All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Eight of Swords

MESSAGES EVERYWHERE

Words and Music by Jim Robbins

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Messages everywhere, in the sky,
in ocean waves, in rivers, in leaves,
and grass, and fire. Everywhere I’ve seen messages
of love and oneness and wholeness and grace.

But now I have heard dark messages for so long,
messages of rage and hatred and fear, that I
instead see those messages in the water and air
and earth and fire. But when I turn back to you,

I feel messages of kindness and compassion
and love and understanding again in my heart,
and I send messages of light and love back to you
until we are one in spirit, purified and unified

and whole, and suddenly the world
is whole again, and the water and fire
and air and earth are all part
of one great tapestry.

PENDULUM DREAMS:

Part Three

   The pendulum at first impressed me as totally accurate, and it soon became my most trusted adviser. If you have not been initiated into the Mysteries, by life or a by a master, you will no doubt consider this story about my pendulum to be the strangest of fictions. I assure you, however, that I am being as truthful to you as my pendulum is to me. In fact, I encourage you to buy your own pendulum to check the information in this story if you don't believe me. If you continue to use the pendulum, you might discover, as I did, that the voice that rises through your soul into your conscious mind is sometimes from the Source of all creation....

   After the pendulum revealed that my parents had adopted me, I remembered a bizarre event that had occurred when I was five or six. One night before I went to bed, my mother poured out a tablespoon of molasses as my father hovered over her. I had no clue about why they needed to give me molasses or why my father felt the need to supervise. My parents claimed that it was like medicine but better tasting. After they had tucked me in bed and turned off the light, my body began arranging itself into insane positions, with a leg above my head and an arm sticking out of my ribs, for instance. Though very young, I realized that I was losing my mind, and I screamed for help. My parents, both smiling, stepped through my bedroom door and assured me that I was only having a bad dream, and they encouraged me to go back to sleep.
   I wanted to yell that I had never actually gone to sleep, but my father turned off the light and closed the door, and my body immediately continued contorting itself into impossible positions until I blacked out. I woke up standing in the middle of the family room with the TV on full blast. I was suddenly conscious that I was screaming about how I was not able to carry the TV on my back anymore. My parents guided me to bed, assuring me that I was just having another bad dream and that I would be fine in the morning.
   I soon found out that Amber, skilled at remote viewing, also reads the Akashic Records, which is a sort of library in another dimension where memories of experiences in all dimensions are stored. After I discovered that I was adopted, I naturally desired to find out who my birth parents were, so I asked if she could find any record in the cosmic library. At the time, I wasn’t expecting credible results, but Amber discovered far more than I had imagined she would. She informed me that I have experienced a process of initiation into the Mysteries over the course of ten lifetimes. I was a Magus in my previous lifetime and wove the knowledge of the symbols of the mystical Tree of Life into the fabric of my being, as if I had threaded them through my DNA, so that I would have visions of them when I was ready and eventually remember my mission as a spiritual warrior who maintains balance on different levels in the subtle realms. My real parents were part of that mystical tradition but were killed in what appeared to be an accident before I had formed any memories of them. According to Amber, my parents were murdered by members of a shadow project formed by the government after WWII. Occultist’s in that shadow agency could also see the history of my soul and have experimented on me in various ways since I was two years old. Amber, at that point in the reading, became exhausted and could no longer continue. My pendulum verified that the information was true, but I didn't know at that point what to make of it all.

     At this point in our society's health and economic crisis, I often hear despair in the voices of commentators on liberal talk shows. They recognize the evil in our political system but don't understand that actual evil is a spiritual problem, not a political one. Unfortunately, many liberals are agnostics or atheists and doubt that a spiritual dimension exists and therefore don't have a clue about how to keep evil from unravelling the fabric of society, which I'm sure many practitioners of black magic and Republicans and autocrats and fascists find amusing. People with knowledge can stop evil, but if I tried to tell talk-show hosts and pundits how to neutralize dark forces, they would not believe me anymore than you do.

     When I was seven years old, I learned how to wiggle my ears. Everyone in my family seemed wildly enthusiastic about my new ability, so I continued focusing on my new skill and soon discovered that I could wiggle one ear at a time. I experienced a surprising lack of enthusiasm, however, when I revealed this variation of ear wiggling to my family and friends—despite the fact that wiggling first one ear, then the other, had taken much longer to master than wiggling both ears at the same time.

     Like most children, I also learned how to whistle and snap my fingers, skills that I struggled to master. By the third grade, however, I was the best in my class at playing Simon Says. By the fourth grade, I could outrun everybody in school. In the fifth grade, while playing football at recess, I made several spectacular catches that greatly elevated my status. Without realizing it then, I was experiencing the power of my mind over my body.

     At the age of forty-two, I learned how to heal myself. After I mentally purified my chakras, I soon discovered that I could scan my personal energy field, or aura, for negative energies, and then with my imagination I could release the negative energies into the fires below the earth. Sometimes, physical symptoms emerged soon after I mentally eliminated the negative energies, the most remarkable example being the surfacing of a large boil in my armpit the day after I had mentally drained away streaks of black energy from under my arm. Two days later a pure white growth, the size of a musket ball, oozed out of the boil. I eventually repeated the same mental purification process two more times, first in one armpit, then in the other, and each time a round white ball popped out of a boil in a day or two.

     I remained an agnostic until I started meditating. After my spiritual awakening, I discovered that the physical body is only one aspect of the total  human energy system. We have different types of subtle energy in our aura, each of which goes by different names in various spiritual traditions. Some traditions classify the different dimensions as the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels of being. Other traditions have identified many subtle levels. All the different classifications can get confusing, unfortunately—but one thing I know for certain, the activities of the mind, both conscious and subconscious, can affect all aspects of the human energy system. For instance, negative emotions repressed in the subconscious mind can surface as physical illness. Conversely, the conscious mind can eliminate negative energies, thereby avoiding serious physical illness, by draining those energies from the aura through a method of release that works for the individual.

     Humans have a natural healing power that is not known by many people—possibly because we are more easily controlled and exploited if we remain unaware that the human mind is incredibly powerful.

     The imagination is the mind’s conscious connection to the different types of energy, both in the human energy field and the subtle world around us. For example, my subconscious mind’s way of revealing information about negative energy that might manifest as illness usually consists of showing black streaks or blots on the screen of my imagination. The imagination, if allowed, in addition to creating compelling images of the subtle energies within us, can personify the invisible forces around us, revealing subtle forces that the subconscious presents to the conscious mind as fantastic or uncommon forms that reveal the nature of the force, such as gods or demons or angels or werewolves or pixies. For instance, when I am in a natural place undisturbed by human beings, I might perceive in my mind’s eye an archetypal symbol such as an equal-armed cross on top of a pyramid, or (especially when I am near ancient Native American village sites) I might envision a goddess associated with a spring or a god of the hunt or a human-like spidery creature, for the forms of subtle forces fashioned by the human imagination often persist in physical locations for a long time. Archetypal symbols of harmony appear in my imagination when I am in pristine natural areas; fantastic human-like forms usually only appear in areas where humans have presided for a long time.

Nine of Swords

     I should emphasize that I only began envisioning these forms in my imagination after I mentally purified my aura. Before then, negative energies veiled my inner vision and caused disruptive, incessant chatter in my conscious mind, making it instead a “monkey mind.” Like the figure in the Nine of Swords above, I would often project anger at people or groups that I didn’t really know, as if they were the cause of the negative energy in my aura. For instance, as a liberal Democrat, I would often become furious with Republicans. 

     Negative energies dominate the energy fields of most people in modern society, and, unfortunately, many unhappy people target others who seem to them to be the cause of their negativity. Hate groups especially maintain a focus on a level of fear that can lead to mob mentality. Fear can cause group negativity that can quickly escalate into war—at this point it could even lead to the annihilation of the entire human race.

     I should emphasize that I don’t take drugs. In fact, I don’t even take aspirin unless I am in agony. I believe now that drugs only mask negativity in the energy field, yet symptoms manifest to reveal disease. Unfortunately, we too often hand over our personal healing power to doctors, who often have no clue about what is troubling us and simply prescribe some type of medication that might not only mask the cause of the disease but also have serious side effects. This enables the for-profit medical industry to make tons of money from human suffering but often doesn’t help their patients. I haven’t been to a doctor in decades, mainly because none of them could determine that gluten poisoning was killing me; after a few minutes of “consulting” with me they instead prescribed some useless medication manufactured to counteract psychological illness. I once had an acquaintance, who was not even a doctor, immediately make the correct diagnosis of my condition after I had only given a short summary of my symptoms. Gluten eventually caused atrial fibrillation, a serious form of heart disease, as well as the low production of stomach acid, which meant that I couldn’t digest foods effectively, both together creating a condition that bordered on agony.

     Just as the Universal Energy Field contains different dimensions of energy, so does the human energy field. In the bible we find that man was made in God's image. "As above, so below" is a famous adage associated with the Hermetic tradition. Because the individual human energy field reflects the Universal Energy Field in terms of energetic frequencies, the human mind can access subtle cosmic forces of harmony. Many Shining Ones, of course, are extremely powerful and staggeringly intelligent—far more than human doctors or scientists. The human subconscious mind tends to give these awesome forces the form of angels or archangels or gods in the imagination. If a connection is made with one or more of these forces, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, healing can occur in a way that some might consider miraculous—when in fact it is a natural latent ability that the human mind can develop, an ability, I should add, that remains free for everyone. However, a person can also hand over his or her personal spiritual power to a spiritual leader or follow a redeemer or savior figure without making an authentic spiritual connection. To make harmonious changes spiritually you make a personal connection in the deepest dimensions of your own psyche, which can have the added benefit of increasing the understanding that all energy is divinely connected.

     According to different psychics, dark forces have targeted me for most of my life. A year before the pandemic began, dark forces were targeting me daily. After the pandemic began, dark forces targeted me twice daily on the average. It was obvious to me that evil was rising as the pandemic raged and the economy crumbled and people remained isolated. Fortunately I learned how to neutralize dark forces by working with spiritual powers of harmony.

     My parents both grew up in the depression. My father and uncles, stationed in different parts of the world, endured the horrors of WWII. Two of them survived plane crashes that traumatized them. No matter what my pendulum reveals about my parents, I can't blame them for actions based on fear. In the modern world, people have not been taught how to neutralize evil, and it has proven difficult, if not impossible, to mobilize effectively on a political level against evil without great carnage. 

     We cannot stop evil or heal a sick political and economic system without first healing ourselves, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, and we cannot heal ourselves if we are regularly exposed to toxic chemicals and toxic thoughts and emotions and dark forces. The individual human mind, as I mentioned, is extremely powerful, but remains powerless without knowledge. 

     Working with powerful spiritual forces of harmony, we can neutralize much of the evil in the world. However, since many of us have been conditioned to believe that we are powerless spiritually and politically, our society could face a grim future. If I ever feel hopeless, I remember that I experienced a spiritual awakening at the age of forty-two--during a terrible illness--and I remind myself that with awesome powers of harmony I regularly neutralize dark subtle forces.

     Let’s play Simon Says. Simon says wave your hand in the air and whistle, twirl around and snap your fingers, jump up and down and stick out your tongue, pat your head and tummy at the same time while standing on one leg, wiggle your ears. Simon says heal your body and heart and mind.  Simon says remember that you have that power.

 All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Four of Swords

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SONGS AND WHISPERS

Words and Music by Jim Robbins

Once I believed that I should just keep searching

for treasures and pleasures and deafening distractions.

Then I thought that I heard the faintest whisper, a message

rising through my soul and into my heart. For a moment

the message almost formed into words,

but I lost it in the noise and confusion.

Again, and again, I felt sudden downloads into my soul--

messages that never quite made it to my brain.

I was afraid of the words that I might hear. I thought

that they would change me or make me strange.

And I ran far but never far enough. I would find a flower

or feel the rain or be immersed in a deep message

that flowed, like breath, from a tree into my soul--

a peace beyond understanding.

Finally, I just stopped running.

I stayed still and felt the voice

rising like a song into my heart

until I could transcribe the meaning.

I am no longer afraid the words will ever harm me.

The messages flow from the Source of all Creation,

messages of love and peace and oneness and splendor.

And I just keep listening to the faintest songs, to whispers

rising through my soul and heart and into my conscious mind.

Satellite Image: Pounding Stones and Ancient Trail in Yokohl Valley

googlemaps.com

PENDULUM DREAMS:

Part Two

     Bran asked us why we thought the people behind the false flag operation had targeted the Twin Towers. I conjectured that it was all about justifying wars in the Middle East, which profited the oil industry and the private corporations connected with the military-industrial complex. Amber calmly stated that she felt it was somehow more nefarious than that. After addressing a number of possibilities, Bran finally announced that the elites were revealing the absolute power they have over the United States; they can make up any narrative, no matter how outlandish, and attack any number of countries whenever it is in their interests, all the while manipulating the media to get the masses to believe anything. Above all, the operation has proven to be an extremely successful mind control experiment.... 

     While Bran was rambling on, Amber looked at me inquisitively for the first time. After the meeting, she congratulated me for impressing everyone during the remote-viewing session, and I realized that we had the potential to form a friendship based on our spiritual abilities—no common bond in this society. I, by that point, could not help but realize that I was getting a tiny bit lonelier every day, so I asked her if she would like to get together at Starbucks for a cup of coffee later in the week, which is where she gave me the pendulum. We had a lively chat about various spiritual topics, during which she gave me some helpful pointers about the pendulum. For instance, she explained that people have free will; therefore the future is like a sea of possibilities, which means that predictions about the future are often unreliable because the pendulum can only make predictions based on current trends and conditions. However, my friend claimed that the pendulum is accurate about past events and spiritual matters. Right then and there in Starbucks, I asked the pendulum if aliens had participated in the false flag operation that had brought down the Twin Towers. Answer: Yes. My friend chortled and lightly slapped my hand, causing the pendulum to spin wildly. 

     When I first began using the pendulum on my own, I recognized a slight pressure rising from within, like a voice yelling from a black box buried deep inside me. I had experienced that sensation before but had always ignored it. After working with the pendulum for a while, I truly began to believe that some other dimension of my self would occasionally attempt to convey urgent messages. I soon concluded that the pendulum is a reliable tool that enables my soul to communicate with my conscious mind. So when I would have a strong, unexpected feeling or image in my mind, with pendulum in hand, I would ask a question that might result in a significant message from my core, and I would often receive an answer that jibed with my intuition.

     At first, I didn't treat the pendulum seriously. I asked the pendulum any questions that occurred to me, from the mundane to the bizarre. Then I began asking questions that I had suppressed in my subconscious mind because I didn’t think that they could ever be answered. A few years ago, for instance, my mother, at the age of 88 (when she was still lucid), had blurted out that I was adopted. Noticing the look of shock on my face, my mother immediately retracted the claim, insisting that she was only joking. Knowing the power of the pendulum, I, of course, could not resist asking it for the truth. The pendulum spun clockwise, indicating that my mother had indeed attempted to confess the truth before she died.

   One image that had repeatedly popped into my mind recently was of a bird with a bright red head, a yellow breast, and black wings. I had first seen the bird forty years ago. I was in college at the time on a day trip with my new girlfriend. She turned out to be a sociopath, a pathological liar who did everything in her power to traumatize my son--and me in the process. (I admit to a certain amount of naivete while in college.) That day, after reaching the other side of the hill on a crumbling, narrow road with a memorable stretch of tortuous switchbacks, I stopped the car under a huge tree. Tired, I stepped out of the car for some fresh air and noticed a stunning red-headed bird in the tree above us. I quietly urged my girlfriend to get out of the car. She saw the bird and smiled but demanded that I turn the car around and take her home. Years after I broke up with her, I became an avid birdwatcher and discovered the bird's name: Western Tanager. I have since discovered that the male Western Tanager will often distract potential predators by remaining on a branch just out of reach.

googlemaps.com

   Because the sighting of that particular Western Tanager kept recurring in my mind, I asked my pendulum if I should head back to the area of the sighting. After forty years, I had no idea where it was, so I tried google.maps and eventually discovered that Yokohl Valley Drive in the foothills south of the Kaweah River contains a stretch of serpentine switchbacks. (See the squiggly white line in the lower right-hand corner of the map above.) Coincidentally, one route from Fresno to the Yokohl Valley is 245 to 198, the same 245 on which I had recently searched unsuccessfully for a connection with Junction 21. (See previous post.)

   As I drove through Yokohl Valley the following Sunday, I felt a presence, somehow sure that Native Americans had once occupied the valley. I ended up stopping under a huge tree on the other side of the hill, not sure if it was where I had parked four decades before. I didn't sight any birds that day. Almost as disappointed as I had been forty years before, I headed home without understanding why my soul had desired to return to that spot. 

   I went online and found a satellite image of a large Native American village site in Yokohl Valley. I have realized from bitter experience that in the age of cellphones,  trespassing is nearly impossible; neighbors will often drive by your parked car and call the land owner, who will attempt to catch you in the act of committing a misdemeanor, so if you trespass nowadays you have at most only a few minutes to explore an area.

   I remained disappointed until I performed my ritual the following day. During a deep dive into my subconscious, I discovered that the original trip forty years ago wove through both the past and my future. My pendulum confirmed that many years ago--thousands of years perhaps--I was a budding shaman at a village in the Yokohl Valley. A psychic friend once told me that I  have experienced ten lifetimes within a spiritual tradition. My pendulum verified that my experience in Yokohl Valley was the first of the ten.  Way back then in the distant past, I worked mainly with the equal-armed cross and only in later lifetimes began ritually employing the pentagram and unicursal hexagram.  

   In other words, on the original trip on the long and winding road, I ended up sighting a stunning bird that would later inspire me to get into birdwatching, a hobby that has led me in this lifetime on ancient trails to Native American village sites all over the mountains. 

Yokohl Valley Dr. Switchbacks

googlemaps.com

   "The Long and Winding Road," by the Beatles, by the way, was coincidentally one of my favorite songs when I was in college. The long and winding road in Yohohl Valley that I drove forty years ago and recently turned out to be a synchronistic journey containing profound meaning for me.

   In college, I was an agnostic, believing that life amounted to an inscrutable series of events that a self-centered sociopath could quickly make unbearable. I learned a valuable lesson from my ex-girlfriend, however. I became keenly aware of the sociopathic tendencies of people clawing for success in a society that conditions us to fight for the American Dream--which until recently has included the institution of slavery and the widespread practice of genocide as acceptable means of achieving that "dream."

All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

      Screen shot: Googlemaps.com

PENDULUM DREAMS:

How I've survived the Covid pandemic (so far)

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Nothing but Lies

Words and Music by Jim Robbins

Lies, nothing but lies.
Lies from the left, lies from the right.
Lies about goodness, lies about evil,
Lies that make my throat sore.
Lies that make me feel safe.
Lies that make me afraid,
Lies about life, lies about death,
Lies, nothing but lies.

But now I have a key to unlock
The mysteries of the past,
The secrets of space and time,
A key that dangles
From a delicate chain,
A weapon that cuts through deception,
A sacred tool that spins the truth.
I am letting go of all the lies—
The veils just keep falling,
So now I know a truth
That no one will ever believe.
I know a truth that no one will ever believe.

Lies, nothing but lies.
But now I have a key to unlock
The mysteries of the past,
The secrets of space and time,
A key that dangles
From a delicate chain,
A weapon that cuts through deception,
A sacred tool that spins the truth.
So now I know a truth
That no one will ever believe.

PART ONE

   A few weeks after we first met, Amber gave me a pendulum.  Below a jade weight, a silver pentagram dangled at the end of a delicate chain, and according to Amber, the pendulum would answer any yes or no question that I might ask. She showed me how to “program” the pendulum by commanding it to spin clockwise if the answer is “yes” and counterclockwise if the answer is “no,” and I soon experienced some startling revelations. According to Amber, my soul was answering the questions: Directly connected to the Source, the soul has access to far more information than the incarnated personality, which is limited by the five senses as well as by space and time.

   I should warn you: beyond this point, you are unlikely to believe what I say. 

   I have experienced more than a few alternate realities, and my pendulum has helped me to understand them.

   Unfortunately I have to rely on maps to help me explain several of the alternate realities, one of which reveals the inscrutable disappearance of a significant physical feature, a highway through the foothills.

   Notice, at the top of the map above, 180 from Fresno, CA, where I live. Just before you reach Grant Grove Village on 180 you can turn right onto 245 and head south. I once had a friend who lived in Miramonte. When I visited my friend I would usually take 180 to Miramonte. I never, however, headed south of Miramonte on 245.

      Googlemaps.com

   Below Badger is Junction 21. I should emphasize again that I have never traveled the stretch of 245 south of Miramonte or north of Drum Valley Road until a recent trip, which I describe below.

   My wife and I in springtime would sometimes take the scenic drive east from the valley into the foothills on Boyd Road, which connects with 245 where the above map shows "Bear Creek Candles, temporarily closed." My wife and I would then often head north a few miles on 245 to Drum Valley Rd, or Drive 152, a narrow road represented on the map by the faint squiggly white line above Aukland that loops back down to the valley. My point is that we never headed north on 245 above Drum Valley Rd.

          Googlemaps.com

Close up of Loop

   (Thank you for bearing with me. Please explore googlemaps.com in more detail if interested.) 

   Sunday is my day for adventure in the foothills. One Sunday recently I asked my pendulum where I should head, and by going through the usual process of asking yes/no questions, I finally figured out that my soul wanted to travel into the foothills on Boyd Rd, then north on 245. That day, therefore, I ignored the turn off to Drive 152, something I have never done before, and continued north on a treacherous section of 245 that weaves toward Badger. After awhile, tired of the winding road, I stopped at a restaurant perched on the mountainside called Baker Mountain House. As I sat in my car in the parking lot trying to figure out if I should continue, I noticed nearby a sign for Junction 21 (J21) south. I thought that perhaps my soul knew of a remote area that I could explore, so I asked my pendulum if I should head south on J21. The answer was "yes." I hoped to find more Native American village sites in the foothills but encountered too many houses and ranches in the area, so I after a few miles I turned around and headed back, thinking that maybe I should have ignored my pendulum and instead continued north on 245. Disappointed, I headed all the way north to 180 and headed west back to Fresno. I could not understand why my pendulum had wanted me to drive that tortuous section of 245 or to explore J21.

   The next day, I checked googlemaps.com and realized that over a decade ago I had driven south on Junction 21 three times, once with my wife and twice by myself, to the Kaweah River, but from some other point miles south of the restaurant perched on the hill. I was confused because no other road connected 245 with J21 south of Baker Mountain House on the satellite images.    

   To my great astonishment, my pendulum insisted that the following Sunday I should travel 245 south from Boyd Rd to Woodlake and from there over to J21, this time to head north, which I had never done before. Since my pendulum has so far never steered me wrong, I followed my pendulum's directions on my next Sunday adventure. 

   I had the overwhelming feeling that something was absurdly wrong, which only increased my curiosity. 

   When my wife and I were still together, I'm pretty sure she would have objected to taking 245 north to Baker Mountain House, only to head south on J21--which ends up being an unnecessarily long, nauseating journey to the Kaweah River. Other routes are much more direct. As I mentioned, before that previous Sunday, I had never driven on that section of 245--trust me, you would remember if you had. I had also never seen Baker Mountain House or the ranches and farmhouses on the northern end of J21 before.

   As I headed north on J21, I remembered the stream in the rural area. At one point, however, after the yellow stripes disappeared and the road narrowed and the hill became much steeper, I no longer recognized my surroundings. I continued north anyway, determined to find a road connecting J21 west with 245. When I finally reached Baker Mountain House on 245, I realized that I had either somehow missed the connection--or it no longer existed. 

   I carefully checked the satellite images on googlemaps.com again, searching for anything that might have once been a public-access highway connecting 245 with J21, without success. I could only find on the satellite images faint dirt roads weaving through ranchlands--treacherous private roads winding up and down, but definitely not connecting 245 with J21.

     Googlemaps.com

   My wife and I had often traveled Freeway 99 through the Central Valley, then onto 201, then over to 245 to Woodlake and beyond that to the North Fork of the Kaweah River. The only explanation for me at least of the inexplicable disappearance of the highway was that there was once years ago a connection with J21 where 201 connects with 245 at Elderwood, but there is absolutely no evidence of some former connection. I have found pounding stones in the foothills in satellite images, but I could not find anything resembling a former  asphalt highway. If I am right, the question remains: Why would anyone bulldoze miles of a perfectly good road when he could simply put up a gate?

   I traveled J21 south one more time and during that long, careful search, I could find no connection between the J21 and 245, nor could I, for the life of me, remember how I got to the point of J21 where years ago I must have turned right three times, heading to the Kaweah River--as if my memory had been totally wiped. Nor could I remember any part of J21 north of a certain point. I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that a rancher had purchased the land and bulldozed miles of road, but inexplicably I couldn't remember where the highway was--even though I have developed a keen, almost photographic memory of everywhere I travel because I am always searching foothill areas to find potential Native American sites. I can even tell you where I have seen certain birds and where different wildflowers bloom each year. I remember seeing rare wind poppies on a J21 embankment one year, for instance.

   I still can only make conjectures as I gaze again and again at the satellite images. I finally asked my pendulum about the conundrum. I asked it if God can change reality any time, and the answer was "yes." Which gives new meaning to the saying that faith can move mountains.

Baby Blues Eyes in Cracks of an Unused Asphalt Road near Pine Flat Reservoir

   Around the time of my search for the connection, my wife, after thirty years of marriage, had moved away to Florida. I sold my house to free up some money for my new life as a bachelor and ended up purchasing a condominium in a building that on the outside resembles a five-star hotel. The units are attractive but the hallways occasionally make me feel like I am residing in a desolate hell of my own making. Since I didn’t have any friends, I started attending a New Thought Community Church, and there I met Amber at an “Illumination Meditation” meeting. Though approaching the end of middle age, I had hoped at least to develop a friendship, if not a lasting romantic relationship, with a spiritually inclined person. Like me, Amber chewed on New Age philosophies, but the last thing I wanted to do was break up her marriage, especially since my wife had hooked up with an old flame who had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. He had fled to Canada when they were eighteen, and she found him online over four decades later. He hadn’t hesitated for a moment to break up my marriage, and I certainly didn’t want to be in any way like him.
   I have survived more than a few paranormal experiences, or what some might call alternate realities. Some of these experiences were quite terrifying, and I was hoping that I might receive some insights and advice from members of the meditation group. At first I was reticent, but during the second Illumination Meditation meeting that I attended, Bran, our teacher, guided us through a remote viewing session. First, we all imagined ourselves experiencing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, paying close attention especially to the different sounds. Bran then told us to go back in time several days before the attack. Suddenly I envisioned people in what appeared to be white hazmat suits planting explosive devices in the buildings. Bran fixed his gaze on me and mentioned that hazardous waste teams were ostensibly cleaning up asbestos contamination in the buildings at the time. He asked if I had noticed the logo on the hazmat suit. I told him that it looked like a light-blue, incomplete circle. He nodded. Amber blurted out that she also had noticed the logo, as well as little gray men scurrying around people who were planting the devices. To my surprise, Bran smiled and claimed that a secret government agency had worked with aliens to bring down the World Trade Center.

 All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Morro Bay at Sunset

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THE SHORE

Words and Music by Jim Robbins

Twenty years since I last saw
the cliffs and the skeletal tree stump
where I had sat in the dusk,
the shore deserted.

A pelican glides above the waves,
tilts a little and plunges.
I don't remember pelicans offshore
twenty years ago.

Only the one
who had left me behind,
the shore timeless,
life irrelevant.

My daughter piles pincers and husks
before me twenty years later in that place
so unaltered that memory
and place match unexpectedly.

Some part of me seems untouched,
yet I could have sworn the years
had altered me beyond
recognition to myself.

In another twenty years,
others will leave me,
the waves growing violet
once again.

A pelican will glide
above the waves, tilting
a little and plunging,
my soul timeless like the shore,

the waves growing violet
once again, my soul timeless
like the shore, like the shore,
like the shore....

THE SHORE

     My friend once claimed that many have come before us who have cleared paths through the unknown. She was not talking about pioneers of the Western migration in the United States, however. She was instead referring to light-workers who have struggled through dense and sometimes extremely dark spiritual energy to make it easier for others to make their way.

     My friend is herself a courageous light-worker. Because of her I am now aware that people can send positive spiritual energy to each other—from a distance. I discovered this after a powerful Reiki session during which she removed troublesome negative energy from my aura. She then filled me with such positive energy that I could not help but believe that she was the kindest, most loving person that I have ever met. When I shared my amazement, she claimed that she is merely an imperfect vessel who channels a powerful type of energy that “knows where to go” in our energy field to heal whatever is harming us. She had, in other words, made herself a “hollow bone” to channel divine chi into my aura.

     The next day, when I was alone, I unexpectedly felt the same powerful healing energy flowing into me. I later asked her if she had somehow sent the energy to me from a distance, and she reluctantly admitted that she had. On the spiritual level, distance doesn’t matter, she claimed. We are all part of one universal energy field; within that field of consciousness there is really no distance between us. She also informed me that I would soon meet other people with amazing spiritual abilities.

     I have since met other people who send positive energy from a distance to me and others, and I have had the honor and good fortune to work with a few of them. Without even communicating in any way with one another on the physical plane, we have synced up spiritually to send positive energy to each other at the same time of day. We are empaths, so we intensely feel both positive and negative energy from other people. We each have a different spiritual modality and reside in different parts of town, but in our spiritual practices we each experience similar positive effects. I have also discovered that we even intuitively know when our subtle energetic support is no longer needed.

    Each of us, like the magi, can follow the star to the manger, where we find the powerful energies of healing and harmonizing love. It takes hard work and a lot of practice. Nevertheless, we can purify and establish harmony even in the face of daunting obstacles. 

     I saw a bumper sticker once that states, “Worship the Creator, not the creation.” I could not disagree more. The Creator is the Creation. All energy is holy. We can each connect with the Source through love for people, flowers, birds, animals, trees, divine spiritual beings, great art and literature and music. And we can connect with the Source by following our bliss—by exploring what we love. As a male in this society, I was conditioned to ignore feelings and display toughness, but I overcame that conditioning when I fell in love with people and nature and the arts. Toughness, I figured out, is great if you really want to be a sociopathic CEO or enjoy getting into stupid fights or are too afraid to reveal your feelings.

   Many people have experienced what a rock group once called “radar love,” a telepathic communication sent from a distance that stirs the heart or groin. The energy sent to me by my friends, however, is at an extremely high frequency, which is similar to the energy I feel when I connect with the Source and experience divinity through love for flowers and birds and trees and animals and people and spiritual beings. One of the most memorable experiences I have ever had is hiking through an area of great natural splendor and suddenly feeling a connection with the Source—and also suddenly feeling divine energy sent to me from a distance by a human being. Perhaps even a fraction of this profound sense of connection, experienced repeatedly by a core group of people, would be enough to transform the collective consciousness of humanity.

     I believe that the upheaval we are experiencing now is occurring mainly because old systems that lead to alienation and misery and the exploitation and destruction of individuals and groups and vast ecosystems are unsustainable and are beginning to collapse. We are now facing an opportunity to enter a new stage of evolution in which we become aware of the divinity of all life and can heal and cleanse and harmonize one another with divine energy, no matter where we are in relation to each other. In other words, we can experience "otherness" at a much higher level. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, we will collectively understand that we are connected more by consciousness than by the space that we occupy. We will develop reverence for the planet and for each other. But at this point spiritual pioneers must continue to clear away dense and harmful and limiting forms of consciousness so that others can find their way.

   “The Shore” describes a beach at Patrick’s Point, which is several miles north of Eureka, CA. When I was a kid, my family spent a week there in a tent trailer. My brother and I explored all the paths in the area even though it was pouring rain most of the time. One day, after hours of dashing along the trails, my brother and I around sunset found a path down to the beach. Suddenly he was gone. He had already ditched me several times that week, but this time his motivation seemed a little sinister since our campsite was far away and it was already getting dark.
   My family traveled all over California when I was growing up, and I never really paid much attention to where we landed or how we got there. When twenty years later I found myself on the beach at Patrick’s Point with my wife and daughter, I was thrown back in time. I had had no idea that we were heading back to the same beach where my brother had ditched me years before. Oddly, the beach seemed exactly the same, and I felt like I was simultaneously experiencing two different moments in time—in a timeless place.
   In the song, I wanted to focus on how over the decades the natural world can stay pretty much the same while a person in the same time period can be battered or broken by experience. All the while a sense of timelessness exists in the natural world that the soul can experience. It’s more than just a sense of timelessness, really: It’s a connection with what the ancients called the anima mundi, the “world soul,” within which everything is connected. Relationships change, horrible events disrupt lives, the physical body breaks down, but sometimes the human sense of time disappears and the soul feels connected to the subtle spirit of the earth and the cosmos and knows the underlying unity of all consciousness—which can bring peace beyond understanding to those who are suffering.

 All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Ithuriel's Spears and Lupine

AT SUNSET

Words and Music by Jim Robbins

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At sunset, strolling under the oaks,
we heard the rustling of grass
as though a snake were slithering
toward us. But no, the wings

of dragonflies were rustling
as their bodies looped
above the dwindling stream
in twilight. We rested a moment

on a rock as thirty gleaming bodies
wove through the air a foot or so
above the water, and we strained
our eyes to glimpse sapphire and turquoise

and ruby red. The other world
didn't matter anymore. The creek
and the oaks and the grasses
were alive with song.

An owl winged, mothlike, to a nearby oak,
perched above us, turned its flat,
oval face and peered silently
a long time.

Ithuriel's Spears, Fiesta Flowers, Fiddleneck

AT SUNSET

   Unexpectedly during meditation one day recently, I remembered creeping over Kaiser Pass, edging along the treacherous, single-lane road that requires drivers to hug the cliffside to let other cars pass. Feeling adventurous, I ignored the turn-off to Mono Hot Springs and came unexpectedly upon a small lake, no more than a pond really, where tules were flourishing next to the road. Across the lake a rock formation rose like the grandest, most formidable cathedral on earth. The place seemed eerily familiar, so I parked the car and stretched my legs. Suddenly, as I gazed at the lakeshore, I noticed a blue dragonfly, which transported me back to a moment in my childhood over forty years before. All of my stress fell away, and, like forty years earlier, I experienced pure being in a timeless paradise.

   As a child, I usually didn’t associate experiences with specific geographic locations, so I didn't know the name of the lake or its relationship to other places. I’m still surprised when childhood memories unexpectedly flood back to me after I encounter a creek or river or lake that I once haunted for a few hours. My father, in his never-ending quest for a divine fishing hole, had ended up at Ward Lake, a drive from Fresno of over three hours, early one summer morning. We must have left home during the wee hours because I woke up as he was parking the car, not long after sunrise. The first thing I encountered as I was dashing to the shore was a sapphire dragonfly hovering in the tules.

   Like all children, I had dreams that I believed were going to come true. Almost all, of course, have since disappeared. As I stood gazing at the dark lake as a child and as a man, I wondered uneasily why we choose not to stay in such timeless places. I concluded as a child that human society must offer something better. As a man, I was no longer sure. A place like Ward Lake puts a lot into perspective.

   The quiet lake and the huge trees and the massive rocks gave me the uneasy feeling that most of what we think and feel and believe and dream about is little more than noise, yet we play the same tune over and over in our heads as if the world depends on it. At Ward Lake the tune vanished, and for a moment I felt terrified. I longed to return to a place where I could hear the noisy tunes of human society. At that moment, the tree trunk that I was standing on reminded me only of death and chaos. I had a bizarre desire to clean up the humus and the fallen branches, to pull the dead, water-logged trees out of the dark water. I sighed as I stared at the awesome rock rising high over the lake, its reflection extending deep into the water. I couldn’t imagine a way of making the rock less intimidating, of making it something that I as a human being could subdue.

   I laughed at myself a little, realizing that I was experiencing an irrational desire to manage an ecosystem that contained its own inherent order. I wanted to recreate the place in the image of humanity, to restart the tune that I understood so well. Yet in the quiet, something inside of me said no, let it go, and once again I returned to a peaceful state of simply being. It seemed easy, as if all I ever had to do was make a conscious choice to let go of the fear of losing my personality, but I suspected that I wouldn’t be able to maintain that feeling for long.

Trail along the San Joaquin River

     The lake and the massive rocks and trees were imbued with a life that did not need humanity at all, which inexplicably troubled me. I strolled back to the tules where the blue dragonflies hovered and bobbed here and there. I remained still, conscious of my breath, letting go of the noise in my head, contemplating the otherness, as if I were meditating with my eyes open.

     I remembered encountering dragonflies all the time when I was a child, sapphire and ruby red and shimmering green, and it occurred to me that I had not encountered one in many years. Suddenly I missed them terribly. Where had they gone? Were their populations decimated by cultivation and pesticides and urbanization or was I just visiting the wrong places? I felt a profound sense of loss as I gazed at a blue dragonfly hovering nearby. I wanted to snatch it and hold onto it. Then I remembered that my father had died a few years after our trip to Ward Lake.

      Once again, a sense of chaos and death and the unknown overwhelmed me. I felt like a Puritan at Plymouth Rock facing the dark forests of an unchartered continent. I wanted to cut down the trees and level the ground and create a safe, comforting, glitzy civilization where suffering and death could be hidden away. I wanted a city to spring up on the hill.

     Yet the sense of timelessness again enveloped me. I felt renewed, like a child again, like my father was still fishing somewhere by the lake. I wanted him to remain there in the brilliant sunshine, dwarfed by the magnificent trees and rocks, his shining line deep in the dark lake. Of course, I knew he wasn’t there, but because in my mind there had been no passage of time, he was there, his body a still shadow in the dark water, the lake more sublime because of it.

Butterfly along Trail into the Gorge

     My watch snapped me back to reality. I had to head home to avoid driving the perilous single-lane road in the dark back to Fresno. I shook my head, suddenly feeling queasy, as if my inescapable need for human order was a chronic illness that always eventually blocks my connection with the timelessness within nature. I wanted to silence the noise in my mind for good and just listen to the quiet lapping of the water and feel the sunshine and the breeze.

   After I nearly died from celiac disease, I have experienced many intense memories of nature, like the one above, during meditation. For instance, if I wanted to, I could wander the trail down to the suspension bridge in the San Joaquin River Gorge in my imagination, envisioning every species of flower that blooms each spring along that trail. I could smell the scent of some flowers dominating the air along certain stretches of the trail and remember slowly inhaling their faint, rejuvenating breath at different times of day as they experience either sunshine or shade. 

   Or I might remember the dragonflies I have known as if they were the most brilliant jewels I have ever witnessed. There was a long period in our marriage during which trips to Watt’s Valley in the evenings brought us closer together, no matter what was happening in our personal lives. We were barely scraping by, and I was miserable due to my chronic illness, but we both found some peace there after we lost our fear and shifted our consciousness to the vibrations of nature and nearly always encountered one living jewel after another.
   In Watt’s Valley, we identified all the birds and flowers as the seasons came and went. We became so intimately connected with the foothill ecosystem that we knew where each species of flower sprouted from one year to the next. We knew all the birds that migrated through during the different seasons as well, including our favorites, the brilliant spring birds, orioles and tanagers and swallows and lazuli buntings. We saw wild pigs and wild turkeys and bobcats and coyotes and newts and frogs and turtles and snakes. One night we saw one pygmy owl after another on the road, their big eyes flashing before they suddenly leapt erratically out of our path. We never saw pygmy owls on that road again. Besides my family, this is what I remember most vividly during my meditations.
   In the song “At Sunset,” I focus on how at first while in nature you often experience fear. You worry about snakes and predators, but usually there is a moment, if you are out among the trees and grasses long enough, that a shift occurs and you can perceive the mystery of the ordinary creatures within the natural world. Dramas and irrational desires begin to seem strange and eventually vanish from your mind, and you recognize how extraordinary are even the most common forms of life.
   The owl mentioned in the song peers at my wife and me for a long time as if seeing the magic and mystery within us, which made it seem even more magical and mysterious and precious to us.