There are innumerable fascinating games one can play in Sanctuary.

This archaeology game came to me in response to watching Time Team on TV, where people spend three days digging at a time and never find anything of any note.

I got to musing what one might find in the way of interesting archaeological artefacts if one was to dig in Sanctuary and the following pattern and story is the outcome of that.

Archaeology In Sanctuary

As an aside, it is interesting to note that by doing this, we are giving our energy mind an opportunity to present us with some thing it might like us to know about, or think about, or learn about.

This is incredibly ideosyncratic, and in the set up we are asking for an archaeological treasure of course - something of value, something priceless, something very well worth having.

Project Sanctuary Archaeology Exercise

Try this simple Project Sanctuary archaeology exercise:

Take a flight across your own central sanctuary.

Look at the landscape from above, and it may be that you might find a place that looks promising for an archaeological dig.

Land there and look around.

Use a metal detector, a dowsing rod, your intuition, a magic wand or whatever strikes your fancy to find a place where a little digging or the like may produce a find of note, an artefact.

Finding An Artefact

As suggested, I took a flight across my central sanctuary and found myself drawn to what appeared to be a random place in a wide grassland area.

I let my intuition guide me to a place and started to dig, magically of course as I don't want to get sciatica again ;-> 

About three feet down, I found what seemed to be a fistsized lump of something. I got it out, an oval lump of clay and started clearing it.

It revealed inside what at first I thought was a kind of statue, of an owl or something like that, made from gold.

So I took it back to my home to wash it and clean it carefully, and this is what it looked like:

At the top in the rosette is a milky white stone, and the whole thing is made from gold or a gold-looking metal. It is solid and very heavy.

I was quite fascinated with how specific this experience turned out to be and decided to draw the find.

As I was drawing it, I began to understand that I had made an important basic human error in dealing with the artefact.

Of Fried Eggs, Ayurveda & Pattern Recognition

To think that "it looks like an owl" and to interpret the scales as feathers, the pointy thing as a beak, and the whole shape as a representation of an owl is more than misleading.

People do this of course, absolutely and naturally - they can't help it.

In my parent's restaurant, there was a man who ordered two fried eggs but stipulated that "they must NOT, and under no circumstances, look at me from the plate!"

This is a true story. In the kitchen, around the plating up bar, there were myself, my mother and father, two kitchen staff and a waitor, staring at this plate with two fried eggs and trying to arrange it so that it *wouldn't* look as though it was staring at you!

It was impossible.

People were actually saying things like, "From where I'm standing, it is looking at me sarcastically," and "This is creeping me out - it's looking at me accusingly!"

In the end I was dispatched to tell the man that we couldn't do it, and if I could serve the eggs on separate plates instead. He was delighted and came to eat his eggs for many years to come in that fashion.

So we're neurologically wired to read patterns and base things we've never seen before on other things - but that is a really unfortunate turn of events when we are dealing with new things, because we jump to the wrong conclusions. 

As an aside, one of my main objections to Ayurveda is that the metaphors for the energy system are way, way too tightly linked in with the physical systems of a person's body. This radically reduces the scope of what you can do with the energy system, reduces what you can EVER learn about it, and leads oftentimes down the wrong path altogether.

So here was I with my "owl artefact", poodling down the usual path of thinking that it was some sort of a representation of an owl god, a trinket, ornament or something you stick in the coffin of a rich guy for whatever strange reasons.

Slowly it dawned on me, however, that this wasn't anything to do with any owls. I made a "pattern mistake" to think in those terms, just like fried eggs have nothing to do with accusing eyes, either.

If it wasn't an owl, or any being at all dressed up as an owl, then it wouldn't be a statue of an owl god, obviously.

So what is this thing?

Alien Artefact

I picked it up and held it in my hand. It fitted very nicely and like a flash, I understood that it was a DEVICE.

It wasn't some random decoration or object of superstition, but a machine, a construction that served a purpose, that the way it looked was because the purpose demanded it to look like that, that it was functional, rational, logical and entirely other than I had first "thought".

I don't know yet what it does, or even how you're supposed to hold it, how you can switch it on, or if it still works (although I have a feeling that it does!).

Now, we're in a TOTALLY DIFFERENT PLACE with the artefact. Just five minutes ago I thought I knew what it was, a whimsical curiosity and nothing else, and if I had remained in that sad state, I would have put the device on a shelf and forgotten all about it.

Instead, I have a technological machine here, consciously constructed for a PURPOSE by an ancient and as yet unknown civilisation, and essentially a WORLD OF NEW LEARNINGS opens up in an instance.

Wonderful.

Alien technology. 

Now it's getting interesting indeed :-)


SFX 

PS - I painted the NOA and here it is:

The NOA Modern Energy Art Painting by Silvia Hartmann 2009