Caves

[Icon]

I'm guessing it's very very few people these days that spend any amount of time in caves.

Caves seem to have a lot going for them when it comes to setting for mind exploration. Dark, quiet, still.

I've snuck into a forgotten cave a few times and it's a magical feeling to have a whole cave to yourself. Like the parents are gone and you can let down your guard. It's very protective energy, like nothing can touch me or find me. Totally isolated from the rest of the world. I guess it would be similar to deprivation tanks, except better if there's room to move around in the cave and you don't have to be laying in water.

I want to take a trip in a cave someday. Without any sense of the passage of time, I wonder how long it would take to start affecting the mind. Circadian rhythm can nail the pattern down to the second, but maybe by day three or four your mind would just be lost and wandering. It would be extra cool to take a trip after that point.

 

[universecannon]

I dont think it's a coincidence caves and granite mountains were so highly sought after across the world. I've had a handful of psychedelic sessions at the mouth of a very quartz rich cave that we found extremely powerful, even with the absence of total silence and darkness. I'm sure darkness and silence contribute, but for us those elements weren't necessary to experience something already far too shocking to handle.

The experiences people report from dark room retreats are fascinating but I'd guess they are a minor glimpse at what is possible in a cave for a prolonged period. I'd be hesitant to do much alone in a deep cave though. It can get overwhelming very fast on psychedelics, and in the pitch black - not to mention with the frequent risk of floods that many are subject to - the dangers pile up. I'd like to try small hits of DMT with a decent amethyst chunk in a dark cave someday, after a few days.

 

[blig-blug]

I think DMT could be a good candidate to trip in a cave, due to the duration and that one's not likely to move.

I know some caves that are very safe, they have no water inside nor holes. A couple of them have Neolithic paintings (nothing exciting, just a few lines crossed in a grid, or a kind of cross). I will have to try this at some point.

I know of another cave where, for hundreds of years, a hermit lived there and gave water to people who went in pilgrimage to it. It was supposedly healing. The cave is long and narrow, and it ends in a somewhat bigger chamber. That chamber has a big rock in the middle with a carved cavity where drops of water fall slowly. I assume that's the "healing water" people went to drink. It's a very interesting place, I haven't been there since I was a teen. I may have to do a tripping visit at some point. The cave is quite safe, if you're in the inner chamber you can't fall anywhere, and you can't get out without crawling some distance.

This cave is in a rock peak, the left one in the attached picture (not my picture). Below those two peaks there was a monastery, only the base of the walls remains after it was expropriated to the Church in the 19th century. I wonder if perhaps the monastery was made in the place where there already was a hermit, instead of the other way around.



It's a shame not much is known about hermits here. There used to be many. They weren't in any religious order, priests or anything like that, they existed outside the structure of the Church. I'm sure they had an intense spiritual practice, at least the ones that lived in places like this cave, but that has been completely lost now. I also wonder if perhaps they precede Christianization and Roman conquest, and they're the descendants of ancient priests for local gods/spirits in "places of power" that later adopted Christian ways externally, as it later happened in America.