Few people in the world realize how much they owe to the ancient people of the Andes. They gave to the world the many varieties of potatoes and corn. Their knowledge of agriculture has never been surpassed. The fine textiles and the beautiful pottery equaled the best that Egypt could offer.
The Incas governed their millions of subjects with firmness and justice under a benevolent system that allowed no one to be hungry or cold.
They had no written language, not even hieroglyphics. What we know about them has had to depend on what they left, aided by the chronicles of the sixteenth century, most written looking upon through european eyes in terms of their history and politics.
This civilization found a perfect way of living in one of the most inaccessible parts of the Andes cordillera, the region lying between the Apu-rimac River and the Uru-bamba River. Two important affluents of the mighty Amazon River. Here they shared their habitat with mighty precipices, passes three miles high, granite canyons more than a mile in depth, glaciers and tropical jungles, as well as with very dangerous rapids.
In spite of these geographical challenges, they were able to build fortresses on top of very high mountains. The religious and military headquarters were placed there. The acclimatization of their bodies were obtained through a very powerful diet using their own agricultural resources.
The royal city of Vilcabamba is one of the great mysteries of the Inca's Empire. Hidden in the mountains is the last great city silently waiting to be found.
Shortly after the invasion of Cuzco, Peru, in 1533, Pizarro placed a young Inca nobleman, on the throne. In 1537, Manco Inca rebelled and fled into the myterious and remote regions of Vilcabamba.
Around 1553, Manco Inca installed his kingdom protected by the mountain of Vilcabamba. After Manco Inca, Sayro Tupac Amaru, and Tupac Tito Cusi resisted the rebellion until 1572.
The Vilcabamba area, and the Spirit Pampa is believed to have been the long-sought "last refuge" of the noble Inca. The royal city was completely lost from the sight of the invaders. It was protected by the remnant of the Empire as a sacred shrine hidden on top of great precipices in a canyon where the secret of its existence was and still is safely buried under the shadow of Machu Picchu Sacred Mountain.
The marvel of this place holds a special beauty in the sublimity of its surroundings. There is nothing in the world that can compare to the character and the mystery of its beauty.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Monday, April 20, 2015
The "SPIRIT" of the "LAND" has a life of its own.
Legendary explorer Christopher Columbus believed that Nature had a power on its own. He wanted to know its secrets and that feeling was the strong force that moved him to spend his whole life sailing in pursuit to discover "a new land." He was a saintly mystic of deep piety with an enigmatic character.
He wrote: "I went to sail over the seas from the most tender age and have continued in a sea life to this day. Whoever gives himself up to this art wants to know the Secrets of Nature here below in this world. I have more than Forty Years that I have been thus engaged. Wherever anyone has sailed, there I have sailed... then ... I ought to be judge as a Captain sent from Spain to the Indies, ... a New World to be found ... a nation with numerous people, with customs and religion all together but very different to ours."
Without forgetting the economic and political motives resulting in the transoceanic expeditions of 15th century Spain, the quality of the encounter of both the Old and the New World was a disastrous event.
The settlers took their arrival in 1492 as TIME ZERO and superimposed their European economy on their own terms without suspecting that in the end this assault to the Laws of Nature, in the future, will result in a catastrophic ecological imbalance.
The Americas were already a land populated by people happily living in harmony with the Laws of Nature. For them to become wise required a personal transformation. The knower and the known became linked in an irreversible way and changed a fundamental way of process information. With this learning process it was possible to know the names, structures and chemical composition of all forms of life residing with them in the same landscape.
Europeans nobles who were the first to come to the New World to settle were educated with sedentary authoritarian social order with relatively autonomous individual man made laws.
Individual land ownership with fixed boundaries replaced flexible communal governance of shifting and seasonal patterns of land use. Exotic agricultural products replace local productivity. Fenced-in imported livestock replaced free-roaming animal life. Linear growth of production and exports replaced the sustainable seasonal round of resource use. Gross National Product replaced ecological sustainability. The Swiss Bank account replaced neighborly sharing, bartering and hospitality. Man made medicine replaced the power of natural healing medicine grown around the landscape in which the natural man set his habitat. Singing inside a shower with perfumed soap replaced praying sessions for hours in a sweat lodge with herbal cleansing made of sage and sweet grass. Global reality now seen in television replaced the natural touch experienced before with the interrelation between man and its landscape.
Knowledge now is seen as something that can be purchased and accumulated by almost anyone if they have the resources to acquire it. But this type of learning process lack its spiritual and emotional facts that are described as tacit, empathic or analog knowledge, and it can only be learnt through non- verbally direct experience using all of our senses: the whole of our being.
Our brains do not accumulate information in a digital form, but rather by growing new synapses. Since the wiring of the brain grows more dense and complex until we are quite old, the learning process is mainly by forming more associations, and co-processing more sensory inputs. Although language and mathematics are powerful tools for modeling the world around us, our ability to think consciously in words and symbols is only a small part of our processing capacity.
The fact that RELIGION was and it is still been in the service of life to the whole natural people of the Americas make them a better source of knowledge about everything. They still seek a better aligment to the cosmos so that the world might continue. In contrast to this reality is the fact that we live in an age and culture that does not grant equal weight to human responsibilities, neglecting our obligations to the Laws of Nature. Our religion separates us from the land, which enable us to pray for ourselves while at the same time we decline our responsibility for the care of the earth that actually feed us. Our potential threat is the assumption that the resources of Nature are endlessly and expansive.
Where do we go from here? Is the Spirit of Nature a commodity belonging to us or slave to us or it is an entity possessing its own life in which we are a very small part of its community?
More than five hundred years have passed since the first european settlers arrived to the Americas. The effect is being proved by the severity of the climatic chaos. The land of the Americas survived catastrophic events but the lives of its inhabitants was preserved for thousands and thousands of years because everyone found its place in the harmony demanded by the Laws of Nature. Still the remnant of these people maintain their ceremonies that symbolizes LIFE as a SPIRIT that makes its journey in which there is a mystery beyond every door. The outside world can see it but they remain blind but in time they may come to understand that the SPIRIT of the LAND has a LIFE of its own.
He wrote: "I went to sail over the seas from the most tender age and have continued in a sea life to this day. Whoever gives himself up to this art wants to know the Secrets of Nature here below in this world. I have more than Forty Years that I have been thus engaged. Wherever anyone has sailed, there I have sailed... then ... I ought to be judge as a Captain sent from Spain to the Indies, ... a New World to be found ... a nation with numerous people, with customs and religion all together but very different to ours."
Without forgetting the economic and political motives resulting in the transoceanic expeditions of 15th century Spain, the quality of the encounter of both the Old and the New World was a disastrous event.
The settlers took their arrival in 1492 as TIME ZERO and superimposed their European economy on their own terms without suspecting that in the end this assault to the Laws of Nature, in the future, will result in a catastrophic ecological imbalance.
The Americas were already a land populated by people happily living in harmony with the Laws of Nature. For them to become wise required a personal transformation. The knower and the known became linked in an irreversible way and changed a fundamental way of process information. With this learning process it was possible to know the names, structures and chemical composition of all forms of life residing with them in the same landscape.
Europeans nobles who were the first to come to the New World to settle were educated with sedentary authoritarian social order with relatively autonomous individual man made laws.
Individual land ownership with fixed boundaries replaced flexible communal governance of shifting and seasonal patterns of land use. Exotic agricultural products replace local productivity. Fenced-in imported livestock replaced free-roaming animal life. Linear growth of production and exports replaced the sustainable seasonal round of resource use. Gross National Product replaced ecological sustainability. The Swiss Bank account replaced neighborly sharing, bartering and hospitality. Man made medicine replaced the power of natural healing medicine grown around the landscape in which the natural man set his habitat. Singing inside a shower with perfumed soap replaced praying sessions for hours in a sweat lodge with herbal cleansing made of sage and sweet grass. Global reality now seen in television replaced the natural touch experienced before with the interrelation between man and its landscape.
Knowledge now is seen as something that can be purchased and accumulated by almost anyone if they have the resources to acquire it. But this type of learning process lack its spiritual and emotional facts that are described as tacit, empathic or analog knowledge, and it can only be learnt through non- verbally direct experience using all of our senses: the whole of our being.
Our brains do not accumulate information in a digital form, but rather by growing new synapses. Since the wiring of the brain grows more dense and complex until we are quite old, the learning process is mainly by forming more associations, and co-processing more sensory inputs. Although language and mathematics are powerful tools for modeling the world around us, our ability to think consciously in words and symbols is only a small part of our processing capacity.
The fact that RELIGION was and it is still been in the service of life to the whole natural people of the Americas make them a better source of knowledge about everything. They still seek a better aligment to the cosmos so that the world might continue. In contrast to this reality is the fact that we live in an age and culture that does not grant equal weight to human responsibilities, neglecting our obligations to the Laws of Nature. Our religion separates us from the land, which enable us to pray for ourselves while at the same time we decline our responsibility for the care of the earth that actually feed us. Our potential threat is the assumption that the resources of Nature are endlessly and expansive.
Where do we go from here? Is the Spirit of Nature a commodity belonging to us or slave to us or it is an entity possessing its own life in which we are a very small part of its community?
More than five hundred years have passed since the first european settlers arrived to the Americas. The effect is being proved by the severity of the climatic chaos. The land of the Americas survived catastrophic events but the lives of its inhabitants was preserved for thousands and thousands of years because everyone found its place in the harmony demanded by the Laws of Nature. Still the remnant of these people maintain their ceremonies that symbolizes LIFE as a SPIRIT that makes its journey in which there is a mystery beyond every door. The outside world can see it but they remain blind but in time they may come to understand that the SPIRIT of the LAND has a LIFE of its own.
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