With the consent of Venexia Editrice, we publish almost entirely chapter 8 of John Mack's book "Passport to the Cosmos" (Italian translation: "Passport to the Cosmos"), focusing on the bizarre experiences of some Brazilian Amazonian tribes in recent decades and their connection with ancient legends and folkloric traditions.
di John Mack
Taken from "Passport to the cosmos", chap. 8
Cover image: Pablo Amaringo, Waves of Ayahuasca
When you come from everything and nothing, there is no time or space. It's like trying to adjust to a new level.
(Bernardo Peixoto, May 10, 1998)
Origins and education: building a bridge between two worlds
Bernardo Peixoto is a shaman and anthropologist, born into a half Brazilian and half Portuguese family. He works at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where he teaches individual and group lessons on the culture of native South Americans, with particular attention to plants with therapeutic virtues. [...] When we met, in 1996, Bernardo was fifty years old and had just returned from an experience, dating back to two years earlier, which had radically changed his perception of himself and of life and which I will briefly describe in the course of the chapter .
Introducing us were Nona and Carol who, after attending the lessons held by Bernardo in November 1996, on the occasion of the Whole Life Expo from Boston, they thought it would be a good idea to let us meet. Peixoto is an important mediator, committed to ferrying the knowledge of his people in North American white culture and, at the same time, an advocate of the defense and progress of Brazilian indigenous communities, which risk being wiped out by the destruction of their native lands.
Bernardo was born in the small tribe of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, in the state of ParΓ‘, in northern Brazil, a short distance from the border with Venezuela. Given the small size of his tribe, he was sent by Ipixuma, an indigenous community much larger than his, to also learn their traditions and legends. Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau literally means "People of the stars" and, according to the legend that is handed down orally (the tribe does not know writing and does not measure time mathematically), "a long time ago", a huskerah, something from heaven that makes no sound and is not a bird, landed in the Amazon basin, ei makuras, little creatures from heaven, luminescent and with big eyes, taught the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau how to plant seeds and grow corn.
Bernardo claims that some representations of these aircraft and their occupants are engraved on the walls of the Brazilian caves, also called atojars, a term that can mean both "entities from heaven" and "possessors of a wisdom so great that it cannot be of this Earth". Bernard explains that, for his people, these creatures are physical embodiments of the Great Spirit. This is the only way the natives have to understand certain matters. Legend has it that the Great Spirit, after creation, said to his heavenly creatures: βYour task here is finished. I need you elsewhere β, and the atojars they left the Earth. A bit like the Christians, who await the second advent of Christ, also the tribe of Bernard await the return of the star people.
Bernardo's mother was an Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, while her father was a Portuguese Catholic. When her mother introduced him to the elders of her tribe, they told her that the child had special gifts and would become a shaman. They taught him everything a medicine man must know, especially with regard to sacred plants and medicinal herbs. In the Peixoto tribe, shamans work only with "luminous" or therapeutic forces, unlike sorcerers, who can practice rituals aimed at harming people. (In the culture of Credo Mutwa this distinction does not exist and the shamanic and witchcraft functions can be embodied by the same individual.) initiation tests to which Bernard had to undergo, there was that of lying on a carpet sprinkled with honey and swarming with large carnivorous ants which, of course, bit him until he was reduced to tears. By the end of the test, his entire body was swollen, including his penis and testicles. His goal was to test his resistance to pain.
Bernard was a double source of pride for his mother. First, the woman considered it her blessing to have given birth to a son who was destined to become one shaman, and she never stopped thanking the Great Spirit for the privilege granted her. Second, he considered it fortunate that Bernard was half white, as his people believed that one day white men would come to respect the natives and their traditions.
[...]
Bernardo, UFOs and ikuyas
Bernard explains that, among his people, the invisible can become visible and entities residing in the spirit realm can take physical form and appear to human beings. It is only through these incarnations that it is possible for us to perceive and understand the Great Spirit. As a child, Bernard heard the elders of the tribe speak of little men from another kingdom and called curipiras. They were also part of their people ikuyas, spirits that can appear in our world in human form. The term ikuya it was considered so sacred that it could only be pronounced in the presence of trusted people.
From his descriptions, the ikuyas they would look very similar to little ones gray aliens encountered by the experts of Western societies. But Bernardo, as well Mutwa Credo, distinguishes one from the other and has little esteem for the latter, which tend to cause havoc and are less evolved than ikuyas. The gray aliens are responsible for the fertilization of human women and the creation of hybrids, and meeting them can be a very traumatic experience. In his opinion, however, even these creatures can transform themselves into beings of light. Conversely, as we saw in the previous chapter, the ikuyas can manifest in the form of animals.
In May 1998 I invited Bernardo Peixoto to attend the conference "Star Wisdom" PEER, which brought together Western scientists, indigenous healers, ufologists and experts. The night before the conference, Bernardo and I were having dinner with some experienced Americans. I noticed that he spoke little and seemed quite nervous. Later, he confirmed to me that the presence of all those abductees had put him in great agitation, bringing back to his memory one of his encounters with him and the fear of the unknown that that experience had inspired him. The next day, during my speech at the conference, Bernard saw me surrounded by a luminous halo and understood that "they" were present. The next day we talked for five hours.
[...]
He first explained that sightings of unidentified flying objects are quite frequent in his homeland. Sometimes UFOs are silent, other times their appearance is accompanied by a hum or a high-pitched, insistent rumble. Many shamans claim to have talked to entities from heaven and rumors are circulating that strange women lead people into the woods to show them where plants with particular virtues grow. Bernard himself saw with his own eyes large spheres of blue light darting across the sky or floating slowly on the surface of the water or above the treetops. They give off such an intense light that girls prefer not to bathe naked at night, for fear of being surprised by that light. Locals believe those lights are spirits of the forest and it is said that at the point where the RΓo Negro and the RΓo delle Amazoni meet there is a clearing with a deep cavity from which the spheres of light emerge.
As soon as he began to tell me about his encounter with humanoids, Bernard began to feel restless and had to shake my hand to feel "connected". Various figures, he said, not too tall, but with particularly long arms and wearing shimmering robes, suddenly appeared on the other side of the Irunduba River. They seemed surrounded by an aura or a capsule of pure light, which isolated them from the surrounding environment. Their bodies, however, had a physical texture of their own and seemed to move in slow motion, which scared him greatly. They had a greyish complexion and a triangular-shaped face, with a pointed chin, "like lizards". Her eyes were "really huge," black and slightly slanted, and she seemed to be able to see in the dark. Bernard could not clearly distinguish the shape of the nose and mouth, which must have been small in size. Despite their "strange" appearance, they did not look "aggressive".
It seemed to him that one of the humanoids performed the function of "explorer", another that of "engineer" and that a third party was interested in establishing contact with him. βHe was the one predisposed to delivering messages, and when he reached out to me, I felt one indescribable force of attraction". In one numbness, Bernard began to ford the river to join them. Arriving on the opposite bank, he followed them into the heart of the forest. He had his camera around his neck, as if he were a tourist on a trip.
Bernard asked the creatures where they came from and their answer left him dumbfounded: "We don't come from anywhere", they told him. And he thought that if they weren't from somewhere, it had to be "Because they were everywhere". At this thought, it seemed to him that "a million molecules were disintegrating" inside him, as a demonstration that "we too do not come from anywhere". What worried him, too, was the tribal belief that his people were descended from humanoid creatures from the stars. But these entities, who were everywhere and nowhere at the same time, didn't seem to have much to do with the "men of the stars". [in the sense of the members of the tribe of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, which literally means βmen of the starsβ, ed].
Over time, Bernard went on to discover that The ikuyas they were direct messengers of the Great Spirit, sent among men to allow us to "get in touch with an energy otherwise too powerful for us". They appear to us in the form of humanoids because "the great spirits know that we are able to understand things only through the outer form". And he became convinced that every culture has its messengers and intermediaries, necessary to connect human beings with divine energies. After this meeting, Bernard began to suspect that the idea of ββentities from the stars was mostly metaphorical, and this discovery had serious repercussions on his conception of the world. βNow I'm confused,β he confided to me. βI have many closed doors in front of me, waiting to be opened, and I don't know what I will find beyond the threshold. No placeβ¦ But how can nothing be explained? There is no way to do it. "
After meeting the humanoids, Bernard remembers spending many hours in the forest, tired, disoriented and drenched to the bone, since it had started raining in the meantime. Not knowing exactly where he was, he somehow managed to find the river, crossed it, and finally, at 11:00 pm, returned to his hut.
The village elders were not surprised when they heard his story: "They are called ikuyas and sometimes we also talk to each other ", they told him. They always knew of their existence and claimed that these creatures had cared for them for millennia. To prove this to him, they took him to a sacred cave. Inside it was dark but, by the light of the torches, Bernard could see graffiti dating back hundreds if not thousands of years earlier, which represented figures very similar to ikuyas. βThey manifest themselves in different formsβ, they explained to him, βas in the case of blue light spheres floating above the forest". Not even his wife, who is of Peruvian origin, was surprised by the story: those entities, in fact, were well known on the highlands of Peru. At the end of our interview, I had the impression that Bernard had had other experiences with the "humanoids" and that he was not yet ready to talk about them. Anyway he said to me: "I don't know if I'll see them again tonight, tomorrow or in two months, but as soon as that happens I'll come and tell them."
Between two perspectives: reaching unity
For Bernard it was not easy to reconcile his indigenous and shamanic identity with his Western studies. βI can't find points of contact between the two,β he told me during our long interview. This disagreement, which became even more irreconcilable after his meeting with the ikuyas, deepened further with our analysis of what happened. As a shaman, Bernard was sure of himself and his own healing practices and he felt comfortable dealing with spirits familiar both to him and to his community. His vast linguistic knowledge allowed him to operate as a medicine man among different populations and his legendary origin from the people of the stars was based on a tradition well rooted in his tribe, comparing him with concrete entities, provided with forms known to him .
The meeting with the ikuyas dealt a severe blow to his worldview, frightened him, and led him at the edge of the unknown. By addressing me, he hoped that I could help him understand the multiple implications of that experience and piece together his shattered identity. The indigenous community had accepted without too much effort the story of his encounters. βNo one in my tribe had anything to say,β he told me. His people, in fact, were used to interacting daily with invisible entities, at least to us Westerners. But his white relatives, of European origin, reacted to his story by mocking him. His daughter-in-law, for example, began to call him "my alien son-in-law". βI don't like being made fun of,β he told me. On the other hand, when he "stepped into their shoes", that experience also seemed "anomalous" to him, to the point that she went so far as to tell me: "Sometimes I wonder if I'm not going crazy".
The meeting by the river raised complex and not easy to solve questions. In a world made up of places, images and concrete forms, the idea of ββdescending from creatures from the stars did not generate particular difficulties. But how he could have explained to his he people the concept of entities that exist everywhere and nowhere and from which perhaps we all we descend? Not to mention that their existence seemed to unfold beyond any idea of ββtime and distance. These were questions that not even his physical readings had been able to answer. Bernardo, moreover, was troubled by the powers acquired following his meeting, which had nothing to do with his shamanic experience. In addition, his body was filled with new and tumultuous energies, never experienced before. "I feel charged with excessive energy, like a shell about to explode", he told me.
To allow him to bridge the internal division that was tearing him apart and to assign the right meaning to his encounter with the ikuyas, I subjected him to some relaxation exercises that induced him into a light trance state. Bernard met again in the familiar places of the Amazon rainforest, in the company of his mother and other natives. His heart was divided between two worlds and that conflict was expressed in a lacerating physical pain, "because it is in the body", he said, "that resides the soul". In his altered state of consciousness, he felt he was "pure essence" and had the feeling that death did not exist. Just like the ikuyas, he managed to be "everywhere and nowhere". Even knowing that he did not find manifestation in his daily life, the realm perceived in a state of trance seemed to him "completely real".
At the end of the session, he said: "I feel better, as if I have discharged an accumulation of energy that is oppressing my body." More importantly, he felt a greater balance between his indigenous identity and his white ancestry, and said he was ready to "assimilate that extraordinary experience [his encounter with the ikuyas] in his daily life "and to" adapt to the new reality ". It was the first time, she said, that she had really opened her heart to anyone. But the "proximity of the unknown" continued to inspire fears. Faced with the existence of beings "beyond all possible understanding", who came out of nowhere and present everywhere, and from which we probably all descend, he said he felt "like a small child who has not yet learned to walk well" .
Protect the Amazon rainforest and its inhabitants: spread the prophecy
Following his meeting (or his meetings), Bernard was actively engaged in the defense of his people and the lands that belong to them. βPeople keep dying, wiped out,β he says. There destruction of Pachamama, Mother Earth, caused by industrialization, intensive farming and ecotourism, breaks an infinite number of lives. The fires started by farmers in order to obtain grazing areas are spreading like wildfire, as a result of uncontrolled deforestation. Thousands of animals are slaughtered every day without mercy. Bernardo saw hundreds of dead crocodiles floating in the river, killed by Japanese, American and German tourists who sailed armed with rifles with telescopic sights. They shoot animals of all kinds and then pose in a photograph with their prey. But as an intermediary between whites and indigenous people, Bernard recognizes that he has a political and social role that goes beyond the confines of his community. All his efforts are aimed at arresting the environmental devastation, recalling individuals to their essential relationship with heaven and earth and raising national and international public opinion on the risks that threaten the Amazon rainforest.
[...]
In 1997, Bernardo undertook an arduous journey, between dense vegetation and difficult to navigate canals, to reach the remote tribe of Krenacroro, who lived in peace along the upper reaches of the river. The Krenacroro, unlike the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, were unfamiliar with the star people and flying saucers. A woman of the tribe had presented herself to her hut at the end of a three-day journey and she, handing him the small gifts that she had brought as a gift, she had told him: βWe know that her people are descended from the stars. Can you come to us tomorrow? β. She explained that, in the last few days, many villagers had seen objects in the sky, she understood luminous spheres of various colors, A huge penisbialpa (that is, βsomething that exists but is not knownβ) e strange creatures that seemed to walk along the banks of the river without putting their feet on the ground. These facts had sown terror among his people.
[...]
Eventually he decided to go. An acquaintance of his offered to accompany him to take pictures and write a report, but Bernard refused, telling him that the Krenacroro did not like receiving visits from white men, and he left alone. The journey was long and tiring and forced him to cross the territory of the Yanomami, famous for their ferocity, but in the end he reached his destination safe and sound. Eighty-three villagers, including children of five or six and very old elderly, told him more or less the same story. "Your people are coming," they told him, knowing the legend of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau about the men of the stars. They believed that the spheres of light were apus, deities or spirits of the forest. A man took him in a canoe to the spot on the river where he had seen a penisbialpa bright, many times larger than his hut and with a myriad of "fireflies" laid on the bottom, which seemed to possess unimaginable strength. The object had approached him and all of a sudden he had vanished into thin air, without making the slightest noise. Seized by terror, the man had hidden under the leaves and had not been able to sleep for three consecutive days.
A woman and a child told him they had seen a man who did not speak with them eyes as large as those of a "giant owl" and skin of a color never seen before. Despite their fear, the Krenacroro had felt that these creatures emanated love. When Bernard explained to them what he knew about it, the villagers seemed to understand and felt reassured. βI saw them appeased and I know they are fine now. They live in peace and everything is going well, βhe told me. However, the thought that this sighting might be the first in a series of contacts that would end up harming the tribe continued to worry him over time. Gilberto Macuxi, chief of another tribe, was upset when he learned of Peixoto's trip: βNow there is another man who knows. And the next one? Who could he be? βHe commented.
The meeting with the ikuyas it broadened Bernard's horizons of conscience and forced him to rethink his tasks and objectives. - ikuyas, he says, they are closer to the Great Spirit than we are, they are his "messengers," and their erratic nature reflects his immeasurable essence. Like Yahweh in the Bible, the energy of the Great Spirit is too high "to be grasped by men," and the messengers, like the angels of the Christian tradition, are sent to Earth to make it accessible to us. The ikuyas they come to visit us "because they know that we are destroying life on this planet and, loving us, they do not want to see us die". They come and go, he explains, they manifest themselves in forms that are familiar to us and, at times, they come into contact with someone, "but they don't want to force us to do anything". Like others apus, so do the ikuyas they belong to another level of reality and give us their wisdom, teaching us above all to recognize the bond that binds us to each other and to the Earth. Their intent is to make us understand that βwe are only a small part of the wholeβ.
Bernard places the arrival of the ikuyas , end of the sixth pachacuti, that is the interval of five hundred years which, according to a prophecy widely spread in South America, marks the epochs of humanity, and which is currently drawing to a close. The new era we are about to enter will see the fall of all the obstacles that currently prevent renewal and will know no limits of time and space. βThe eagle and the condor will fly side by side,β says Bernard. The condor is a bird of the South, native to the Andes; it has an "environmentalist" spirit and cleans the soil of carcasses. The eagle is native to the North, it is a fearsome predator and, until today, it has tried to impose its dominion also in the South. The condor represents the wisdom of the South and the eagle the strength of the North: the time has come that ally and learn from each other.
Bernardo has the impression that Westerners are opening up more and more to the knowledge of "the other world" and imagines the collapse of the barriers that separate peoples, "so that there will no longer be any difference between an indigenous man and a medical doctor. Washington". Considers it important that whoever had interdimensional encounters share them with other experiencers, because you know how painful it can be to carry their weight in solitude. Being able to talk to others, knowing that you are understood, brings great relief to those who have gone through difficult experiences. It is also certain that the more men move away from "great power," the more ikuyas they will intensify their visits to Earth.
Bernardo told me that he had dedicated his entire life to studying the languages ββspoken by the many Brazilian tribes. But the meeting with the ikuyas made him understand that "we are one", there is no distinction between us, because "For those who come from nowhere and are everywhere there are no distances, no limits of space and time". And he added: βWe will have to learn to adapt to a new levelβ, perhaps thinking of a new social order that we could define as βtranstribalβ. Shamans who, like Bernardo Peixoto, changed their perspectives after the encounter with humanoids tend to interpret their role in broader terms and work to find points of contact between the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples and the new challenges launched by the contemporary society. Once Bernard asked the ikuyas because they had such big eyes: βTo see more than you see,β one of them replied. βWe have to learn to see through their eyes,β Bernardo warns us.
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