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Stranded on Earth

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Chapter 16

Back to Peyreblanque

We suspect that, this evening in Peyreblanque, they spent a lot of time in explanations. Brigitte starts exclaiming «But I'm in Peyreblanque! It's incredible!» Which immediately attracts everyone's attention: She did not arrived here in a normal way!

She first refuses to explain her presence in this place, but the others insist, intrigued by her curious behaviour.

In the end, she accept to tell, happy to find people to confide in. And then, deep down, she should have thought about it earlier: she has nothing to reproach to the people of Peyreblanque; she has no reason not to trust them: all the elements against them came to her through Frédérique, and only through him... She finally understands the strange prevention they had towards him: they already knew him! No sooner had she left Yanathor, than his last words were brilliantly confirmed: there were still Frederique's ideas in her head. Maybe this is the only reason why they brought her back here.

It therefore is a warm and healthy trust which takes again its rightful place between her and her friends, without any need for a single word to be said about this dispelled muddling!

Smiles and congratulations give way to sustained attention as she starts to tell her story.

Gerard, Hélène, Yolande, Marc, as well as Anita and Simone, who went down here in the meanwhile, look at her, astonished, collected and overexcited in the same time. Brigitte quickly understands that for them, this adventure, much more than an extraordinary discovery, is above all a consecration. After all these years of training in a spiritual life, without any tangible «return», they are happy as children to finally find a confirmation of their hopes, of their vision of the world, an encouragement to persevere in the path of the Good!

They are so absorbed that the delicious soup has cooled down. Gerard is the first to comment on the strange event.

«The dark side of the Moon? Have you ever seen pictures of it?

- No, or vaguely. I don't remember the details.»

He slips away for a while and comes back with pictures. He spreads them out on the table in front of Brigitte; all of them depicting grey, heavily cratered continents.

«No, not that one. This one looks like it, but... No. That one does not. Yes, this one, here. I am sure, everything I saw just now is as if etched in my memory. This big dark crater is typical!

- Mare Moskova. You have shown the right one. The others are from Mercury or Callisto. This really is the dark side of the moon. But how did you...

- The most extraordinary thing in your story, Brigitte, is the manipulation of time.

- What do you mean, time manipulation?

- Well, the hour you say you spent in the UFO did not happened on Earth.

- Ah! (Laughs)

- Well, no, since the sun was setting here when you arrived, just as it was in your home too. Even with the slight difference of time zone, this cannot be more than five minutes, instead of an hour. Maybe you even got here before you left home!

- ...

- ...

- It's pretty classical in UFO stories about time shifts. Look at Corporal Valdez in Chile... His beard had grown, and his watch had advanced three days, the time he was in the UFO, while his soldiers only saw him absent for fifteen minutes. That is strong, indeed.

- That this makes us think about the nature of space and time. I mean, for me, I don't really see...

- In any case, it is reassuring to know that mankind is guarded and watched, so that it doesn't do too much harm.

- Yes, but that doesn't mean we don't have to evolve on our own. They can't do it for us.

- They will still stop us from destroying the planet!

- Oh, I am not sure of that. The death of a planet may not weigh much in the cosmic balance. What matters most is evolution. If the best way to speed up our evolution is to let us screw it up, well... We are the ones who wanted it that way.

- Who do we testify to?

- The gendarmerie, of course. Their mission is to investigate UFO cases.

- No, I don't want to.

- You don't want to?

- No, I am... I am... It is like a shame. I don't feel like telling everybody about it. «They» did not asked me to do so. I do not want to go through psychiatric examination or cross-interrogation. For me, it is part of my inner life, it is its logical thread. How can I talk about my inner life to people who even not have any? They would never understand!

- Hmm. Yeah, I guess you are right. This is tricky.

- You are not the only one. When I was a student I had a friend who saw a light in the sky, when she was about to commit suicide. For her it was a sign, and she regained her taste for life because of it. But she does not want to talk about it at all, even to her relatives.

- Besides, «them» themselves don't show up so much anymore. There are far fewer cases.

- Maybe there are many more, but few know about them.

- More, I don't think so. Less, much less, but much better targeted. They don't try to show up any more, like ten or twenty years ago, when they used to do ostentatious carousels over Washington.

- Their goal at that time was to make the masses aware of a cosmic opening. And they've done that, as far as it was possible to do it without disrupting everything down here.

- They don't necessarily have to show up to do their job.

- So the UFOs are gone... Mission accomplished.»

Despite the overexcitement of the unexpected return in such unusual conditions, the evening ends quietly at about ten o'clock.

Let us note, friend reader, that these words were uttered a little before the Belgian wave of the years 1990-92. As what, with UFOs, nothing is ever established in a sure way...

The next day Brigitte rediscovers the children, Fabien and Joël, who grew well during this time, and took who a little bit of self-confidence, who a little bit of maturity. But by mutual agreement, our friends do not tell them about what happened to Brigitte, because, being very talkative, they would go and repeat everything. Nobody in Peyreblanque wants to draw attention to the mas, especially after the incredible slanders which circulated about them in the region. Were they not accused of making sacrifices? For animal rights activists, that is a bit harsh...

Gerard has already made good progress in his temple, with the help of Mark and the three women, who are not awkward either. At Peyreblanque, everybody is working.

The temple is not distinguishable, from outside, from the other old buildings of the farmhouse. The stone walls of the old barn had been pierced with large windows, all in height, a bit like the bays of cathedrals. The roof has been redone in the style of the region. But the interior is so different! In the square building there is a large circular room, tangent to each side of the square in the middle. This is naturally where the four windows had been placed. This way the round part fits into the square as well as possible.

«It was your idea, Brigitte, remember!

- Yes, but it is better done than I thought.» Gerard is currently finishing a false dome ceiling, which required cutting all the aerated concrete blocks. The scaffolding still occupies the interior, it is now used for plastering and painting. In spite of this cumbersome item, we already feel wonderfully comfortable in the large round room. A square room is like a box, closed. In a circle, the subtle but indispensable air of the Spirit circulates, the walls are no longer limits. They create a place open to unlimited space.

Clever indirect lighting slots are provided, as well as speakers integrated into the wall, almost invisible, and also a warm air heating system.

The four corners are occupied by an entrance hall, a storeroom, a crypt and the large stove. As the temple occupies the two floors, four more corners are available above, which will be converted into small rooms, accessible from the outside by various stairs from neighbouring buildings.

Brigitte in the same time is excited of seeing this beautiful building, while regretting that it is not yet finished.

«I would have finished it, but because of Frédérique we had to spend a lot of time in the notary's paperwork, untangling all his mess.

- Frédérique? What happened?

- Well, it is just that... Oh, well, normally we agreed not to tell you, since you were with him. But now that you understand...»

Brigitte feels how relieved Gerard is, to finally getting out everything he has on his heart! He hastily spills his story:

«Frédérique, this is the biggest blunder of my life. At first, I believed in him, just like you did. I was his disciple, almost. Oh, he knows a lot of stuff, he went to India, Nepal, California... He was super in. But, um... How do I explain this? The spirituality in him is only superficial. Deep down inside he is not spiritual at all. It is his egocentricity which seized the whole spiritualist discourse, playing this half-master figure, without any real background. But I was a beginner, I believed him. Like you believed him, like many others he fooled and made suffer.

«Yeah, it turns out that at the beginning of Peyreblanque, we were just Hélène, me, and Simone who was just born. No way we were staying with our baby in the city, poor thing. We had not a lot of money, and Hélène sold our house, which she took from her family, so she could buy a farm, and I quit the job. The beginnings in Peyreblanque were hard, no money, just family allowances! We didn't eat any fat, and the little organic food we could find was kept for the children.

«We had not enough money from Hélène's house, so Frédérique helped us to buy Peyreblanque with money he had from who knows where. We bought Peyreblanque together, in JOINT OWNERSHIP! Ah, I thought it was a good formula to avoid personal ownership, but ouiche! It is even worse as a system, we actually end up with several owners, with the sum of the disadvantages, without any of the advantages of the collective! And when the Frédérique started doing wrong with Hélène, we had to realize that he was rotten at heart! He even went after Simone, so you understand why she knows about the problem, the kid, and she runs off to her room every time he comes along. (Friend readers, today paedophilia can be denounced easily. But by the time of this story, often it was the child who had to bear the blame. This is why nobody denounced Frédérique) You see, me, his stories of bio-energy, of sexual energy, I understood it from a mystical angle, as a way to rise, by living our sexuality normally. But in Frédérique's case, it was more of a pretext to bamboozle others into his fantasies. I had to throw him out! At the time, I would have simply smashed his face, but as he was also the owner, it was quite a war... Fortunately, it seems that in the village they did not realized what was going on, because otherwise, I don't tell you, the scavengers would have come, trying to take Peyreblanque, which has always been an object of covetousness, because of the spring, you understand.»

«But he had a lot of bucks, Frédérique!

- We never saw him lacking money. He even bought a lot of stuff for Martine when they got together, right after you left.

- But he always told me he was broke!

- Well, one more or less lie, to pump up your savings, so that you would not cost him too much. Probably he plays the stock exchange, or some other shady trick to get a lot of money fast. But to him, you were just a toy, like Aline, who attempted suicide three months after he dumped her, or like Cheryl who ran away from his home shortly before he met you...

- !

- Yeah, this is how he is like, poor guy. He wanders, he flutters from woman to woman, incapable of true love. With Martine, it is more serious, he found a woman like him, as much scheming and manipulative. No doubt they have plans, and now they have the money to carry them out.

«Yeah, it was really an ambiguous situation as far as I can see! We had to tolerate him at the farmhouse, and with the visitors we were already receiving at that time, it was a real mess. Luckily, Marc and Yolande came along in the meantime. They already had their idea about the Frédérique, because he already had screwed them too. But I was very surprised. They knew how to deal with him. They are more accomplished than me, you guess. They took him in a more subtle way. Basically, stubborn guys, if you know how to handle them, they are the ones you can most easily lead by the nose.

«So, first arrangement, they managed to get him to agree to share the estate without selling the whole thing. It was just a stopgap, because then we lose all the fields on the other side of the road, down there. A farmhouse without fields, what does it look like? You guess, it is because we were only two, we could not cultivate them, but I intend to start working on them when I have finished the temple. Frédérique also kept the clear rocky flat where we used to meditate, which gave its name to the farmhouse. Peyra blanqua: the white stone. What a symbol, a name like that!

«He also kept the house where you lived with him, in the village, which we had bought with the farmhouse, but we don't bother with that one.

«No, but you get the picture. Us the farmhouse, with half a hectare of garden, that is nothing, and him the fields, which he never did anything about, by the way. Frédérique, the biggest bramble grower in the department! Not to mention that the estate developers... Oh, they always are on the lookout, these guys. There was a tourist mega development project, with golf, swimming pool, tennis courts, lazy bums bearers, slakers pullers, butt scrapers with microprocessor and so on. They even made a model, I saw it, even that it had the Peyreblanque mas on it, with «the luminous smile of the locals» written on it! No, but I swear! And all this on Frédérique's fields. Why he would not sell these fields, that he would never have cultivated? Luckily, he can't stand the estate developers either. It is strange, despite all the harm he did, even with him there is, deep down, something pro-life. So there was a sort of tacit reconciliation between us, on their backs. Fortunately, otherwise, with such a mess right next to our centre, we would just had to leave. They tried to contact Frédérique, who threw them out. Scavengers, I tell you. What saved the day was the source. They needed it. They came here, asking for it. The poor blokes, they stumbled on me, I'm not telling you how I received them! I'm telling you, they ran out. They will remember it, the smiles of the locals. I remember, there was one so fat, he couldn't run, he would have lost his belly.

«But they went to bother all the administrations, the town hall, the sous-prefecture, the prefecture, all the deputies, the minister, the regional council, the equipment, the hygiene, the DASS, the army, the parish, the synagogue, so much asking them all for the permission to expropriate the spring, they would have ended up getting it, with everybody tired of them.

«Martine, when she arrived in Peyreblanque, she started with going to tell the village about us, that we were sectarian, intolerant, that we exploited children, etc. Luckily in the village they are used to hearing this stuff all the time. They end up laughing about it. It even was the mayor who told us everything! One day, Frédérique came, he even not told us that you left his house, and he departed with Martine. Phew, we said to ourselves: Godspeed. But we could not get rid of her that easily: she would come up to Peyreblanque unexpectedly, saying we had swindled Frédérique, etc. What hard times! Scavengers on one side, traitors on the other, and you disappeared! Dead maybe, we were wondering. With all these suicides in the fake spiritual, we were afraid for you.

«Luckily, three months ago, Marc and Yolande sold their house in town. Not without regrets, by the way, because it was nice. But how to do otherwise, there was a bypass project next door, they had better to get out before it became an hell. Everyone told them no no no no that it is not a nuisance, but still they lost out on the price because of it.

«This is where it went great: Yolande went to find the Martine, and offered her to buy the fields. No, not even that: she let her come up with the idea herself. When Martine saw the tingling bucks, she melted, became all smiles, all nice. «Money is energy, it's an energy, money, you have to be realistic, you have to live with the times» she chuckled. To her, it certainly gave her energy! The fields, she didn't give a damn about them. She is not a worker, her. Already, when we asked her to do some gardening here, she called us exploiters, slave-drivers! What do you want, she is a daughter of rich people, used since childhood to servants and all the paraphernalia of the bourgeoisie. She got a heck of a handicap from this! A dead weight for society! Ah, except for her weaving, were she is going full steam ahead, and it must be said that she makes pretty clothes, very New Age. Go figure out something!

«They quickly concluded the sale, because Yolande is spiritual, you see, but that doesn't mean she has her two feet in the same shoe. Oh, she is smart, I did not knew her like that. So Mark and Yolande bought back the fields from Frédérique, but in their name! No sooner had they declared at the registration, than the estate developers came along in our home! OOAAAH the fun we had! Ah, she did not beat them up, her. Very correct, very nice. She did not answered no right away: she started by telling them all about Human's place in the universe, and our loving bond with the Earth which belongs to all humans of good will. In the meantime, you can imagine that Mark... He recorded everything on the tape recorder! OH LALA what a cracker when they made us listen to the tape! The guys, at first, they said «but yes, of course, we're in complete agreement, we can get along» but the more she spoke, the more they panicked, they brought out their credits, their land development, their «realism» and all their filth, and Yolande who, always very kindly, told them that the money system was an egocentric neurosis, and that staying in it was infantile, utopian, passé, irrational! In the end they ran away even faster than when I was chasing them!

«And the end of the end, now what are we going to do about it? We are going to bring the two plots of land together in a civil society, which it will rent to an association we have started to create, which will be responsible for choosing possible new participants in the society. That way it is almost impossible for a member of the society to destroy it. Well, it is not the Divine Law at all, to lock up our ideal in this kind of legal status, but it is the best way we found to guarantee Peyreblanque against all these kinds of stories while getting out of individual ownership.

«In any case now our situation vis-à-vis of Frédérique is clearer, we do not anymore need to be accommodating with him, like when you first came. He and Martine are forbidden in Peyreblanque now. Without us having to tell them, by the way!

«And then, Brigitte... You came back. That's a beautiful gift... from Heavens, that's right to say... Come let me give you a kiss!»

Over the next few days, Brigitte rediscovered with delight the life in Peyreblanque, whom she had stupidly abandoned for Frédérique. Once again, she feels good. She knows what to do. Even if she does not precisely have a personal goal or project (her mission?) there is enough work and ideals at Peyreblanque to satisfy more people than the farmhouse could accommodate.

So, like three years ago, she looks after the garden, consciously and poetically cooks food, teaches the children, helps Gerard at the temple. What a sweet life!

Simone is also starting to look like a young lady now. How she changed! She engages in college, but is still in her parent's home. It is amazing, in this world of assisted and followers, to see her organize her own studies, program and schedule. She studies maths and physics, and she is passionate about this. All this work does not prevent her from painting a beautiful nature. Brigitte is happy to see a synthesis of the past achievements, science, technology, and of the awareness of the future, art, poetry. She has seen so many truncated pseudo-ecologists makig the mistake of declaring that all the evil comes from science! At least Simone will not be a compartmentalized specialist.

Fabien and Joël (now 7 and 9 years old) have become calmer; they too are studying, and Simone doesn't hesitate to guide them through what she has just gone through. It is almost as if the three children were progressing together. In the end, they spend relatively little time on their studies, while still achieving honest results. Why then do almost all children waste their youth sitting in boring rooms? What a waste of new life in this world!

One of the small floors under the roof of the farmhouse is used as a painting workshop, where Hélène and Yolande now regularly come to create for a better world. Little by little the mas is adorned with paintings full of light, smiles and cheerful colours. Simone also frequents this place, and her gouaches, although still childish in some ways, now have a beautiful colourful ardour.

The children's dome is still there, but it now looks very small to them. Gerard had promised to make a bigger one for them, when he will have finished the temple. Brigitte notices, moved, that this marvellous little construction, even decrepit, would hardly stand out in Yanathor's ship. It was indeed the fruit of a good intuition.

In spite of this new-found happiness, Brigitte only stays for some weeks at Peyreblanque. She goes back home to settle her affairs, to finish one or two paintings. She will go back again, part of the time, to paint, to meditate. But now the center of her life will be in Peyreblanque.

She arrives home, a little worried because she had left without seriously closing the house. A gendarmerie car... Explanation: her father had come unexpectedly, and, not finding her, had panicked and made her search everywhere, so far that a photo was put in the local newspaper. It took several hours of talking to get the story straightened out. Brigitte refrained this time again from telling her father that he would have to admit that she was an adult. But he still get the remark, by the gendarmes...

Even so, the gendarmes question Brigitte, as if randomly chatting. Fortunately they are far from suspecting what really happened. She was at Peyreblanque, that's all. Nobody in the village knew anything either. Especially not this retired worker from the SNCF, who from her window saw Brigitte climbing with Yanathor. She wants to end her days in peace.

Ah, there are fewer and fewer UFO sightings...

Is it so surprising, when we know how they were received?

This is the way life is, which has nothing to do with any official vision drifting somewhere, far from reality...

Brigitte now feels strong and sure of herself. As promised, she can perfectly remember the sweet moments spent in the ship, with all their emotional intensity. She does not miss to meditate on every sentence she heard, on every thought she picked up. She even goes so far as to paint on the wall of her sanctuary, in barely visible mauve pastel, a rounded door silhouette, like one of those marvellous magic doors of the ship. We never know...

But now, the little house, which she still loves, seems very cold to her, especially in this season of short days. So a phone call to Marc, who just happened to be passing by, and there she is again in Peyreblanque.

What a sweet period of happiness for Brigitte.

She is getting back to her habits of spiritual work on herself. The best moment for that is when she prepares her meals. Just like she used to do in the time she was with her parents. Frédérique had broken this routine, just as he was breaking everything. So it is good to find it again.

It is, say, ten o'clock. Brigitte arrives in the kitchen, perfectly tidy (not always, but never mind) What is planned? How many shall we be? Boards with dry-erase markers, oval surrounded with flowers, are there to record this kind of information, plus the virtue of the day, astronomical phenomena, visits, shopping, etc... These arrangements are Yolande's work, which her mysticism does not prevent from being organized and rational. The others watched her do it, and approved, not by compliments, but by using the tables. It was the right way to recognize her, to accept and appreciate her Service at its right value.

Gathering the ingredients. A vegetable? (They have a lot of big, colourful Japanese squash this year) But what a beautiful, sweet smelling vegetable! You have to start cutting it, and don't forget to heat up the water for a cereal. What a pleasant work to handle this living matter, with its varied flavours and delicate translucent structures!

Prepare a sauce.

There, the vegetables are peeled, we light the fire under the big pot. A sponge on the work table, which is clean and new as on its first day. It is time to prepare the cereal. What a marvel all these little grains which bring life! How beautiful to see them roll in your hand! It almost is a shame to eat them!

While all this is heating up, we take a little trip to the garden to look for carrots, parsley, and a beetroot. We pull on the leaves, and the big orange root comes out... Oh! There was this beautiful thing in the brown earth? A garden is really a magical place, where transformations and transmutations take place, that no chemical industry will ever be able to achieve. Entering, peelings, straw, droppings... Sun, air, water... a bit of elbow grease, and out of it come good vegetables, delicious strawberries dripping with prana. What a feat. The Earth is the only noble thing...

When we come back from the garden, with our cold hands, everything is simmering deliciously. It is time to set the table. The beautiful stoneware plates (which for a long time were the only luxury of Peyreblanque, but Gerard was fond of them), the spoons, the dishes where the raw vegetables are artistically arranged. O cuisine, ephemeral art, but that we love to renew indefinitely!

Aromatics with poetic names: cumin, coriander, tarragon, laurel, rosemary, thyme... Bowls, also in stoneware, for black olives, green sauce, gomasio, yeast... plus one of raw sauerkraut, a tangy delight at the beginning of the winter meal, alone or mixed with grated carrots. They never cook it.

At last, everybody is coming. The moment of the meal is a joyful reunion, because normally everyone goes about his or her business in different rooms of this farmhouse so big that we can easily believe that we are alone.

At Peyreblanque, they avoid talking too much during meals, and only about pleasant subjects. They tell each other what they have done, sometimes they walked through the farmhouse to see. So in principle everything is fine.

In principle, because obviously there is no lack of problems. Hélène often messes things up, shuffles things around, only to complain that she can't find anything. Gerard is still a bit stiff on certain details of meal preparation. Even Marc gets angry from time to time. Yolande does not work so much... But, on the whole, Brigitte finds them all improved, since she knew them three years ago. Ah, if only all Earthlings were progressing at such a pace!

If the method is slow, it is effective and without surprises. Despite the fatigue of her Frédériquesque period, Brigitte easily finds back the reflexes she had started to acquire. And if there is a problem, they talk. They put everything on the table. Oh it is not always easy, and often it is tempting to justify oneself, to blame everything on others. Especially since it is not always easy to find out who is really causing a problem.

Yolande has been professing for twenty years that perfection lies dormant in every human being. But few manage to manifest it; because it is smothered by defects, conditioning, calculations and selfish interests... Little by little, we need to do the house cleansing, and to light the Sacred Fire which is only asking for that. The method? Not to cling to what is wrong, and, through patient meditation, always to return to the light. Of course, a thousand times we fall back, but always we must get up again. Patiently. And so we move forward, slowly but surely.

However, this method is not perfect. For the good reason that there is no perfect method. This is why Gerard came with his own.

 

«Our faults? He repeats to whoever wants to hear him. It is easy to say, «We see the straw in our neighbour's eye and not the beam in our own». But you have to understand why. It is like driving a car: there always is a blind spot, and sometimes you crash because of it. The worst is when we don't think at the blind spot: we do not see it any more, and the eye reconstitutes a continuous image of the landscape, where only the beam is missing, sorry the other car, which is coming along for us to ram into it. The point is that, it is because we are inside our car that we cannot see the beam. The guy who watches us make a parallel parking from the top of a building, he can easily criticize us and see the slightest straw. In life, it is the same thing. There often are aspects of our personality that we do not see, sometimes we do not even suspect their existence, while for others they are obvious. So mishaps and problems fall on us without us understanding why. It is because their cause is in the blind spot.

«There are many parts of us that we may not be aware of: egocentricity, qualities, defects, sensations, desires, aspirations, emotions, thinking methods... It is incredibly rich, a human being, even the most banal one! If you still have blind spots, and if there are faults or problems in them, therefore you don't measure them, you may not even notice them. Me, I must have a blind spot in terms of poetry, aesthetics. Until I can capture that myself, I rely on Hélène. And I have never regretted it. There not necessarily are flaws in the blind spot. Me, I don't get poetry, but at least I am healthy, I am not attracted to dirty stuff like it is fashionable now. So I always manage, on this point, to accept Hélène's advice without difficulty. We helped each other, each looking into the other's blind spot to help moving forward together. I even owe her a lot: I could have turned into a tramp without her. She was demanding, but it was for my own good.

«It wasn't easy at first. When Simone was born, and Hélène came back home from the clinic, she had been in there for two weeks, clean and tidy, but she came home, I had stayed all that time without cleaning, without changing clothes or anything, so she was furious, she screamed, would scratch me.... At first I answered her in the same tone, but in the evening I saw her with the baby, and she was crying... And the girl was looking at me... It is strange, the first time, when you find yourself with a child... Who depends on you for everything. You feel responsible... I never dared say anything to Hélène, apologize or anything like that, but I realized I had to change my way of doing things. That change had to be my main life focus! It was Baby Simone's serious look which gave me the energy to do that. Luckily.

«On the other hand, I have a defect which took me a long time to understand: what Yolande calls intellectual stiffness. Please understand, I am a rational, orderly person, I like to know exactly what is going on in the field where I work, to have precise, exact knowledge. These are very good qualities, good instruments in the symphony of life. But their caricature is dogmatism, coldness, sclerosis, which make them ugly blunders, out of rhythm. To remain in Harmony, in the right divine tone, we need to balance these qualities with Sensitivity, artistic sense, flexibility. Because life, by definition, is not rational. Now I am doing Yolande's exercises to correct this; and they all tell me that I am making progress. But me I can't see anything, ha ha ha ha!

«Our couple, Hélène and me, according to psychologists, was absolutely not viable. Too different. A year they gave us. Indeed, it started going bad long before that. We spoke about splitting up... Hard, because she was like my second skin, and on her side she had found through my ideas a meaning to her life. And crack, she got pregnant. A child without a family, horror! No way for that. So we clung in there. We tried to understand why things weren't working out, we made an effort to understand and respect each other. Efforts which no longer are efforts today. And this is the result. In the end, it is good that we were so different, we made much more progress than if we had the same defects to hide together. If we had been psychological, we would have lasted less than one year, the psychos were right. But our fortitude allowed us to observe all this sickly psychology, to understand it, and to thwart it. Our free will allowed us to overcome our conditioning, to free ourselves from the tyranny of emotions and prejudices. This also gave us more strength of character. And, despite all the disputes, we were much happier that way.

«It was a very enriching experience, because this is how I came to understand why people can't see their faults.

«First of all, there is ignorance. Every human being is at a certain level. There are some who are still in the prelogical stage. They are animals in a human body, robots with feelings. Without having developed the intellect to observe their feelings and find the source of their feelings, the later fall on them like hail on turnips. They suffer without knowing, and blindly carry out the orders of their emotions, even absurd ones, even against their interests. They say «they want» and «they think», but they do not even realize that these only are electrical impulses in their brains which make them find pleasant to say or to think this or that, even if it is silly. If these emotions are unhealthy, it leads to fanatics, bandits, fascists. Even if they are acceptable, they are not less uncontrolled. This results in people who are sometimes very nice, but who evolve very slowly. They are mired in life, mired in situations. The word «freedom» has no meaning for them, since they are subjected to what they are, and never chose it. Even if they are nice, their uncontrolled sentimentality can push them to do bad things.

- Like Frédérique... Comments Brigitte.

- Ah him, that's another problem. He knows he is hurting, but he doesn't care.

«So when you start to evolve by awakening the intellect or the heart, the matter is not to develop one by suffocating the other. Either way it will fail. And yet we almost all make that mistake. We are familiar with one of the two areas, so we get involved in it, further aggravating the imbalance. The other is still obscure: the blind spot, the dead angle... It is scary. If we have any flaw in that blind spot... For example, intellectuals are often fooled by the coherence of their reasoning. But all logical reasoning always starts from undemonstrable starting points, given by intuition or by observation. The pure intellectualist is incapable of going out of his vision to give it more sensitive, more real, more humane bases. He does not have the sense of truth to show him how far he has strayed from life. For the sentimentalist, it is basically the same problem, but instead of finding an opinion «logical», he will have a pleasant feeling about it, and therefore he will hold it as real, without any real basis in fact, since he does not know why he finds it pleasant. He is fooled by egocentrism, desires, flattery, gratuities, unconscious conditioning... The sentimentalist is also quite dogmatic and stiff in his own way, with exactly the same disastrous consequences as for the intellectualist.

«What makes me laugh, for example, are all these guys who go to war against science, against computers or against maths, attributing to them the origin of all evil. This is sentimental dogmatism. And they come up with arguments, which are often relevant, but which only serve to justify afterward a pre-existing opinion which only originates in fear of an area they have poorly mastered. Intellectuals are the same, with their hatred of spirituality, of goodness, of naivety, their panicking fear of all what is gratuitous, uncalculated, and all their dogmas that we constantly get our feet tangled up in. Even doing maths like my kids were asked to do, it is useful for training in deductive reasoning, it is useful for understanding oneself. Except that you can imagine a world without computers, but not a world without Poetry.

«Beware, then, of school without Poetry!

«As we evolve, we control our feelings. This doesn't mean that we smother them, but that by discovering their sources and their effects, we can escape their grip, so that we can finally live our true sentimentality freely, without breaking our lives every week. We also control our intellect. This does not mean that we occult it, but that we put its logic and coherence at the service of Wisdom, of Compassion to others, on the right bases given by Sensitivity and Intuition. Feelings can only be purified if the intellect can look at them, and intuition can only be right if the feelings are pure. Thus we can only advance by making the two fields work together, by harmonising them. Only when this is done can we go towards the spiritual.

«The second reason why we do not see our faults is of course pride. Quite simply. It is already often painful, by itself, to recognize our faults. But pride gets involved, too. It does not want us to tell others what is in the blind spot, and even though everyone would know, it does not want us to know. Pride has a sickly ownership instinct: OUR opinions, even false, OUR feelings, even rotten, OUR clan, OUR problems, OUR flaws! Beware who attacks them! It prevents us from turning our eyes to the blind spot to really see what is in there. While knowing very well, by the way, what there is.

- Like Frédérique, Brigitte does again.

- Yeah. Now you're right.

«Often humans who are prisoners of pride and who, because of that, struggle with their emotional or relationship problems, make me think of them as if they were in a prison with only three walls, open at the back. They are there clinging to the front bars, begging for help, but if you tell them to turn around to get out, they insult you and say it is your fault that they are there. That's how stupid it is to be proud.

 

«Pride is the primitive self-centered ego which feels threatened. It is the reptile in us, the dinosaur, the monster which shoots at anything moving, friend or foe. The egocentre feels threatened a priori by everything that is not ITSELF, good or bad no matter what. So it refuses everything that can put ITS image at risk, even if it is a question of recognizing a personality defect to to remedy it. In short, it rejects even the doctor who could relieve it. It is the main obstacle to our fulfilment. It is the one which prevents us from delving into our shadowy areas to understand what is going on, even if it costs us a lifetime of misfortune. It makes us find justifications, pretexts, and excuses for not eliminating our defects. It would like us to drag them all to Nirvana, in a huge bag. But this is not possible. It is too heavy. We have to abandon them, and to do that we have to start by accepting to look them in the face, to be able to identify them as such. This automatically deflates them, and they lose little by little their power to manipulate us. And pride itself is a feeling like any other, just as easy to observe and to thwart.

«Pride may come from an attempt to compensate for a lack of recognition by the group. In order to function properly, every human being needs to be recognized by his peers, to be accepted by them, in a way involving him in his survival, in his life, in what he has deepest. If we recognize someone in this way, we can make him infinitely happy and allow him to open out all his riches, this is the most beautiful secret of Love. If we are not recognized by any one around us, then we have no more energy, we are chronically tired, and nervous breakdown and suicide await. But to recognize the other too much is flattery, while not enough is rejection. These are two vices which deeply distort the social interactions, which completely disrupt the energetic functioning of the victims, but also of the perpetrators.

«The recognition of the other is a considerable force, often more powerful than material gestures, which can be put to good or to bad use. This is undoubtedly what the sages of old called magic, but it has been made into absurd stories so that people do not understand how they are manipulated. Magic is group rituals where this energy is distributed. Whether it is in an esoteric group, an Indian tribe, a thug clan or a business board, the principle is exactly the same, only the symbols of recognition change. Even rationalist technocrats do magic, with their suit-and-tie rituals, appointment, titanium ashtrays... They are recognized by society, by their entourage. They have the energy, they are self-confident, they are obeyed, they are courted, even if they are bad tempered. If they are on the side of the road with a flat tire, they are taken care of, whereas you or I have to manage to be on time at work anyway. Once the Gallic chieftain wore a bronze shield; today the notary's son has a carbon fibre tennis racket. In the past animals were sacrificed for the harvests; today it is virgin nature which is sacrificed for industrialization. In the past, the lords ruled the land; today, technocrats and bureaucrats decide everything without any control. Magic works on simple people. And it is so easy to misuse it... What manipulative power! What terrible inertia to oppose to all social progress!

- That's Frédérique, Brigitte comments again.

- Ah, him. It is true what you say, but remember what Yanathor asked you...

- Oh, he... That I must forgive him. Hmm...

- Yeah... You shall not be truly free of him until you're completely free of hatred towards him. And he needs it so badly too, anyway.

- I, uh... (Clears throat) It is gonna take me a while.

- Yeah, I know, until the negative energies he had stirred up in you cool down. It is not easy, but it is something you have to go through anyway. I have to forgive him too, by the way... Ah, if I had Yanathor to kick my ass!»

Gérard goes on explaining: «Working in a group is very good for seeing where we are, how we are actually able to behave. But in the end only us can eliminate our defects, and only if we agree to look at them, to consider them. No group can do the job for us. The main difficulty when we work in a group is to find out who is causing a problem. Well, this is neither to judge nor to punish, but it is very important in a group to know who is the cause of a problem, because only this person can really solve it. The slightest pride, the slightest guilt feeling, and that person gets the whole group stuck. The slightest judgment of the group, and the person becomes defensive and can no longer be communicated with.

«If two people have the same dark area, they will clan together against the others, instead of helping each other to find the problem. Or they will argue and suffer together without understanding why. If the dark areas are different, each one will see only the faults of the other, not his own. And they will reject on each other the responsibility for their disagreement. This is why so many groups or couples break up, each member with his or her own coherent and logical story about what happened. And each one interprets what happened according to the only part of reality that he has been willing to see, and can therefore only assume that the other has suddenly gone mad for some mysterious reason. There is no solution to these problems which does not require sincerity with oneself.

«We were in the latter case with Helen: each of us saw the other's faults but not his own. You know, here, in the beginning, it was hard, between us two, we would probably separate several times if it had not been for Simone. She was embarrassed by my intellectual stiffness, but as she herself was rather intellectualophobic, uncomfortable in this area, she only knew to get angry about it, dualistically rejecting all my intellectual life as well as intellectualism. I found myself forced to defend myself from her, when her perception should have been a help for me. She called me an engineer, a foreman or other such niceties, but I did not see how that was a reproach, since organisation and technology are just as much a part of the Human as anything else. Since I also like these areas, I felt denied in my deepest being, in my personality. I felt it in the work, I hesitated to undertake building works, I saw myself confined into washing dishes and diapers, while the roofs were leaking on the rotting frames. What a sad time! We have been through a lot, I tell you! Now you see why I want to smack the crap out of all those idiots who say, «This is a fake paradise, free from real problems!»

«On her side, she was messy. Oh, my God, how I cursed her! So many hours spent looking for things she had scattered! She could not understand that storage is a matter of logic, so that utensils can be easily found without having to remember by heart the exact place of each of the innumerable trinkets there can be in a house. The buttons with the socks, the noodles with the herbs, the suribachi among the towels and its pestle with the nutcracker, and of course she could never remember where she had put all this stuff. I'm not telling you the spats we had. Actually, she was storing things, but more by style, by what they looked like. I didn't realize that until recently, and she never told me... Because she was doing it without understanding the importance of it. Because she was not using her intellect, that's why. I had to lend her mine, in a sort, so that she could understand herself.

 

«For years we quarrelled because of these stories, which all are rather secondary, but which constantly broke the rhythm of life. We kept blaming each other. I only understood it thanks to Yolande, who spoke me about intellectual stiffness, while approving warmly (This is the detail which changes everything!) my inclination towards the technical field. She even asked me about the planets, about masonry... And she started to do it too! It gave her roots, as she says, and a deeper, more solid happiness, to her who had lived only in books and who did even not know how to plant a cabbage.

«For Hélène, it was a bit harder, because her dark area (intellectophobia) was wider. Oh, she is not to get out of it in just some months, but at least now she knows. Originally there was a failure in maths. What do you want, poor thing, she had to do her homework after cooking and washing dishes, with the father who used to make the TV bawl, when he was not plain drunk... And the slaps fell... So she kept an inferiority complex. Especially since she was brought down and devalued at school, instead of helping her. You know, maths is the weapon of social selection, the fetish of the West, and even if you want to be a nurse or a gardener, you will soon need a degree in maths. What a pity for such an exciting science! As for devaluing a child, I find it a crime, a rape, in the strong sense of the word, like sexual rape, and it leaves even more serious after-effects. So much, that it is still difficult for Hélène to make a simple logical reasoning. It is not that she cannot, but she has a blockage. She feels like as she was wading in shame, with screams and blows threatening. Yolande found a clever trick: she told her to go and learn arithmetic with Simone. With the kid, no more judgment, no more complexes, no more phobias. And it works.

«A few weeks ago, Hélène told me that it was a great joy for her to be able to bring her child what herself was not lucky enough to develop. Isn't it beautiful to hear things like that?

«Well, Hélène is not going to devote herself to maths, she made other life choices. But she agreed to try and to understand «my» working principles, and beyond that to respect my own life orientation. Phew! What a weight fell off our shoulders that day!

«This is how I understood her own way of tidying up... Ah, we had a good laugh that day. And we agreed. We put in the storeroom all the odd utensils, all the thingies, gizmos and contraptions that we use every day without noticing how awful they look. And we made sure that the storage was both logical AND poetic: the kitchen is a sort of composition, a bouquet, we have assorted the utensils, the boxes for the condiments... Which we always put in the same place. The aspect corresponds with the category of use, and we even put names or drawings to help to remember. Well, we still sometimes dispute a bit because of the old reflexes which take a long time to fade, but the result is there: all the visitors tell us that our storage is great, beautiful and practical. And we do not get angry as often.

«Don't mistake, if you see us relatively in Harmony today, it did not just fall out from the sky. Sometimes, there are people coming in Peyreblanque to tell us that we have no merit, with our gentle characters, we never had any trouble getting along. That's nonsense. On the contrary, to get at this point, we had to fight hard, to strive, to tackle our problems inch per inch, to keep a constant vigilance, especially towards what could come from ourselves. The very first thing, when we want to evolve, is TO WANT IT. And to be ready to do the right thing. Without this will of Good, without this Sacred Fire, there is nothing to expect from life.

«Knowing who is causing a problem is important. It is common sense to apply the remedy to the cause, not besides it. It is only the person who is at the origin of a problem who can remove it from his or her personality, and nobody else. It cannot work any other way. With Hélène, if we succeeded despite the difficulties, it is because we both wanted to move forward. And each of us had his own work to do, and we both agreed to do it. If only one of us had tried to justify himself or herself, to duck, to blame everything on the other, we would have failed. Both of us.

«This is why, at Peyreblanque, we sometimes bear a lot from difficult but promising visitors, while others who are too uptight get fired right away, for some apparently benign reason. But if, when faced with a person who is causing problems, we go to court, or threaten reprisals, then the person defends himself or herself and we lose contact with him or her. If you want to help someone, you have to love them, give them the energy to work on them. Problems must be approached in a benevolent way, without getting into the calamitous sentimentality of conflicts, judgment, revenge.

«Still, if we want to help people with serious problems, like old friends of mine with a centre for drug addicts, then we have to preserve a personal space where their problems cannot harm us.

«Also, you cannot take responsibility for others. Other people criticize us. Sometimes these criticisms are well-founded, and therefore very helpful to us. But nine-tenths of the criticisms we may receive from others are pure projections which are totally unconnected to who we really are. There are some, so as not to question themselves, they exhaust you, they psychoanalyze you for years, to find in you the root of their own problems. The guy who really understood one of your faults, often he does not dare to tell you. If he tries, even when he is angry, he will not sue you, he will not cut off your energy, he will not devalue you. People who are always smiling and always honeyed, who pose as superior, as wise, they have nothing to tell you, but their own stories. It is very dangerous to listen to them, to inferiorize, to feel guilty, to devalue ourselves. You get all your life energy drained out of you. Worse, these people can make you fail on your life choice, make you miss your incarnation.

«Finally, even if the essentials of life are simple enough for a chickadee to understand, we need a little bit of judgment, a little bit of intellect. Otherwise we think we are moving forward, when in reality we are clinging to a big psychological problem, like a goat after her stake. I am telling you this about the intellect, it is because of the fashion today for anti-intellectualism. Every year, during the teachings, there are people who come along and make speeches against the intellect, who would like to suppress it, replace it with instinct, or I don't know what. Well, I tell you: there are no worse intellectuals than anti-intellectualists. Stuffed with dogmas and prejudices that they are. Just that they do not see that they are dogmas and prejudices, because they seem to go towards «nature», towards «ecology». If we continue to let the ecological movement be invaded by anti-intellectualists or anti-spiritualists, we risk ending up with a green inquisition, against spirituality, or against science. Everybody, science, ecology, spirituality must unite to reject dogmatism, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism.»

Gerard finally inquired:

«Do you understand, Brigitte?

- Uh, yes, it is exciting, but not always easy to grasp the nuances. Whatever, I am not an intellectual.»

Gerard mimes a huge sigh of discouragement... And they laugh together at this repartee. She starts again:

«Seriously: I agree that there should be a certain temperance, that we should never be too deep into something and close ourselves off from everything else. The middle way, in a short.

- It depends, says Gérard. If you say «there ALWAYS is a middle way», it still is pushing something to the extreme. Sometimes you need extremes: For example, between Good and Evil, there cannot be a middle way, by definition, otherwise it would be too easy. In that case, even if Good is an extreme, it is the only one that we must choose, without compromise, and the middle way law does not apply. There are cases where the Middle Way law tempers itself, and lets extremes go by, you know?»

And he scoots away, with a smirk on his face, on this joke that, he is sure, would have puzzled Lao Tzu himself.

One fine February day, several small events in Peyreblanque's life happened simultaneously.

The four founders returned from the city, from a meeting with their notary's for the constitution of the civil society which will ensure the durability of the centre of Peyreblanque, beyond personal vicissitudes, against any legal threat. Gérard also brings back the paint and various accessories he was missing to finish his dome. Which, four days later, has a tangible consequence. He takes out of the future temple a whole series of copiously crusted rafters and planks: the scaffolding. But it is only four more days later that the first visits take place.

Apart from the floor still in cement, the temple is almost finished. They were used to this low room, cluttered with posts, under the dark planks. To discover it suddenly clear and high gives them an enthusiastic shock: How beautiful it is! The irregular white of the walls has given way to a velvety light purple which seems immaterial, the high ribbed windows have a little cathedral-like air, with their clean, pure and rounded lines... The domed ceiling, which Gerard has patiently polished and painted, looks like a sky, a magnificent consecration of a long and painstaking work! He is the first to marvel at it! Brigitte is also moved, what she contemplates now looks so much like the marvellous ship of Orgon and Yerda. How could Gerard, who has never seen it before, have guessed...? They all draw from the same universal source of inspiration...

The children comment warmly. Yolande put herself in a lotus, on a small carpet so as not to get cement dust. Marc, Gérard and Hélène discuss technique, then without transition feel the subtle and ethereal vibrations of the place. In her heart of hearts, Hélène realizes that her man really has talent, and that he owes it to his method, to his precision. She is about to congratulate «the foreman», but refrains in extremis from pronouncing this word, for fear of reopenind old wounds. There is nothing stiff about this architecture: the protruding corners of the windows and doors have been carefully rounded, and the shadows clinging to them are blurred, in immaterial shades. This is the influence of Yolande, which Gérard has willingly accepted, and even integrated. Seen up close, curiously, the plaster of the walls is not rigorously smooth, fine spatula marks are clearly visible. But as they are arranged at random during the work, while being distributed homogeneously, they contribute to give a richness, a warmth to the material...

Anita is away visiting her family. Brigitte then realizes that she knows her very little, that she hardly ever spoke to her. Anita is indeed very discreet, but suddenly at this very moment her presence is missing. She is like one of those sympathetic strings on which the musician does not play, but which give the instrument its timbre, its warmth and its life... Without her, Peyreblanque would not be so much Peyreblanque. Thanks to her very silence, to her approving smile, she brings warmth, sweetness, complicity... It seems she has never been involved in any dispute.

«There, we had agreed with Anita and Hélène, they will do the tiling.

- Aren't you doing it yourself, Gerard? Ask Brigitte.

- No, they've already done it, and they did it very well, thanks to the method I taught them. Anyway, if it is a bit irregular, so much the better: too perfect it would look like a company management office. I still have everything else to do, the little sanctuary and the annexes.

- We cannot meet here yet, it is too cold without the heating. Not until spring. Then we shall do the dedication ceremony.

- This is why we have to make sure that by then there is no more dirt and traffic.

- As for me, Marc ends, I have to start arranging the rooms for the sessions this summer. Now that I have finished with the addresses and flyers, I shall be more available now»

This is how life goes: everyone goes back to their activities with a new enthusiasm, galvanized by the tangible achievements!

The second event is more intimate. When Gerard returns from the city, he brings back a magazine with new photos of Uranus and its satellites. He shows it to everybody, and as you might guess, everyone is enthusiastic about this discovery of new worlds, even if, unfortunately, life is not there. Despite this lack, such an event is a milestone in the history of mankind, just like Galileo's first observations in 1610.

Suddenly, Brigitte exclaims: she has stumbled upon the photo of Miranda, the small ice moon with the strange herringbone and oval structures which have fascinated all astronomers and all Humans.

«But this looks like my planet!

- What do you mean, your planet, Brigitte?»

What a goofball! She just betrayed yet another one of her private secrets. Well, the best thing is still to tell everything.

«Well, I... I often dreamed of a planet which looks like this.

- Really? This is strange, because before these photos, no one ever saw anything like this...

- Well, still... Wait, I get my dream book.»

Brigitte shows the drawing in the notebook to her more than intrigued friends. This old drawing, already a little yellowed, looks just like the new photos. But she does not tell the extravagant story of the little robot, which she did not dared to write down.

What to say in front of the inexplicable? She thinks back to her uncle Albert, who probably took an interest in the Voyager photos. Will he have noticed the resemblance? This can only be one more proof of the strange premonitions of Brigitte and her grandmother. Will he think about it? Or has he already forgotten his confidences, like one forgets what one saw on the television?

That night, Brigitte dreams, for the last time in her life, of the little robot. The access ramp is finished, and the round door opens into the darkness, into the obscure depths of the pyramid. The little yellow and red robot is motionless at the foot of the ramp, as if waiting to welcome her. With the disarming naivety of a little child who is about to show off his beautiful pâté. And also an indefinable nostalgia... Is this machine really just a machine?

 

 

Stranded on Earth

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