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

The Devil

DREAM OF DEMONS

Words and Music by Jim Robbins

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Leathery, withered skin; frayed, ragged wings;
emaciated, bat-like faces. You might see demons
in your mind’s eye before they attack, especially
if they wish to terrify before they shake or choke

or prod or poke or hold you down to ravage the heart
or ruin the gut. The smarter ones
avoid showing themselves at all: They only bring an aura
of malice and oppression to amplify feelings of fear,

hatred, guilt, anger, failure, loneliness, and desolation
to assist you on a descent into a deep, dark hole.
The worst don’t even cause pain or negative feelings.
They just flood your aura with horrible, dark energy

that eventually shows up as a fatal illness.
They love to attack the vulnerable during times
of illness or depression or loneliness or grief.
You cannot fight the monsters. That only causes

more chaos and negativity, which is what they feed on.
Your best bet is to neutralize them with invincible forces
of harmony and love in your soul, which connect you
with the powerful, healing forces of the Archangels.

PENDULUM DREAMS:

Part Five

   My parents, as I was growing up, were almost always cold or distant. I asked the pendulum if my parents had resented me. Answer: yes. I asked if the government had forced my parents to adopt me. Yes. My father, I remembered, never once spoke about his experiences in the army. In fact, I once noticed his uniform hanging in the closet while he was getting ready for work, and I asked him about it. He glared at me with both shame and anger on his face, commanding me never to look in his closet again. Had my father done something improper or illegal while in the army in WWII? Yes.
   When I was only eight, an uncharacteristic feeling of disconnection cut through me so profoundly that I believed I might die of loneliness. I began engaging in negative self-talk. Fifty years later, pendulum in hand, I wondered if the sense of disconnection had been caused by the experimental drugs. Yes. But I suddenly had an intuition that there might be another reason as well.
   So I blurted out a question, the answer to which will no doubt cause you to question my sanity. According to my pendulum, the experimental hallucinogens also opened up my psychic senses so that I became more sensitive to the subtle energies around me. 

   Few people, of course, believe that spiritual entities intrude upon our reality. In this society especially if you admit that you have encountered ghosts, demons, or angels, you might end up as a text-book case of schizophrenia in some loony bin. Demons and ghosts and angels exist, however, and some demons and angels have great power and intelligence, far more than humans, in fact. Humans are like amoebas in comparison to Archangels. Most humans would not be able to recognize an Archangel any more than an amoeba would be able to recognize a human.
   Believing that subtle spiritual realms don’t exist is a pathological denial of reality that is perhaps the most common form of collective insanity in our culture, yet I, of course, would be diagnosed as having some form of psychosis if I told any doctors or psychologists about my experiences. It may therefore come as a surprise to a great many people that a significant percentage of “sensitive” people have learned how to work with spiritual entities, for good or for evil. This society’s denial and ignorance about such spiritual realities is, no doubt, a constant source of amusement to those who work in secret to ruin souls.

   Once I had a vision of the God Shiva dancing by the sea in the moonlight. He began spinning around so quickly that his arms resembled a circle of light, which soon transformed into a sparkling galaxy. Suddenly I was in outer space surrounded by innumerable galaxies of different colors and shapes and sizes. I floated peacefully in space for a while and then suddenly in my vision the cosmos collapsed to a single point of light, which grew smaller and smaller until I could barely see it at all. Floating in the blackness of space, I was not sure what to do, so I opened my eyes, and the vision ended.

     The more I muse upon this vision, the more I understand my insignificance. On the other hand, I also understand the incredible power of human consciousness: humans can view the cosmos from the perspective of God. As humans we have many opportunities for connection with different forms of life and consciousness, from the smallest flower to the vast, flowering cosmos itself. We can connect with the Source through love for people, nature, the arts, spiritual beings…for all energy is holy. But so often we find ourselves shrouded in veils of negativity.

      Before the pandemic, I was a member of a group that gathered every other week for a spiritual practice known as Deeksha. The master practitioners in this group took turns laying their hands on our heads to channel heavenly golden energy for a few minutes into the crown chakra of each one of us. Like the divine chi channeled by Reiki practitioners, Deeksha is an extremely high frequency energy that heals and balances and relaxes those who receive it. If a person continues with the practice of Deeksha long enough, the divine golden energy eventually rewires the brain to return the person to a state free of negativity, comparable to the brain of a new-born child. The liberated individual who reaches this state of innocence still retains all memories but can experience life without oppressive emotional and mental burdens.

     My Reiki friend also performs Deeksha and kindly invited me to one of the group meetings. From the beginning, I found that the energy had a profoundly calming effect on me, but I didn’t know much about the Deeksha tradition, except that it originated in India. At the third or fourth meeting, while my friend was laying her hands on my head, I had a vision of a blue man with more than two arms who was dancing on the seashore. At the end of each session, we would take turns describing our experience, and when I disclosed that I had envisioned a bluish dancing man with multiple arms, one of the practitioners blurted out, “You just described Shiva.”

     I went online and discovered that numerous forms of Deeksha exist, one of which is known as “Shiva Deeksha.” Shiva is generally known as a god of destruction. Before the pandemic, I had six visions of Shiva over the course of several months while participating in Deeksha sessions, and at the time, I confess, I didn’t understand what the visions signified. I eventually realized that the god of destruction can also be viewed as a god of liberation—from negativity, from the past, from limiting beliefs about who and what we are.

     In one of my visions, as Shiva was dancing, I was again suddenly floating in space, surrounded by innumerable galaxies. Then I was unexpectedly flying through redwood trees near the ocean, and I was unexpectedly happy to be back on earth. I realized then that as a human being the earth is more significant to me than billions of galaxies floating in the blackness of space. 

   The Kabbalists believe that the physical plane is “the world of action” where we learn to bring our consciousness and the world around us into balance and therefore manifest one of the primary qualities of the Source of all Creation: harmony. As humans, we have the opportunity to transmute negativity into harmony through grace, one of the most powerful forms of action in the cosmos, but not an action that normally occurs in outer space.

     

Poppies in February

     One thing I know for sure: modern humans have to release much personal and collective negativity before we can hope to become aware of spiritual realities. If we can release all that negativity, however, we can feel the underlying unity of all consciousness and the divinity of all life.

     I know, in this period of history it is impossible not to be haunted by the past. The liberation of concentration camps in Europe, where millions died so horribly, took place fifteen years before I was born. The dropping of the atom bomb, which instantly revealed the potential for total annihilation of the planet, occurred fifteen years before I was born. In California, where I have lived my entire life, an unspeakable genocide slowly came to a close about five decades before I was born. Ecocide soon followed in the San Joaquin Valley as dams killed the rivers and wetlands—a decade or so before I was born. In the past couple of centuries, genocide and ecocide have gone hand in hand.

     Somehow most of us can manage to live with the realities of ecocide and genocide and climate disruption and the potential annihilation of all life on the planet, but eventually, most of us reach a crisis point in our personal life that pushes us to seek pathways to higher awareness. Negativity can become a crucible, a test designed to bring about change or reveal our true character. My crucible has always been a chronic illness that has undermined me physically and emotionally: For most of my life, an undigestible protein in gluten has broken apart the tight junctions in my small intestines so that undigested food particles and waste and toxins have entered my blood stream, overwhelming my immune system and causing inflammation in various parts of my body. No doctors were ever able to identify the cause and dismissed my physical illness as hypochondria or a mental health problem (which was an easy out for them since chronic poor health often leads to depression). 

     Even though many people are now aware of the adverse effects of gluten, grocery store shelves are still weighed down by products filled with a protein that the human body cannot digest. Eventually I experienced severe digestive issues and atrial fibrillation (which might have caused a stroke or heart attack) every time I ate even a miniscule amount of gluten. I attempted to go gluten-free but discovered that gluten exists in just about every product, even chicken, thanks to a plumping solution that increases its weight. The American diet was killing me, but everyone believed that the illness was all just in my head. People often ignore a problem by blaming the victim, so I nearly fell victim to what amounts to a socially acceptable form of negligent homicide.

     At one point, I tried meditating to relieve stress. I have a psychic friend who claims that astral bugs often crawl up her arms when she lays her hands on the people she’s healing. Coincidentally, during meditation, I had visions of numerous headless spiders attached to me, and even though I had repeatedly cleansed my chakras with my mind, I could see blackness in my heart whenever I scanned my aura with my inner eye. Eventually, I got rid of all the spiders in my aura through the process of mental purification, but the blackness kept flooding my heart, which worried me since I was fifty-five years old, and my father had died from a heart attack at that age. Finally, just as I was going completely gluten-free, I went to my friend the Reiki master, and she helped eliminate the black energy from my heart. Since then, I have never felt healthier, physically or emotionally, in my life.

     Yeah, yeah, visions of demons and Shiva and headless spiders and blackness in my heart, sounds pretty crazy, I know. But it might seem ironic to some that the ability to sense demons and other entities is a textbook symptom of psychosis. After all, I only developed psychic abilities after releasing all negativity from my energy field. And I have only become whole mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually after figuring out how to neutralize the dark forces that have plagued me for years.