Some time ago I posted this image of me

drawn by one of my High School students who
did not know about my metaphysical background.
It is just the way he 'saw' me, the essence of my soul. Ellie and The Sphinx

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Image by David Lovegrove in Australia.
The energies seemed the same to me.
Ancient Egypt, Link With Australia

My name is David Lovegrove. I am a professional artist and illustrator, and I have a Diploma of Fine Art from Australia's oldest art school, the Julian Ashton School, and I have a Masters degree in Visual Art from Griffith University, Brisbane. I have a website that showcases my illustration and fine art works on this website.

This picture was drawn from a viewing platform that is set up behind the Olgas, the large group of huge red rocks close to Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock). I drew it in September 1999 whilst on a camping tour of the Australian Outback (Interior).

My interpretation of this rock formation is that it looks for all the world like a huge monolithic bust of a simian type face, with a realistic huge hand propping up the head on its right side, as if it is a figure lying on its side. I have seen a lot of rocks that are noted for looking like something (e.g bear rock and the like), but this face and hand took me by surprise, and I couldnÕt get over the excited feeling that this formation was consciously created by ancient man or some other advanced species. The strange thing is that no one else present that day could see it!

Australia is a vast and very old land. There is a spiritual vibration in the outback that I believe is part of the ancient mystery of our indigenous people. It is a very powerful sense of a sort of eternal wisdom of the land, and it's like you feel that you are being watched and weighed up by ancient elders. For me it wasnÕt just a good feeling. I actually grew a little afraid of the realness of this feeling. It was like "we are watching you little white child walking in our sacred places". I eventually felt that I was approved of and also protected and watched over.

The uncanny thing for me about the aboriginal people is that in physical appearance they look very much like the people of southern India. I am very interested in Yoga, and whilst in the outback I felt that maybe the Yogic tradition came from here thousands of years ago or at least that there is a strong link.

Outback Australians like to talk of the uncanny "magical" deeds of Aboriginal men of power, and the people I have talked to over the years were not new age people, but were actually rather "straight", yet were convinced of the truth of these stories.

I see no reason why there could not have been civilizations of high technology(technology of the physical and the spirit) here in the distant past. If we have got to where we are now in maybe 7000 years, why couldn't something similar or greater happen a long way further back?

One day I was talking to a Christian Minister (Uniting Church, which is Presbyterians and Methodist and Baptist combined). Anyway, he was a very honest and reliable sort of man, and he had been a minister in an outback town for a number of years. One day he was driving his Landrover out of town (the only road out) and stopped to talked to an old aboriginal Elder who was a friend of his.

The minister told the Elder that he was going to this other town a couple of hundred miles away (not far in Australian terms), and the old elder said, "Okay, I'll see you there."

The minister drove off wondering what the man meant, as he knew that the Elder had no car. He drove for hours and as he pulled into the town there was the aboriginal man sitting on a verandah.

When asked how he got there ahead of the Landrover he just smiled.

Now this sounds like a tall tale, but the man who told me the story had no reason to lie, in fact such a tale seems to be in a distinctly non Christian realm, and I am a good judge of people and I could tell he was sincere.

The spirituality of the aboriginal people is a secret thing, and even among them there are secrets for men and secrets for women and secrets only for the specially initiated. The white invader her has usually treated the aboriginal people with contempt, seeing them as dirty naked savages, labeling them as lazy and untrustworthy. Things are a bit better now, but this attitude and misunderstanding is still widespread.

There is no reason I can think of why the remnants of the traditional aboriginal people would even attempt to share their spiritual wisdom and profundity with a people as arrogant and ignorant of nature as the invader. They are at heart a very kind and gentle people, and many times I have wept tears of shame when confronted with the cruelty inflicted on them since my ancestors came here 200 years ago. What happened here is just as obscene and genocidal and barbaric as what happening in America to the native peoples.

The aboriginal people are great judges of character, and as I have a love and kindred feeling for them the people I have met usually have warmed to me and accepted me as a friend. When I went to the outback I was told in a psychic way that I was being watched and weighed. I am not terribly into the whole gamut of new age beliefs yet I have lived a life of spiritual experiences, partly through my own seeking and partly through some kind of fate.

In the outback I got the strongest feeling possible that the spiritual masters of this land are still the spiritual masters of this land, no matter how much the western materialist capitalist culture appears to prevail. I believe that we are like big children playing with super toys, ignorant of all but the most obvious facts of life. The movie "The Right Stuff" touched on this belief that many of us have that certain aboriginal people are able to do "impossible" things.

There is a scene where "Gordo" is in Outback Australia and the Elders are singing around a fire throwing swirls of sparks , and he is told that they are up there helping Scott Glenn as he orbits the Earth. Many older Australians like me (I'm 45) take it as given that there are amazing mysteries in this country that are secret for good reason.

I mentioned in a previous letter about the possible connection of ancient Australians and the Vedic culture of India. In the well known book Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda describes his life witnessing miraculous abilities of yogic saints he met, and his! own experiences. This includes people being in two places at once, not eating for years, sitting underwater for hours, raising the dead. He writes in a matter of fact way, and one has to either believe him or consider him a liar and a lunatic! I believe that the secrets of the aboriginal people are of this nature- abilities that are considered supernatural to Western people whose culture was stripped of its tradition by the Christian clergy and its economic power, and by the Industrial Revolution that mechanized our ancestors lives and has removed us a long way from nature (and dare I say it, sanity).

About David, My birthday this year is on good Friday. Spiritually I am a man who believes that this world and the universe are alive and conscious, and I have enjoyed a strangely powerful relationship with something I used to call God but now think of as the great being, probably the consciousness of all things together. My favorite texts are the Tao Te Ching and writing on Zen Buddhism, and I am very influenced by the thinking of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. As an artist I feel that I move in a non literate realm, and I see creating drawings and paintings as a form of deep meditation and a method of contacting my own unconscious and the collective unconsciousness.