Machu Pichu, Tibetan Lamas And Parapsychology

I was alone and frustrated with the projection data when I heard this strange sound. My heart skipped a beat. Honestly, I am not the bravest of souls, and I don't feel a wee bit embarrassed to accept that I believe in certain things that science doesn't acknowledge. I often tell myself, that anything and everything that happens has logical reasoning. When one fails to explain an occurrence, either it didn't happen or one missed a detail, or worst still it's the mind playing games! Most of the time this explanation helps me. Other times my friends get a call at the oddest hours precisely after midnight:) or when I am walking towards the empty parking lot at 8 pm in the deserted downtown. Sometimes, I wonder what am I more scared of !?! The predator or the phantom! Well, there's no end to fears.

I visited a Psychic once! One of the many impulsive things that I have done in the 28 years of my existence! it started on a curious note and ended with goosebumps. The psychic seemed to have seen through me. Later I tried to reason it. Did I hear what I wanted to hear? Did I interpret her words as I wanted to interpret them? or did I hear her say things that I subconsciously thought about? Maybe this may be that! There might be a hundred ways to analyze my experience. In fact, I was so shaken that night and so desperate to convince myself that it was silly and superstitious, that I requested two of my friends to visit her. I had to prove that parapsychology is no science. It's just a hypnotic game! Unfortunately, things have happened since as she had predicted, I have been a student of science but sometimes science fails to provide answers. Sometimes I have to question things I have been taught or learned to believe!

Let me now digress to something entirely different -The Tibetan Lamas! Ma once read a Bangla detective story about a mystery in a Tibetan Monastery. I was intrigued by the details about the 200-year-old lama and all the mystical powers that he had. The fact that this 200-year-old man would die and be reborn in a distant land and his followers would begin a quest to find his successor thrilled me. I used to wonder what if it wasn't fiction. What if unknown to the scientific world in some corner of the universe such things happened. From the little that I know, eastern/oriental religions do talk about reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul from the body that you leave on dying to the body you are born into again. Complex but yes, Hindu and Buddhist texts talk about it. Occidental religions, I guess have not professed a lot about rebirths. Hmmm! haven't we heard our grandma say, "Do a bad deed today, and you will be born as a rat in ur next birth" Good karma is the road to nirvana, the end of the rebirth cycle? Interesting stuff, isn't it?

Talk about Digressing from a topic again!!:))...Machu Picchu...or the "lost world" The amazing Inca ruins in Peru (2430m above sea level) It's breathtakingly beautiful, and someday I hope to set foot on that mystery-shrouded land. It's considered one of the architectural wonders of the world and more so because no one knows why this fortification was built and how it was built! The entire citadel is built of stone, precisely cut, and so accurately placed that even a thin metal piece cannot be squeezed between the joints. There is no use of cementing anywhere. The 13th-century fort is still intact! I have been a student of Architecture and the pyramids, the Temple with the musical pillars., the whispering gallery, and many other such wonders never cease to amaze me.

7 years back I had been to Hampi on a college tour, I stood in that dance courtyard and traveled back 500 years to the court of Krishnadevaraya. There were the court dancers, the musicians, and the amazing musical pillars. Yes, I could faintly hear the swaras (notes) when I knocked on the pillars. It was very faint or maybe it was imagination but the feeling that once upon a time it happened for real gave me goosebumps.

Mysteries come in all forms. Some are fictitious while some are facts and some are mere manifestations of our fears or wishes! The curiosity about the unknown spices up our otherwise mundane lives, whether it's the ghost in the attic, the gypsy astrologer, the Buddhist monk, or the Inca architecture. They have all given us a reason to think that perhaps there might be things beyond logic, and deep down I want to believe that there are no answers. It keeps the mystery alive, it keeps the curiosity to know about it alive.  Isn't there an old saying 'No more a mystery becomes history'