All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
RETURNING TO LIFE
Words and Music By Jim Robbins
Entangled:
Part Ten
The queen found out from one of her spies in the town that Simon had enlisted the support of the townspeople to heal the Princess, so the queen redoubled her efforts to make the Princess disappear. The Princess kept fading in and out for several days. Simon eventually realized that his plan would only work if he could find some way to heal the queen. He told the Princess that they both needed to imagine the queen as happy and whole, full of light and love and aware of their forgiveness. Simon and the Princess spent hours together imagining the queen free of negativity and full of abundance, harmony, and magnificence. One morning, Simon and the Princess looked at each other, knowing that the queen had been healed. Soon, the Princess returned fully to life.
After two weeks on a roller coaster ride, Katie finally stabilized and was soon taken off all medications. She was then transferred from the ICU to a lower floor where she could recover while under observation. She was able to walk a few feet and talk clearly, and move all of her limbs, with only some numbness on her left side. In a few days, she was transported to a rehab facility. She had returned to life.
I knew that Katie was experiencing both physical and spiritual healing, a belief that stems from a few childhood experiences. There are places where it doesn’t matter at all what you’ve done with your life in the little time you’ve been allotted, places where one moment you were a child and the next you're old and you realize you haven't changed much in the core of your being, places where you might be lost in a daydream and then suddenly feel powerfully connected to the Soul of the World. My Dad with his fishing gear spent much of his free time in search of these places, and when he eventually found one, I felt his soul quietly tune to the "Heartbeat of Mother Earth," the Schumann Resonance. As my soul tuned to the peace in his soul, I also experienced the harmony in the trees and grass and water and stones.
On a fishing trip one day when I was twelve or so, my brother and I searched together for a way down into the river canyon. Our Dad had already thrashed his way through poison oak and had slid the rest of the way down a steep slope, but my brother and I kept searching for an easier way. We followed a faint trail down to the edge of a cliff and stared at the river below. Then my brother dared me to climb down the cliff. He insisted so much that I finally began the treacherous descent. Halfway down I realized that I was in a potentially fatal situation. The incline was steep, almost straight up and down, and if I fell, I would hit rocks fifteen to twenty feet below. I panicked for just a moment and then treated the situation simply as a problem that had to be solved. With my senses totally engaged, I soon descended to the bottom like a seasoned mountain climber.
“Come on down,” I yelled.
“No way,” he muttered.
“C’mon, it’s easy!”
“Nope,” he replied. Then he disappeared.
Another time my brother and I were hiking, with him about fifty feet ahead of me on a trail that suddenly rose to a ledge about twelve feet above the creek. I was running to keep up with him and suddenly noticed him motionless at the highest point of the ledge. When I caught up with him, I suddenly experienced absolute terror before I could even sense any danger in our circumstances. I had, in fact, simply come into the range of my brother’s emotional sphere of influence, which immediately paralyzed me with fear. I looked around and discovered that we couldn’t climb up or down. We could only go forward or backward on a very narrow ledge. My brother was literally shaking, eyes wide with terror. When I was finally able to turn my gaze down at the creek, the water seemed menacingly far away, and I was certain that I would slip and plunge to my death if I moved even a tiny bit.
We both stood quaking on the ledge, unable to inch forward or even talk, for what seemed like an eternity. Suddenly, to my great surprise, my brother broke free and headed down the path without a word, leaving me alone on the ridge, still paralyzed. I don’t know how long I stood cowering there, but my Dad finally found me and coaxed me down the path. When I turned around, I couldn’t believe that I had even been afraid. I had experienced situations far more dangerous than that without even breaking a sweat.
I experienced, with both my father and brother, the little-understood ability to adjust the mind to the emotional and mental frequencies of other people. I felt my father’s deep sense of peace and harmony and my brother’s fear of heights. As a child in nature, unlike my father, I tended to be more concerned with playing than being meditative, and, unlike my brother, I never once felt climber’s panic while on my own, no matter how steep the cliff or treacherous the trail. Telepathy is the communication of thoughts and feelings through means other than the physical senses, involving mechanisms not currently understood by science. Ten years ago, despite my childhood experiences, I would have maintained the materialistic viewpoint that telepathy is a fantasy of the delusional brain, but in the past ten years, due to my spiritual practices, I unexpectedly became telepathic--not all the time, mind you, but often enough to know that we are connected on a fundamental spiritual level. Often I will be swept by a wave of emotion or hear a word or see an image from the mind of another person, and I know that I’m not delusional because more often than not I ask them what they are thinking and usually discover that my intuition was correct.
Most of us have thought of a person and then a little while later unexpectedly received a phone call from that very person. We tend to dismiss such occurrences as mere coincidence despite the mounting evidence in favor of telepathy. Unfortunately, the experience of telepathy is extremely difficult to duplicate for several reasons. First of all, it often occurs between people who are unusually close to each other, such as identical twins, or during moments of extreme emotion, or during spontaneous daydreams when the mind relaxes into a mental frequency that allows psychic connection. The attempt to produce the occurrence of telepathy at will presents a basic obstacle because demanding the effort creates an element of struggle that makes the appropriate mental state impossible. Because testimonial is necessarily the basic form of evidence, documentation gathered over decades of study is usually treated as merely anecdotal.
The belief in telepathy, however, is the basis for common religious practices, such as prayer and invocation. Uncountable people throughout history have believed that it is possible to connect through the power of prayer with subtle, imperceptible deities. A materialistic scientist therefore finds himself in the uncomfortable position of claiming that billions of people are essentially crazy.
Oddly, many rational people accept telepathy as an unassailable fact on the spiritual level--between the mind of a physical person and a spiritual entity--but dismiss as delusional anyone claiming that telepathy has occurred between people in the flesh. Stranger still, in some parts of the country, a man could lose his job for claiming that Jesus doesn't answer prayers, on the one hand, and on the other hand the same man might lose his job for claiming that he can read people's minds.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the experience of telepathy is sometimes compared to a “religious experience.” In other words, people sometimes feel when experiencing telepathy that they have slipped into a spiritual mode of thinking that transcends limited personal subjectivity. This suggests that there is a spiritual dimension that the human mind can access, a dimension that is not just “out there” but within each person.
The experience of telepathy, and many other things considered paranormal, flows from this imperceptible spiritual dimension, which accounts for why so many things cannot be explained nor explained away.
The phenomenon of telepathy between two individuals is closely akin to mass hysteria and mob mentality, both well-documented. In moments of crisis or intense emotion, a thought form can explode through a group, causing inexplicable symptoms of disease, such as vomiting, rashes, or fainting, or strange behaviors, such as uncontrollable laughter or dancing, or unruly conduct, such as violence or wild adulation.
A belief in the group mind is commonly held in esoteric spiritual orders. A group mind consists of a number of people tuning to specific mental frequencies, usually in order to contact the mind of spiritual entities. Here, we are treading on ground that hidden mystery traditions have explored for ages, and we encounter again the belief that thought, specifically a thought form filled with emotion, can influence individuals and large groups. In this case, it is believed that a thought form can create a frequency that exalts a person's mind as high as the angels. In the case of a group mind formed by a mob, of course, the thought form can reduce a person or a group of people to the level of the beasts, or lower.
On a personal level, if there is anything significant about me, it is simply this: I have transformed my emotional and mental frequencies from deeply negative to extremely positive frequencies through physical and mental purification and positive visualization. I remained mired in despair for the better part of two decades, then transformed myself into a person who for over several decades now has experienced peace and harmony on a regular basis. During those twenty years of despair I completely ignored the spiritual dimension, but for the past twenty years I have become far more intuitive than I could have believed possible, and I believe my transformation has ramifications for society as a whole because of our innate tendency to tune to each other’s emotional and mental frequencies, for good or ill.
My father died when I was a teenager. Around the same time, I began experiencing a debilitating, chronic physical condition that causes severe depression. I had no choice--with the grief and illness and despair, I literally had to establish harmony in my life to survive, a process that took over twenty years of serious attention, mainly because I had to do it solely by myself. First, I slowly eliminated everything from my diet that caused physical or mental disturbances. Then I went through a long process of mental purification. In other words, I started meditating and eliminated negative energies from the chakras, the energy centers within the aura. Soon, I unexpectedly began having visions of archetypal symbols that led me to the ancient symbol systems of the Tarot and the Tree of Life. The Tarot and the Tree reveal the archetypal facets of human experience and together offer the keys of ancient wisdom both to solve ingrained emotional, mental, and spiritual problems and to achieve higher awareness.
After my self-purification I have experienced over and over the effect people have on each other through thoughts and feelings. Intense negative emotions especially envelop me. I have, for instance, felt homicidal rage emanating from a person who did an excellent job looking like nothing was wrong. Usually strong emotions will "float" over to me during what appears to be a normal conversation. Perhaps the most unusual example regards an intelligent young woman who appears extremely well-adjusted. Six times when I had been waxing eloquent on some topic in the young woman’s presence, I suddenly experienced negative energy boring like a huge screw into my heart chakra, so quickly and intensely that I felt an almost overwhelming urge each time to lash out at the young woman. At first, I had no idea what was happening, and then I realized that the force she projected reversed the clockwise turning energy vortex of the chakra, an act that might have damaged my heart. My friend has a hidden and extremely disquieting ability to project powerful negative thought-forms in a way that can do serious harm to other people, an ability possessed perhaps only by shamans or true magicians. She might not even realize that she has the ability, which she might have developed in response to some recurring abuse or trauma in childhood, but I know also that she has caused other people to have a similar "irrational" reaction to her.
As I have mentioned previously, before the age of forty-two I had no belief at all in a spiritual dimension and knew nothing whatsoever about the occult or the paranormal, but after my visions of archetypal symbols and heightened awareness of other people's thoughts and feelings, I began doing some intense research on different spiritual traditions. I discovered that the Gods in different cultures throughout history are different versions of the same forces symbolically represented by the Tree of Life and the Tarot. I began treating the archetypal figures in Tarot cards, perhaps because they are more commonplace and human than the Gods in different pantheons, as "allies" and discovered ways that they could help me to banish negative energies and bring positive energies through into my sphere of influence--to invoke, in other words, the forces of spiritual harmony, abundance, and magnificence.
Our ally below is obviously no stranger to depression. I’m sure some of us can identify with this person’s despair.
Mars in 11 - 20 degrees of Gemini
Moon in Yesod, the Foundation (Ninth Emanation)
Th figure sits up in bed, hands covering her face. Nine swords hang horizontally over the bed, three of which, as she bends forward, seem to pierce the four chakras related to the spiritual dimension of the self: the crown, the third eye, the throat, and the heart. At first glance, our ally appears to be suffering from the effects of cruelty, which is a vice of Mars stemming from unbalanced force, or she might be suffering from grief, which is a common result of the constant change associated with the Moon. However, on the level associated with the element of Air in the ninth sphere, the influences of Mars and Gemini can also be felt on a deeper level. The scene suggests that a blockage of the life-force between the higher and lower chakras, the energy centers in the aura, causes the despair. Stress and trauma from dysfunction or physical illness or cruelty can close or block the chakras. Gemini symbolizes the dual nature of the self, the physical and spiritual aspects of the human being. She is covering her eyes, blinding herself to the spiritual dimension and its relationship to the physical dimension of the self, hence the blackness in the background. All levels of being are connected, and this is no different in the chakra system of the aura. The true power of Mars on the physical level is linked to a balance of the higher chakras with the lower chakras, the life-force flowing harmoniously throughout the whole system, both upward and downward. When a blockage exists between the spiritual and physical levels, the life-force on the lower levels, which includes the sex-life (associated with the Moon), is adversely affected, and weakness and psychological suffering can result. It’s no accident that the spiritual dimension is blacked out and the lower half of the body is covered. However, there is always hope. On the blanket are red roses, red symbolically associated with both Mars and romantic love. Also on the blanket are astrological signs, a reminder that the psyche always has the potential to balance the subtle life-forces and regain the health of both mind and body.
Why despair and cruelty? Despair can easily turn into cruelty, especially when fear is introduced. In times of crisis we tend, both individually and collectively, to believe someone else is to blame for our despair, and once we find a suitable scapegoat, whether a person or a group, we project our anger and frustration and hatred at them for causing negative feelings. This is often based on the erroneous belief that harmony can be established by changing or even eliminating types of people that the majority has labeled as "different" or "subhuman."
Fear is often both the cause of our denial and the reason for lashing out. Often the self finds it too threatening to identify the actual psychological sources of dissatisfaction or disturbance (usually the people close to us), so fear motivates people, even strangers, to band together and blame a person or group based on ethnicity, race, political affiliation, sexual orientation, or any of a host of other reasons.
The danger is the very fact that we are able to influence each other on a subtle level to the point of frenzy or paralyzing fear with thought-forms charged with intense emotion. In a split second we are capable of profoundly affecting each other on a subtle psychological level for good or ill. We can get so swept up in demonizing a target, whether an individual or group, that we are capable of leaping into extremely damaging conflicts without moral justification.
In order to adequately address personal and collective tendencies that lead to cruelty, we must first acknowledge the powerful, subtle psychological effects that we can have on each other.
I have discovered through my spiritual practices that we are able to control physical and mental health to a very large degree. The mind can purify the various chakras and energy sheaths in the aura surrounding the body, eliminating negativity, and that has a tremendous impact on overall health and well-being, which then has a positive effect on the people around us. The mind can eliminate, or "banish," negative thoughts and feelings and replace them with positive energies like the archetypal energies represented by the Tarot and the Tree of Life.
Like my father, for many years I have chased peace throughout the mountains. I have hiked through numerous watersheds on ancient Native American trails in remote areas where now only cowboys and determined hunters occasionally stray. The only predators I have encountered are coyotes and bobcats and a few mountain lions because the more intimidating predators like bears and wolves have already been cleared out by hunters and ranchers. I have gone on many adventures searching for wildflowers and birds, instead of fishing like my father, and finding evidence time and again of native cultures that were also "cleared out" a century or so ago. In some remote areas, I have found numerous Native American village sites with pestles still in the mortars of the pounding stones, and I have also discovered many house pits where huts once stood.
At first, I did not even realize that I was hiking on ancient trails, some perhaps thousands of years old, until I kept stumbling upon one native village site after another as I explored the mountains. Grazing cattle still follow the ancient trails from one water source to another and keep many of the trails distinct. I am amazed every time I discover a native site, and I can’t help but wonder why we as a people are not lamenting more about the genocide that occurred so recently on our continent.
After the genocide in Europe in World War II, of course, we have lived with the fear of global annihilation, and many other complex problems such as overpopulation and climate disruption continue to threaten to unravel civilization and the environment. Genocide a century ago is a haunting reminder that past is prologue, not one of the many immediate threats to survival, but I have realized due to a spiritual transformation that lack of resources is not the essential problem: lack of inner peace and harmony is the source of most, if not all, of our thorniest difficulties. We have enough resources on the planet and enough resourcefulness in ourselves to enable the vast majority of people to live satisfying lives. There are many paths to inner peace. A great gift that we can give to the world is to let inner peace and harmony ripple out into the world. Once we release the negativity within our minds and our aura, we can then continue to expand consciousness by building our own inner temple.
Once, when I was fishing with my father and brother at Dinkey Creek, I put down my pole and sprawled on a smooth stone. I was fourteen at the time, and I remember feeling stressed from a rough week in middle school. On the cool stone, as I gazed at the pine trees and listened to the stream, suddenly all tension slipped away--as if the surrounding trees were breathing tranquility into me, and my consciousness ballooned. The pine needles were glittering in the sunset, and I sensed the trees and I were part of innumerable fields of living, light-filled energy. I was totally inspired, as though a god had breathed into me, and I felt connected to all things.
My father turned his thumb toward me and muttered to my brother, “Why can’t you be more like him?”
My brother stared at me. My Dad seemed to be glaring at me. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I realized that my inspiration had somehow become apparent to them both. I felt like I was emanating light and love, but I was at a loss for words. Any attempt to explain my exaltation would only diminish it, and I didn't want to annoy my Father any more than I already had.
That was one of my first magnesium flashes of higher consciousness. Since then I have occasionally experienced an unexpected expansion of consciousness at strange times and places, such as two in the morning in my living room or nine in the morning at work. How I am feeling at the time before the exultation seemingly has no relevance: I can be feeling miserable, bored to death, exhausted, comfortable or uncomfortable. Only when lost in hyper-focus while painting or writing or composing music, or lost in the void during meditation, or lost in devotion during ritual have I experienced exultations similar to the moments of unexpected ecstasy.
I developed a thirst for inspiration at a young age. The flashes of exultation often left me with the sense that daily life was stale and dull, but in retrospect I realize that each inspiration provided an expansion of consciousness that never completely diminished. I eventually discovered that every time I made myself available to moments of inspiration--in nature, in ritual, in meditation, and through the arts, I opened the door a little more to higher consciousness.
Only when I began having visions of archetypal symbols that represent spiritual principles did I realize that these moments of profound inspiration were related to a state of being on the Tree of Life known as Beauty, the sphere of the Sun and the higher self. Since the term “higher self” has been so over used that I believe it now has little meaning, I am choosing now instead the term “inspired self,” which suggests the "immediate influence of God or a god," (from the Latin spiritus, breath, spirit) and suggests as well the inebriation of ecstasy, joy, exaltation. (Being “inspired” is similar to being “enthused,” literally “possessed by a god.”)
Recently during meditation I envisioned my soul radiating light like the sun: I felt free, without labels or limiting beliefs, without need for anything else. Then suddenly a golden plate and chalice on a white tablecloth appeared in front of me. A golden, equal-armed cross with a brilliant light around it floated to the right of the chalice. Finally, in my mind’s eye, I saw a golden crown on the white tablecloth. Beauty is the Sphere of the Sun, the source of light and life, and gold, which is incorruptible and does not tarnish, is the mineral associated with that state of being. The symbols in my vision reveal the magnificence, harmony and abundance within the human spirit. I also had an epiphany about why I was experiencing the vision: Cumulatively, the moments of inspiration expand consciousness until higher psychism is possible.
I consulted my dog-eared copy of The Mystical Qabalah. According to the author, Dion Fortune, in Tiphareth we find the archetypal ideas behind creation that have emanated from the higher planes. Fortune refers to Tiphareth as the “Treasure House of Images on a higher arc” while making this critical distinction: “but whereas the astral plane is peopled by images reflected from forms, the images of the Sphere of Tiphareth are those formulating, and as it were crystallizing out, from the spiritual emanations of the higher potencies" (1).
The lower astral plane reflects the forms within the human mind and the physical plane. The mind during moments of higher psychism in the Sphere of Tiphareth, on the other hand, rises above the lower astral plane to the archetypal ideas emanating from the higher states. Tiphareth (“Beauty” in Hebrew), is the transition point between the states of force and form and also functions as a point of equilibrium on the Tree. The astral forms of archetypal symbols in Tiphareth, such as the golden, equal-armed cross, embody the spiritual principles that emanate from the higher, formless Spheres.
The mind can only become prepared for this higher psychism through the expansion of consciousness that occurs through repeated experiences of inspiration. Fortune points out that the mystic is at first like a child in a humble manger, not like the Christ giving the Sermon on the Mount. The mystic, in other words, must first “build the Temple” through these moments of exalted and expanded consciousness. After each inspiration, the white heat of pure consciousness eventually diminishes, but “in the brief space of its lasting, changes occur in the temperament, and the mind receives new concepts and undergoes an expansion that never wholly retracts. The tremendous exaltation of the experience dies away, but we are left with a permanent expansion of personality, an enhanced capacity for life in general, and a power of realization of realities that could never have been ours if we had not been forcibly swung across the great gulf of consciousness by the momentum of ecstasy” (2).
Usually we spend our time in what Fortune calls “brain-consciousness,” the surface mind that addresses the demands of daily life. In a stressful capitalistic society, the effective use of brain consciousness is highly valued, to the point that any attempt to expand consciousness beyond the physical plane is often considered irresponsible, narcissistic, kooky, impractical, even unsafe. This reveals the essential conflict within a society that is both capitalistic and Christian: without the expansion of consciousness produced by inspiration, the individual cannot know the emanations of spiritual principle from the "higher potencies" in the Sphere of the Cosmic Christ.
Every human being can access the Christ-center. This requires sacrifice, which is the transmutation of force through a shift of focus, a different use of emotional and mental energy. This sacrifice is an aspect of the Mysteries of the Crucifixion, one of the two spiritual experiences of the Emanation of Beauty, the other being the Vision of Harmony--the realization of the harmony, magnificence, and abundance within the human spirit and within the cosmos, an understanding that occurs in the temple of exultation.
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