Create your own reality - be harmless. La Grotte de Rouffignac

"Perfect stillness is not the human’s natural state. It’s a gift, given yet earned, from the same source as peace. On one level it’s a withdrawal from activity, but on another it’s an engagement with all that is.
"For everyone different issues emerge every hour of the day: the active person responds with further activity – thereby ensuring a karmatic sequel: the peaceable person first examines whether hir involvement is desirable.
"A person who looks only at exteriors decides whether to become involved on the basis of what is attractive: but you must look at the heart, and offer only what help is appropriate to the heart.
"The world grows & unfolds throu each person. Let yours be a balanced contribution, that best moves forwards the interconnected situations of which you are the centre.
"What to do when someone means you harm? Best is to walk away rather than compound the other’s negativity. Have you been wronged, or cheated of money? Your currency allows you to gain what the cheat loses. Not all rich people are cheats, but don’t envy their physical comfort. You already have, if you choose to claim it, far greater assurance than the rich ever acquire. If you continue to be preoccupied by earth matters, you’ll never grow to Heaven.
You can create your own reality. You can create peace or war; greed or cooperation; excess, sufficiency or revival – choose which world you wish to inhabit."

> Right at the point where the publisher had pulled out of my fledgling magazine CataList & given me the whole set-up, & I was mulling over whether I should /could continue, my wife was designing a production of Purcell's The Fairy Queen at Aix-en-Provence. So I & the family went there & then holidayed in a cottage on the Loire. During this latter period I took myself off for a day alone.
> I let myself drift & ended up at the Grotte de Rouffignac. This is a 'throat' opening from the underworld, a natural cave which descends slowly over about a km. The floor is formed of petrified mud from the first ice age, & is cratered by mammoth hibernation pods (as shown).
> In 1956 animal carvings were discovered at the extremity of the cave in a space where the 'tongue' of rock-like mud almost reaches the roof. Now, after substantial excavation one can stand & view these carvings (which are by no means as clear the photo suggests) spread out randomly all over the roof. Parties descend in a little electric train, which takes about 20'. Banal as this might seem, nothing can detract from the numen of the place.
> For me, alone in a throng of holiday-makers, this was as profound a spiritual experience as it must have been for those who made the perilous descent over the vertiginous floor in total darkness millennia previously. It must then have taken a good day each way & I cannot believe they would have had a means of sustaining light. My sense was that the descent & carving could have been a rite of passage for young men in which they attuned to /at-one-d with the spirit of their prey. Led by elders, whose knowledge of a safe route over the pothole-strewn floor must have been a source of authority, they would have arrived at the end & as part of some arduous ceremony someone would have created one of these extraordinarily realistic images of their 'life source' lying flat on his back in a claustrophobic opening barely large enough to wield the graving tool – which, the 'graduates' would have been invited in singly to trace with their fingers & engage with some mystical act of union before returning to the light as 'made men' of the tribe.
> When I came out blinking & transformed after just an hour, my car had been broken into & my beloved Minolta stolen. The police caught the thief, who was without a car to leave the remote hillside!! It turned out that he had only been released from prison the day before, & so I had to spend the afternoon in a Gendarmerie filling out forms while they gloated on their success … tho I never got my camera back.