediately afterward he was shown the destruction of Yungay which would occur ten years later. The beings revealed the future destruction to Vitko so that he could exercise his free will by going to the authorities to plead for evacuating the city of 20,000 to another location. The mayor-judge in charge accused Vitko of being an extreme alarmist and again he was recommended to a psychiatrist. Vitko said he left the mayor’s office and walked alone until he encountered one of his being friends who reassured him: “You have done your part. But ridicule is difficult to bear, is it not?”

On another occasion he entered the craft with three mountain women. Each was shown some of their past-life incarnations on the screens.

“We show you what you need to understand,” said the beings. “What you already understand is not necessary.”

On still another contact he met a woman who had been born here on earth and taken to Apu to learn her own internal power. She said that within one year’s education on Apu she was using mental powers she had never been aware of possessing. She elected to remain with the Apunians.

During a visit to a town that was suffering from drought, he was told that the inhabitants said prayers for the craft to come. It did. It hovered in the sky manipulating the positive ions in the atmosphere. When vibrating
at different speeds, the positive ions caused clouds to form which then created rain. The town was drenched in a much-needed storm.

Vitko told me story after story of his encounters with the space beings. And basically they were trying to teach him that all of mankind and each individual within it was a masterpiece of spiritual potential; that the Earth was a learning center where spirit could interact with matter; that our physical world was only a result of consciousness intention and by changing our consciousness we could change the world. They said that beyond the physical spectrum of our Earth, there were companion intelligence systems of nonphysical guides, as well as physical guides, who continually interact with us and with every life form on Earth whether we are aware of them or not. They all hold the spiritual intention of our Earth in their consciousness, because we are all brothers and sisters of the cosmos. Many of our forefathers were their forefathers, so they are karmically intertwined with the human race.

Vitko said they told him that whenever we treat any form of life carelessly it is because we don’t recognize it as a part of ourselves. They said the flow of conscious energy among all levels of life on our planet was instantaneous; that there was no life form, however small or large, that did not feel the impact in some way of every thought emanating from human consciousness. So as long as we remained unaware of the power we had, we would abuse it unconsciously—to our own disadvantage and possibly to our own destruction.

Everything destructive occurring on our planet flowed from spiritual ignorance—ignorance of the fact that we interact with all living kingdoms. They said that the purpose of the space beings and the nonphysical beings was to help us expand our conscious awareness so that we could radiate from within on a level that was more in
keeping with our power and spiritual expression in the human experience.

Over a period of a few days I learned a great deal from Vitko and his related experiences. Whether they were “real” or not seemed irrelevant to me. The message was clear, a spiritual shift in consciousness would benefit humankind.

   When Simo and I said goodbye to Vitko, I felt that I should travel to the mountain city of Huarás, where he had been, high in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range. He mapped out where we should go and wished us good luck.

One thing was becoming crystal-clear. Understanding the dimension of outer space which we longed to know would be accomplished in direct ratio to our understanding of our own inner space.

Chapter 25

   A
t 5:30 the following morning Simo and I piled into a van with a woman who, I knew, lived in and ran a government-operated hotel just outside of Huarás. Her name was Suzie. She was German and had married a Peruvian man twenty years her junior. By all reports she was radiantly happy, even though most of her family disapproved.

When I called Suzie (recommended by another friend), she said she had known I was going to call her. She had read
Out on a Limb
the previous Christmas and “knew” she would meet me within a year. There we were, traveling over the isolated desert highways outside of Lima on our way to the Cordillera Blanca, high in the Andes at 22,205 feet.

My easy breathing at sea level was not to last past two hours out of Lima—not that much of a loss anyway because of the pollution.

On the six-hour drive the terrain shifted almost mathematically according to the change in altitude. The lower mountains were sandy, dry, and barren, almost as though a nuclear blast from long ago still stood as a
testament of destruction. With each ascending mile the surroundings became more lush and green; the vista more extraordinary in its beauty the higher we climbed.

The mountain road was narrow as it wound its way upward toward the high Andes. Our van seemed to shrink whenever we encountered a vehicle coming from the opposite direction.

We passed mud ruins, potato farms, fields of sugar cane, open acres of cactus, herds of sheep and cattle. And always the life I saw seemed to drift along inside isolated bubbles of casual time all its own. Goal-oriented priorities were laughable to the languid mountain people. A peasant ambled alongside his cow all day long, unconcerned whether he would make it to the market that day or another day.

Women with water vases on their heads walked five miles to the Santa River for their family’s water, only to walk another ten to trade a goat for produce. Linear time didn’t exist for them.
All
was
now.
You could see it in their attitude: peaceful, unassuming, and unaware of difficulty.

The red pepper trees swayed in the blue sunlight alongside mountain ridges. Yet fields of yellow broom reminded one of Scotland.

When we arrived late in the afternoon at Suzie’s mountain hotel in Monterrey we were tired and exhilarated—and I knew I was just exactly where I was supposed to be. I looked out over the vista below me. Curls of smoke spiraled above mountain huts, the snow-covered Cordillera beckoned in the distance, and the high-altitude stars which I knew to be ridiculously large were waiting to come out and greet us.

Why was I there?

I couldn’t really answer that myself. I just knew something was going to happen to me and that I should be there to let it.

Suzie gave Simo one small guesthouse. I had another. Suzie and her husband, Jorge, lived in the third.

Jorge was a pleasant young man with dark hair and black pools for eyes, contrasting with Suzie’s blond blue-eyed bovineness. They seemed very happy and were swift to understand that I basically wanted to be left alone.

So after unpacking I made my way to the thermal bathhouse, which was a welcome relaxer and I allowed myself to do nothing but simply
be.

Dinner with the four of us in Suzie’s small guesthouse was fresh tomatoes and onions, omelets, and homemade bread. In that altitude a sparse diet is the best. We talked about metaphysics and synchronicity in human lives.

“You can feel when things are meant to be,” said Suzie. “You are meant to be here.”

She and her husband had seen many spacecraft and of course had heard the stories the mountain peasants told of learning from the occupants of the craft. Suzie said she and her husband had a friend who was a close friend of President Alan Garcia. They said Garcia was a student of metaphysics also and in fact was a Mason; which degree of the Masonic lodge she didn’t know.

Sometime that evening after going to bed I began to ruminate on why my spiritual consciousness-raising had begun in Peru. I had been somewhat interested in spiritual matters prior to my trip to this mountainous country, but it was the energy of the Andes that had inspired and moved me in ways that the Himalayas never had.

I remembered again that the Andes were supposed to represent the feminine vibration on the planet earth, and the Himalayas the masculine. Since the feminine vibration was what was finally coming into its own to balance the planet’s preparation for the New Age, perhaps I had simply felt the flow of an energy that coincided with my own.

And now it felt as though I was in the Andes again
to realize something more than I ever had before, so that I could
integrate
it into my daily life. And it had something to do with Gerry. In exactly what way I was not certain.

As I tossed about attempting to sleep, the altitude began to get me again; a rumbling nausea accompanied not only by a dizzying headache, but something else. I had the decided feeling that something or someone was trying to communicate with me. I got up and walked around. I lay down and tossed and turned some more. I wouldn’t allow myself to relax and receive whatever it was that was trying to reach me.

My night did not go well. But that was for the best, too, because it simply lowered my resistance for what was to occur the following day.

Suzie drove Simo and me around the “Lost Horizon” that we felt we had reached.

Above the Santa Valley, overlooking the village of Mantacatto, I felt I should purchase a piece of land with the intention someday in the future of erecting a spiritual center where people from different areas of the world could come and meditate collectively. It was a strong and positive impulse as I looked out over the craggy white-capped range of the Cordillera Blanca. Again I felt the presence of an energy I couldn’t define. Again I couldn’t touch it. Gerry never left my mind, not really. And he had always claimed that
I
was persistent!

We left the mountainside and drove by the landslide site of Yungay. I thought of Vitko’s prediction screen on the spacecraft. He said he had seen, in those three minutes, the immensity and the swiftness of nature’s power. How had the space beings known about it? And why couldn’t they have prevented it if they were so interested in saving the human race? In the face of such catastrophic disaster, with all the personal tragedies involved, it was cold comfort at best to believe that the world’s collective consciousness was responsible. Just as it was
heartbreaking, for those who believe in an exteriorized, loving God, to accept the daily toll of tragedy around them and often in their own personal lives. None of it made sense. Nor could it, until the human race took full responsibility for its own destiny, and included spirituality in that fullness.

   After a lunch of wheat-grass soup and fresh vegetables, Suzie drove us into the mountains. An hour into the trek we came across a turquoise lake nestled silent and floating in its own higher kingdom, surrounded by bodyguards of chiseled beauty. The crisp mountain air brushed through my hair. I walked off by myself. I needed to be alone. I felt the haunting energy again, and then, as I looked up I saw the mountain covered in snow that I had seen in one of Vitko’s pictures. The “reclining Hindu” people called it because that’s what it looked like: a reclining body shrouded in white linen. But in Vitko’s picture a spacecraft had hung above the mountain. As I looked at it now I saw only the meditative splendor of its snowy silence—and surely that miracle of beauty was sufficient.

I walked closer to the mountain, pulling an apple from the pocket of my coat.

This was how it had started for me: gazing at a mountain in the Andes some ten years before. Here in these magnificent heights I had first connected to the untapped stirrings inside me that had longed to be recognized. Waking from the dream sleep of unawareness I had realized that I, and each of us, were more than we seemed to be. The realization had happened in the flash of an instant, although I had heard it as a song in my heart for some time. But here I had listened to its lyrical music. And since then it had never left me. It was there to sustain me through the weathers of misfortune and despair, only to accelerate its sweet vibration whenever I respected its existence. It was God and it was me simultaneously. We were intertwined. I could be whatever I
wanted to be if I trusted that music, that song, that vibration of God that was
inside
of me.

And now as I munched my apple and raised my arms to the mountain wind I could feel myself make contact with another song energy. I sat down and closed my eyes, relaxing to allow whatever was going to happen to flow through me. A bright light began to form in my mind. It grew and expanded until the image and vision of Gerry appeared above me, yet
inside
my mind. I held tight to what I was “seeing,” needing very much to understand what it meant.

Gerry seemed confused and slightly desperate as he hovered in the light. Then he spoke to me.

“I don’t understand what has happened,” he said. “Where am I?”

I hesitated a moment in my mind before answering. He seemed so real, so separate from me. Then, as though speaking in a thought language, I said, “I think you have gone home.”

I could see his face reacting to me so clearly.

“Is this what you were always talking about?” he asked. “Is this what you meant when you said we were souls only living in bodies? And now I have no body?”

I nodded.

“I have been trying to contact you,” he went on. “But you were too busy to hear me. I have been around you for so many days.”

“I know, Gerry,” I said. “I felt you. Why did you do it? Why did you leave now?”

Gerry hovered there as though torn between what he had done and what it would now mean.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not really certain where I am.”

“You are home, Gerry. You are with the light and with that God-energy you didn’t believe in.”

I felt him absorb what I had said. “I needed to hear that again?” he asked.