Leaps of Consciousness

I used to be an atheist, that there is no God or Great Spirit and that life had no purpose.

I became an atheist on my nearly three-year round-the-world motorcycle trip. I’m in Peru going south.

"Yungay is a small town eight miles southeast of Caraz. Gene Savoy, the American explorer who discovered the ‘city‘ of Gran Vilaya near Chachapoyas in northern Peru, settled with his family here in 1962. He likely inspired the film character of Indiana Jones.

The town has a tragic past. On 31 May 1970, an earthquake triggered a massive landslide from Huascarán Norte, Peru’s highest mountain. Estimates put the ‘piece’ that broke off at half a mile wide and over a mile long – big enough to be a mountain anywhere else. The mountainside plummeted towards Yungay. Many people were inside watching an international football match on television.

Three minutes later, it tore through the town at about 120 mph and buried everything under 30 feet of rock and rubble. Twenty-five thousand men, women and children were killed, including Savoy’s three-year-old son, Jamil. Following the tragedy, Savoy, a profoundly religious man, came to believe that his son's birth had been the second coming of Christ. This concept formed the core of his numerous religious books, writings, and church doctrines, and he founded a New Age Christian church with himself as minister.

The only survivors were the children who happened to be at the football stadium watching a circus and those people who were at or who managed to get up to the town’s graveyard in time. The site has since been declared a national cemetery. Only the old church tower was rebuilt; the ‘new’ Yungay was reconstructed a few miles away.

Under a pure blue sky, I walked through lines of stones laid out to mark the streets. Former houses are now simple gardens filled with thousands of red and yellow roses which swayed gently in the breeze. Relatives erected memorials where whole families were killed. Four palm trees protruded through the rubble in the Plaza de Armas, but only one was still alive.

On a small hill above town, a giant white statue of Christ stood on a blue globe with his right foot pointing to South America. His outstretched arms were open towards the murderous mountain. It made me angry. How could anyone believe in the goodness and benevolence of a deity after the death of twenty-five thousand innocent people?

In the complete silence, amid the scent of beautiful flowers beneath the towering mass of Huascarán, I imagined the sounds of laughter and bustle of a busy town, the noise of children playing in the streets. Then, the sudden avalanche of destruction seconds later. I crossed a small stream that gurgled and rippled down the hill and bent to smell a red rose. The sweet scent made the tragedy even more unbearable. Suddenly, overwhelmed by grief and sadness, a lump formed in my throat and tears rolled down my cheeks."

Four months later in Argentina, I had an out-of-body experience at 80 mph in Patagonia.