All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
The Lovers
DANCING WITH THE FLOWERS
I explore the forest to claim hillsides for my soul,
so many roots and stalks and mossy rocks,
so many petals and leaves and wings,
so much vetch and lupine, so many red maids and poppies,
and look an albino blue dick bobbing with its purple clan
and these shooting stars with fluttering petals,
and golden fiddleneck swaying above so many blue eyes,
and hidden by shadow, the first Chinese purple houses
in this living tapestry, and I can’t escape the subtle shock of love
as the fragrant breath from jewels awakens
my hidden eye and I envision
a golden-equal armed cross on a pyramid and suddenly
I sense immense peace drenching the hills and I know the Source
of everything is inside me
and maybe these tiny white flowers
are fairies that just want to make me dance,
so let’s dance, let’s dance, let’s dance….
PENDULUM DREAMS:
Part Fifteen
When I was 42, I mentally purified my chakras and experienced a spiritual awakening. To eliminate negativity completely from my aura, I also spent many hours in meditation forgiving people. Now, I practice a ritual, known as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP), which purifies my psyche on all levels. Imagine a conscious mind free of negativity. Imagine emotions and a subconscious mind free of darkness, and a clear will free of distractions. Imagine being able to use the mind, the emotions, and the personal will without any psychic obstacles or disturbances. Imagine feeling centered and one with Universal Consciousness—which includes feeling peace beyond understanding, freedom from fear and negativity, compassion for all life. Imagine feeling this most of the time.
I realize now that before my spiritual awakening, I used to dwell on negativity most of the time. I was the poster child for the effects of capitalism on body and soul. While believing that I was eating the healthiest diet in the world, all the while, besides consuming pesticides and other harmful chemicals, I was ingesting, like everyone else, an indigestible protein that was breaking apart the tight junctions in my small intestine, allowing toxins and undigested food and waste into my bloodstream. My immune system could not fight off all the foreign invaders, so inflammation occurred throughout my body, and I remained chronically ill. The Russian Roulette with diet is sometimes played out over decades, slowly ravaging the bodies of hapless individuals with no connection to one other, and most people, including most doctors, are either unaware of the cause or blithely ignore it. Unfortunately, if you yelp from the rooftops that contaminated, unhealthy food has killed a large number of people in our society, you are labeled a wacko, which allows the powerful elites who control the food supply to get away with criminally negligent homicide.
Politicians, captured by corporate donors, have allowed cigarettes, alcohol, toxins in food and air and water, guns, legal drugs, imperialism, and our regular diet to kill untold millions, with little more than a few whimpers from the masses. Now, the elites seem happy to let Covid-19 keep the masses in a panic. So many politicians, used to pretending that the free market will solve everything, end up paralyzed by real problems, like the pandemic, climate disruption, the death of democracy. They have grown used to relying on their corporate donors, for whom the public good is an impediment, to tell them what to do.
Their corporate donors don't want to take the simple steps necessary to solve our worst crises. The elites don't bother themselves with the public good. Their only concern is making a profit. The for-profit health care system and the wealthiest top few percent are making a killing from the pandemic, which could have been curbed quickly by widespread testing and quarantining and other rational measures, such as lock downs in targeted areas. For instance, with a population of nearly a billion and a half people, China has managed to keep Covid-19 deaths down to just over twenty-eight thousand people (https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn) while the United States, with a population of just over 330 million, has allowed over a million seventy thousand people to die from the virus.
As long as Covid-19 rages, the masses experience fear, which the elites can use to divide the races and economic classes and justify a fascist crackdown when the time is ripe. The elites could have long ago curbed climate disruption by shifting away from fossil fuels, but corporations are not done making money hand over fist at the expense of the future of the entire human race and the biosphere. Democracy and truth and our ecosystems die by a thousand cuts as the elites continue to divide the country through lies and misinformation and alternate realities and inflation. (Little known fact: corporate elites set prices, not Democrats.)
I wish to dwell on the horrors of capitalism just a tad more. An indigestible protein in gluten can be found in just about every food on grocery shelves. Since the protein cannot be digested, consumers are all harmed to some degree. Scientists have known this for decades, yet the government has done little or nothing to remove gluten or other toxins from this nation’s diet.
I nearly died from the effects of gluten. My digestive system literally began shutting down—I couldn’t digest most foods—and my heart went hay wire when I ate even a miniscule amount of gluten. Over the years doctors had considered me a hypochondriac, and the people closest to me had believed that I was to blame for my inability to act happy and healthy. My physical symptoms and depression were both considered psychological. I eventually eliminated gluten from my diet, and I am now healthy and free of negativity.
Nowadays the President is saying that we should not believe what we see and hear—we should only believe him. Having been fed for our entire lives a steady diet of illusion and lies by the media and those in authority, believing only him has not been a problem for a surprisingly large number of people. Some people, however, must see through the lies or die. For instance, the American diet almost killed me: I know that many of this society’s lies are extremely hazardous to the health.
Many years ago, I held my grandfather’s hand as we climbed through golden grass up a hill above the picnic area. My grandfather and I were both radiating golden light. Neither one of us said a word, and in a silence that crickets made more profound, I felt immense peace emanating from the earth, which ignited a euphoria in me that I had never before imagined possible. Golden light flowed from the grass and the trees and the rocks and the earth as we headed back down the hill.
After the family piled into the van, I clearly heard a disembodied female voice state with great assurance, “Everything will be all right.” Frantically looking around, I could tell that no one else heard it. Startled, I suddenly sensed that I was hearing the voice of a goddess—even though I was only three years old and no one had ever told me anything about gods or goddesses. For a moment, I felt a little uncomfortable that something supernatural would need to comfort me about my future, but soon I was experiencing again such bliss that I remained still, hoping to hear the voice once more, and feeling such boundless love for the rocks and trees and bushes that we passed that I wanted to remain there forever.
After I tested positive for Covid-19, I drove out to the foothills where twenty years before I had traveled in springtime with my wife and our dog Pepi, who was only a puppy at the time. That day twenty years ago, after I parked the car, and we got out to stretch our legs, Pepi squeezed under barbed wire and leaped maniacally through fiddleneck and popcorn and miniature lupine until he was sopping wet with dew.
Twenty years later, I parked the car in the same turnout, and as I stood remembering Pepi’s exuberance, I felt enveloped by peace. Suddenly tears came to my eyes. One Sunday night a few years ago, when he was sixteen and a half years old, Pepi had struggled to stand up, took two steps on wobbly legs, and urinated on the hardwood floor. An hour later he died in his doggy bed, right next to my bed. He had been my friend and hiking companion for over a decade and a half. As I grieved for Pepi, I gazed down the road and suddenly felt bewildered by the end of my marriage (which had inexplicably lasted thirty years). After the unexpected shocks of grief, as I stood gazing at the fresh green winter grass, I was again enveloped by a peace beyond understanding as well as by an unexpected sense of freedom.
Suddenly I remembered the voice of the goddess that I had heard when I was three years old, and I suspected that what I had believed was a goddess might instead have been the world soul, the anima mundi, described by ancient philosophers as an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet—what some consider the unifying force of the universe. As my mind shifted away from grief and I felt centered again, I sensed something even beyond peace and freedom: a profound sense of unity that transcends trauma and war and injustice and loss. Immersed in tranquility, I understood then why I could feel peace and freedom despite my personal history and the history of humanity: in oneness with Universal Consciousness, which can unexpectedly envelop us in nature, we are free of negativity, transcending our worst collective and personal nightmares.