All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
Six of Wands: Lord of Victory
SMALL VICTORIES
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
I know a hero, someone who never gives up,
someone who instead keeps taking one step back,
then two steps up, someone
who keeps fighting for small victories.
She never stops struggling to be free
from the sickness, from insidious spells,
She keeps taking one step back, then two steps up.
She keeps fighting for small victories.
It has to be about small victories,
two steps up and one step back,
to win back her health, to win back
the freedom of her heart and mind, of her heart and soul.
She’s always believed in herself enough
to fight for wholeness and harmony.
Others may have goaded her
to not believe in herself,
but she refused to listen to them.
Others may have tried to make her feel weak and afraid
so that they would always have power over her.
She keeps struggling to find wholeness
through small victories, one step back
and two steps up until she wins back
her health, until she wins back
the freedom of her heart and soul.
Entangled:
Part Nine
The next day, the Princess faded in and out many times. Simon’s attempt to enlist the help of the townspeople had nearly succeeded. Something was still missing though. Simon meditated for a while and realized the Princess herself needed to imagine that she was completely back in the physical world. She needed to remember times when all of her senses were engaged, like when they were hiking next to the river. She needed to remember being immersed in her surroundings, one with the earth and air and water and light. Combined with his love for her and the help of the townspeople, she might return completely.
Katie kept stabilizing and destabilizing for another week. The nurses kept mentioning that recovery was all about small victories and how amazed they were by Katie’s resilience. When Katie was conscious, I encouraged her to imagine herself as happy and whole and engaged with the world around her.
Once, after I had scrambled down a trail about five hundred feet into a secluded foothill valley and then had hiked about a mile and a half along a creek in search of Native American artifacts, I suddenly knew, without a doubt, that someone was breaking into my car--even though the car was parked far, far beyond the range of my physical senses. Alone in the woods and helpless to stop the crime, I plopped down on a rock and bitterly lamented for at least twenty minutes about all the evil in the world--without any evidence at all that anyone had even touched my car. I just simply knew, in a way that no one could explain--or explain away. In the same way I knew that Katie was going to be all right.
That day in the foothills, after I found my way back to the car about an hour and a half later, I found that someone had indeed smashed a window on the passenger side of the car and had opened the glove box. On the way home, I was furious as the cold air blasted me. I soon forgot about my intuition as I drove home from that remote foothill valley.
Like many others, I have experienced inner voices, visions, and intuitions that transcend space and time, wise inner voices as clear as the voice of another person, symbolic visions that have revealed spiritual principles, and powerful intuitions about people and events. Since these voices, visions, and intuitions have occurred sporadically over a period of forty years, and since they are not scientifically explainable nor even socially acceptable, they have tended to become lost in my daily concerns. Many predictions by my higher self, my holy guardian angel, have come true, the cumulative impact of the various communications creating, for me at least, an undeniable truth.
The Greeks believed the inner voice of intuition and enlightenment came from a person's “daimon.” Some believe, like Plato, that the daimon is a kind of spirit that is separate from us, a spirit that adopts a person at birth and follows that person even after death. Plato calls it, “the daimon which has received us as its portionment.” The ancient idea of the daimon, therefore, appears to be analogous to the guardian angel, which has been described as either a hidden dimension of the soul or separate from the soul, an intermediate power of divine order, or a god of the second rank, as characterized by Maximus of Tyre (1).
This god or angel, I believe, is the highest dimension of the psyche, an unpredictable intermediary between the human personality and the divine Source.
The Romans translated the word daimon as “genius,” from which we get the word “genie.” The Romans also viewed the genie as a personal guide whom one can contact through prayer, trance states, visions, and dreams, or experience as an inner voice, intuition or compulsion. The higher powers and abilities of each human being are attributed to his genius.
Each organized unit of nature, moreover, has a genius, known as a genius loci, or “spirit of place.” Believing that the genius is the unique spirit which exists in every living thing, the Romans worshiped the genius of the river, the tree, the family. For the Romans, each and every God has a unique genius, which is how the Gods can be distinguished from each other. Sacrificing to the genius of a God or local deity was a way of appeasing it and harnessing its power (2).
Each person, moreover, has a unique genius--a kind of driving force which must fulfill its own destiny--forcing an individual to become that which he or she is really meant to be. Ignoring the genius means not only denying the power within but also denying the ability to realize one’s potential. The daimon often creates the inner compulsion to do things seemingly without concern for the consequences. It might compel a person, for instance, to give up a career to become an artist or sacrifice his life as a martyr. The daimon doesn’t care what kind of money a person makes or what kind of reputation a person develops. A person who heeds his or her daimon sometimes feels pulled this way and that--even deeply violated. Heeding the daimon can lead to a life of poverty in pursuance of a dream. Choosing not to heed the daimon can lead to a worse fate, however: a sense of failure accompanied by feelings of emptiness or regret--no matter how successful a person might become in a worldly sense.
Another time, even though my hikes were almost always focused on finding Native American artifacts, I had an overwhelming urge to climb a mountain that I knew was probably not connected to any Native American village site. As I climbed higher, the slope became steeper and clouds grew darker. A thunderstorm was on the way. I was also worried about rattlesnakes in the tall grass and the rocks since I had seen several rattlers on the road. Yet whenever I paused to ask myself if I should climb higher or go down, a voice in my head always replied, “Higher.” Finally, my way blocked by a tall outcropping of rocks covered by poison oak, I sat down to rest on a smooth stone at a vantage point that enabled me to see the mountains for miles. Suddenly, I was totally overwhelmed by a sense of the spirit of the place and recognized that the aborted hike up the treacherous slope was simply for the purpose of connecting with the spirit of the watershed. After feeling an unexpected, powerful connection with the spirit of place, I felt no need to go higher, so I flew down the hill as rain soaked me to the bone.
I, of course, have no way of measuring the experience or in any way proving that I connected with the genius loci. Western societies tend to ignore or dismiss as fantasy or psychosis the mysterious compulsions and communications of the daimon, or guardian angel. However, according to a Theosophical source,
The belief in daimones as mediating spirits between gods and men was customary in ancient Athens and sacrosanct in Vedic India. Socrates regarded the intervention of the daimon – what Gandhi called his 'inner voice', which sometimes spoke to him and remained silent at other times to his deep despair – not so much as a command laid down on the human spirit by an external power as "an absolute law of the spirit itself,” to quote Hegel's terms for the sacred task of the Delphic oracle. To make this interior voice wholly subjective is to destroy its spiritual character and distort the position claimed by Socrates and Gandhi. For a few pre-Socratic writers and for some Indian mystics, the daimon or devata was no more than the genius or over-brooding spirit unique to each person. If we adopt a facile rationalist attitude and take the daimon merely as an inflated metaphor for a familiar psychological process, thus denying it all transcendence and regarding it simply as a pathological oddity, a hallucination or a paranoid or hysterical symptom, we are, in fact, denying that it is an instrument of any meaningful communication and leaving Gandhi and Socrates, and many of the great mystics, enclosed in themselves….(3)
The Qabalists believe that each person has a Holy Guardian Angel, a higher self in touch with divine knowledge that transcends our limited physical senses. For the Qabalists, the supreme spiritual experience of The Kingdom, the material plane, is the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This simply means that the higher self communicates with the conscious mind through intuitions, inner voices, and symbolic visions.
Why is it important to connect with your daimon, your guardian angel? For one thing, it can save your life. It can lead to a state of optimum physical and mental health and a sense of connection with the divine.
My connection with the holy guardian angel began when I started meditating, purely to relieve stress, at the age of forty-two. I did not believe in a spiritual dimension and knew nothing about the daimon or the Tarot or the Tree of Life, or anything else considered occult, or “hidden.” The last thing I expected at the time was a spiritual experience; in fact, for several decades before then I had doubted the existence of a spiritual dimension. But I started to meditate, usually when I woke up from a nap, emptying my mind completely. Unexpectedly in my mind’s eye, I started envisioning pearls in the joints of my fingers and a rainbow of wheels, known as chakras, spinning in front of me along my spinal cord. I noticed impurities in the vortices and mentally wiped them clean. Some of the spinning wheels were harder to keep clean than others, however. I kept mentally draining the blackness from my heart and emptying trash from my crown chakra, for instance, but the blackness and the trash kept returning, so for a long time--in fact, until this day--I continue to purify my aura.
One day when I finally felt purified, I began having visions of symbols, such as a simple mandala comprised of a golden, equal-armed cross with angels at each end, each angel in a differently colored robe; a gray, horizontal figure-eight above my head; and a pure, white flower with countless petals above my head. (I had thought at first that the flower was a rose, but a voice in my head whispered, “Lotus.”)
I continued meditating and noticed in my mind’s eye a patch of black under my right arm. I mentally drained the black energy from my body and filled the area with blue, yellow and brilliant white energy. Several days later I pressed a round ball of white flesh, the size of a musket ball, painlessly through a slit under my arm. Weeks later I envisioned another black streak, this time under my left arm. After doing the same visualization, mentally draining the negative energy and filling the underarm with positive energy, a large round boil surfaced under my arm. Several days later another round ball of flesh, along with a teaspoon of pus, painfully oozed out. The same process occurred two more times over the period of a year, my left underarm forming a boil and white growths oozing out--after I had mentally drained the black energy from my aura.
From then on whenever I envisioned a streak of black anywhere in my aura, I mentally drained it away into magma and engulfed my aura with blue, yellow and white energy, and soon I began to feel healthier than I have ever felt before even though I was almost fifty years old. I continued to drain the black energy from my heart whenever I envisioned it there and slowly felt more and more joyful, experiencing a radical innocence that I have not experienced since childhood, and rarely even then.
If one goes through a process of mental self-purification in meditation to clear negative energy from the subconscious mind, the higher self can then reveal to the conscious mind problems with the mental, astral, and etheric energy "vehicles" or “sheaths” in the aura surrounding the physical body, just as the higher self can then also communicate to the conscious mind profound spiritual principles through archetypal symbols, inner voices and intuitions. The idea of connecting with the guardian angel or daimon is ancient, but I believe that the “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel” has potential applications in terms of mental and physical health that make it more than a spiritual understanding: It is a way to heal oneself and others on all levels of the psyche as well as a way to “clear a path” to the divine.
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