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

Ten of Cups: Mars in Pisces

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TIMES LIKE THESE

Words and Music By Jim Robbins

Right now our hearts are lamps of the spirit
that light a path to our roots in Eden.
It's time like these
our bodies spread the light of the Source.
It's time like these
our hearts light up the heavens on earth.

There are times when we have felt like less than half,
times when our hearts and minds have almost shut down,
times when we have felt like no one would ever find us,
but it's times like these
we dance with the angels in our hearts.
It's time like these
we feel the sun in our souls.

We are light. We are love,
for we are one with the Source.
We are blessed. We are blessed,
for we are one with the Source.

Right now our spirits clear a path
to the moon and sun and stars.
There have been times
when we have felt like bubbles
drifting in the wind.
But we have always kept dancing toward the light.

It's time like these
light dances on the facets of the heart.
It's time like these
our bodies spread the light of the Source.

ENTANGLED:

Part Eleven

   As the Princess was recovering fully, the queen was changing her evil ways. The queen, herself healed, no longer felt jealous of her stepdaughter and made no objection when Simon and the Princess announced their engagement. Within a decade, Simon and the Princess became king and queen, and they ruled wisely and compassionately. Their rule as king and queen seemed almost magical. The kingdom prospered under their rule, and the people loved them.
   Katie remained in rehab for several weeks, making a complete recovery, except for a little numbness in her left foot, which eventually disappeared. All the doctors and nurses were amazed by her miraculous recovery. Most of the other stroke victims were older and experienced great difficulty moving or talking. Katie, fortunately, had brilliant doctors, strong spiritual support, and an incredible will to survive. She was able to walk all the way out the front door of the rehab center by herself. The nurse who escorted Katie out to the front door mentioned that she had never seen anyone else walk out of the rehab center before….

   Before the Creek Fire incinerated almost everything living and dead in the forest around and above Shaver Lake, Tamarack Creek helped to weave the threads of my soul together. Stunning wildflowers once bloomed profusely in the meadows in July and August when the lower hills are brown and threatened by wildfire: Tiger lilies and columbine and larkspur flourished with tapestries of lupine, paintbrush and arrow-leaf tansy. Snow still covers these parts in mid to late June. Before the conflagration, when the snow melted away, wherever there was water, life sprang forth, jewel-like and fresh. 

   One sniff of a tiger lily, and my soul felt free as rivulets fed roots and streams, which meandered down to rivers that searched for an ocean. Then the water eventually evaporated and returned as snow and rain. As I sat next to the creek, feeling this cycle as though it were part of my own circulatory system, with dead trees and branches strewn on the ground, I understood why there had been so much cognitive dissonance in my life.
   Before the fire, when I sat on a rock in the sun at 7,500 feet, I felt like a renegade. Who I am or what I have accomplished didn’t matter at all, very much like when I was a child. What mattered was the energy of the sun inflaming my solar plexus and pounding through my veins, the source lighting and warming and feeding the cells of all the plants and trees around me. I was part of that huge, radiating fire, wild and sentient and intense. Without it, no life on this planet would have ever existed.
   My soul is likewise a sun after all negativity has burned away; I can see it in my mind’s eye when I envision the subtle planes during meditation and ritual. At times, that is all I am, a conscious point of intense white light that resonates with the fiery life generated by the sun. When I sat by the creek, I could barely glimpse the sun if I squinted, but I knew that its light manifested in the world all around me.
   I am a fool. As I was growing up in Fresno, 7,000 feet below in the San Joaquin Valley, over the years I was conditioned to believe that other life forms such as plants and animals aren’t really alive the way humans are--they don’t have feelings or consciousness--and I believed it. Now, I remember that next to Tamarack Creek, I sensed consciousness all around me, in the sunlight and the flowers and the towering trees, in the birds and the chipmunks, even in the water and the rocks. Now I cannot believe that the sun that gives life to everything on the planet is devoid of consciousness, that the earth providing a home for that life is also without consciousness, that the incredible plants and trees within the biosphere do not have their own forms of consciousness.
   I was also conditioned to believe that I am right-handed when I am really left-handed. I was conditioned to believe that the vast majority of the foods that weigh down grocery shelves are good for me when the American diet has been killing me. I don’t know why I am surprised that I have been lied to about nature: In a capitalistic system, considering nature lifeless makes it easier to commodify it and kill it and exploit it without remorse, just as it is profitable for capitalists to lie to people and convince them to consume what is toxic to them.
   I have also been conditioned to believe that people in this society who claim to see ghosts or sense subtle forces are highly suspect, kooky, possibly even insane, yet after going through a process of self-purification, I have grown more aware of spiritual dimensions, regularly sensing subtle energies, whether they are the feelings and thoughts of other people or the consciousness of plants and animals or the presence of supernatural entities. Either my reality is a lie, or what is generally considered reality in this society is such an over-simplification that it ends up being a twisted lie. I can no longer believe in a materialistic view of the cosmos. Alone at Tamarack Creek once, I officially declared that I have moved beyond social conditioning and am now a member of the fellowship of the sacred light.
   When I was a child, I was quite good at following directions. I smiled at the teacher a lot and gave one hundred percent in school and during sports activities. I had high hopes that I would accomplish great things. Then I became ill, and that is when I first started questioning authority and drawing negative subtle forces to me.
   Without health, prolonged misery causes the psyche to break down like the body’s organs and immune system during the onslaught of disease. On the subtle levels of the psyche, if you are healthy, you draw positive, solar energies to you, but if you suffer physical distress for years or continuously have negative thoughts, you eventually become a magnet for dark, insidious forces. Depression and misery attract dark forces like a seabird with a broken wing attracts hordes of crabs. It’s as if the cosmos conspires both on the subtle and physical levels to eliminate anything no longer healthy enough for the world.
   I have discovered that foods that cause allergic reactions affect me on a subtle level: I feel depression for no reason other than that I have eaten a piece of bread or something else with gluten in it, and the ensuing psychological distress over time attracts harmful subtle forces. While I was meditating during the self-purification process, for example, my subconscious mind revealed hundreds of subtle, headless, black spiders attached to my aura as well as black blobs and polyps, all of which were feeding off of my energy and maintaining psychological distress. After clearing my mind of these entities, my depression waned; I stopped hearing critical voices in my head and unexpectedly began having visions of symbols that reveal spiritual principle, such as the lemniscate, the thousand-petaled lotus, the golden, equal-armed cross. My higher self began communicating with me.
   For me, evil forces are not like the demons presented in movies. They are usually invisible, but my subconscious mind presents an image of them in my mind’s eye. I am not clairvoyant like some psychics. I have only once glimpsed a spiritual being for a moment. I am, however, clairaudient and clairsentient: I have heard them distinctly, and I have been shaken and nudged and touched and enveloped and held down by them. Most of the time I simply sense their presence. Some seem to be discarnate humans, but demonic spirits have an aura of malignity. Some are probably no more intentionally vicious than a virus or a bacteria, but many of them, at least in the way that my subconscious presents them to me, appear alarmingly malicious.
   During meditation, in other words, I discovered how demons and gods and angels are born: Those who are sensitive to subtle energies can tune their mind to lower or higher energies and symbolic images that personify them rise into the conscious mind. In other words, the subconscious mind often gives form to the forces the way that it gives form to forces and ideas in dreams: through symbolism. The force is real, but the image that rises into the conscious mind is symbolic.
   Celiac disease, an incurable, chronic physical illness, has attracted insidious forces to my psyche for the better part of four decades. I have never dabbled in the dark arts, but because of this disease dark spirits have attacked me and negative entities have latched onto my psyche. One night, for instance, just before I began manifesting the worst symptoms of the disease, a demonic spirit, cold, heavy, and invisible, enveloped me, paralyzing me for about fifteen minutes. I wasn’t afraid because this had happened to me a few times before, and I knew that if my soul radiated light like the sun, I would mentally repulse it. The simplicity of that might sound absurd, but I have discovered that if a dark spirit cannot latch onto fear or negativity in the aura and instead encounters inner light, it is either repulsed or loses interest. Before it departed, however, it pressed down on my stomach, the part of the body that celiac disease ravages the most, for about a minute, as if to indicate that worse things were in store for me. Soon after that, I began having irregular heartbeats caused by gluten--for hours at a time.
   In Fresno, people tend to question your sanity if you claim that you have experienced malicious or demonic spirits. Even claiming that you have a soul is enough to make some rational people flee in terror and avoid you. So much of “rationality,” though, is about appearances and agreement about what is true. What can be perceived by the physical senses is “real” because a group of people or a device has provided some sort of verifiable proof. Then a larger group of people agree that the proof is real, which can lead to an even larger number of people accepting it without question.
   If your job or your future survival depends on agreeing with the prevailing beliefs of your community or society, fear becomes a factor in whether or not you will even entertain different ideas or experiences of reality. If a group of people have some investment in a particular reality, if they benefit from it, for instance, then other people are gently or forcefully encouraged to conform to that belief. Anyone who does not conform risks being demeaned or vilified or worse by other members of the group. In a hierarchical society, those who are higher up on the ladder tend to ignore or dismiss anyone who challenges the reigning belief system. Those who are lower on the ladder often ridicule or attack the person who is challenging the system.
   When relying on the five senses, agreement about the reality of a rock or a tree is fairly easy, but what a physical object really is on the subatomic level has become more and more difficult to determine. According to chem1.com, “Our intuitive view of the ‘real world’ is one in which objects have definite masses, sizes, locations and velocities. Once we get down to the atomic level, this simple view begins to break down. It becomes totally useless when we move down to the subatomic level and consider the lightest of all chemically-significant particles, the electron....The electronic structure of an atom can only be determined indirectly by observing the manner in which atoms absorb and emit light"(1). Whether light is made up of particles or waves depends on who or what is observing it. Agreement about a subjective state or a subtle force, of course, is even more difficult.
   How did those in power benefit by conditioning me to believe that there is no spiritual dimension or that there is only one way, one savior to honor and one devil to fear? 

   I remained oblivious to the god-like potentials within me. If I thought about it at all, I tended to believe that the spirit world does not exist or that it exists in a realm far beyond me where some god or savior is waiting to judge me for my sins and mistakes, as if I were given a reliable guidebook for addressing each and every problem in this increasingly complex world. I did not know, until I began having visions during meditation, that I could tune my mind to the god-like potentials represented by the Tree of Life and develop them in myself. I did not know, while working at shit jobs, that I could move beyond social conditioning and learn to become more psychic and speak my truth effectively and create beauty and manifest the Christ force and become a courageous peaceful warrior to neutralize evil--a magnificent spiritual being ruling the domain of my own mind. With that knowledge, it's a lot harder to remain a compliant unit of labor.
   Once when I was in the boy scouts, a friend "accidentally" lit my tent on fire in the middle of the night, and the back of my head burned while I was sleeping. The next day I was in excruciating pain, but I had no way of surveying the extent of the damage. I asked a small group of friends if anything was wrong with the back of my head, and they all said, no, nothing’s wrong--because they didn't want to get in trouble--and I believed them. When I got home, my mother noticed a large patch of red and black skin on the back of my head immediately. In other words, despite the agonizing pain, I was duped because everyone in the group seemed to be in agreement. The ability to deny the subtle or invisible, such as an emotion or a force or a spiritual entity, is far easier.
   I now often perceive the world around me with a different set of senses, what I call my soul senses, which in my case means that I see, feel, or hear forces that others do not perceive. And I am well aware that when I say that I perceive subtle forces, I sound crazy to people in a materialistic society.
   There is an old saying: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In a capitalistic society, and especially in the San Joaquin Valley, home of the rawest forms of capitalism, the one-eyed man is insane. By claiming that I perceive forces that others cannot verify, I am no longer conforming to reigning beliefs about reality, and no doubt when powerful people read this I will become forever unemployable, but I did not choose to break out of conformity: my very survival depended on it. I have been conditioned as much as the next guy to rely on appearances to make my way in the world. My father, for instance, would often declare that the world is all about appearances (or some variation thereof). My father was well aware that we live in a culture where people are often judged quickly and decisively based on their appearance and their worth as a unit of labor. My father used to say that if you focus on appearances, you’ll end up all right; you’ll have a good job and be able to support a family. Because of my chronic illness, my compulsions to be creative, and my perception of subtle forces, I have discovered that maintaining appearances while remaining true to myself is an arduous challenge. Struggling to remain true to oneself is not attractive to other people who are desperate to fit in.
   In older cultures, many adepts, or “gurus,” believe people from Western societies are too spiritually immature to take on as students. In Fresno, CA, I have had to deal with spiritual realities without assistance from a guru or anyone else. I had to "break on through to the other side," so to speak, by myself. I suppose that I would have preferred to live a life based on appearances; instead I have had to rely only on myself to weave together threads of experience to understand the truth about the forces behind appearances. I know that radical evil exists, just as I know that higher and more exalted forces exist than people in this society generally acknowledge, and they are not all associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition.
   I discovered, after envisioning spiritual symbols during meditation, that all forces symbolized by authentic spiritual traditions over the centuries are represented on the Tree of Life, a composite symbol that has been handed down from ancient times. All the symbolic representations of these forces, including Gods and Angels and demons, fit on the Tree (the demons assigned to a state  of unbalanced force known as the Qlipoth). In other words, I discovered that I am not alone in my perception of spiritual dimensions.
   Each Emanation, or state of being, on the Tree of Life contains a virtue--an ideal, balanced use of its energy--and a vice--a potentially damaging, unbalanced use of its energy. In the sphere of the intellect known as Hod, for instance, the virtue is truth and the vice is dishonesty. When climbing the Tree of Life, I have discovered that it is extremely important to strive for the ideal in each sphere. If I am glamorized by appearances or caught up in illusion, I cannot understand the virtue within each of the higher spheres. In fact I would not know the spiritual dimension at all because I wouldn’t be able to see beyond the physical plane to experience subtle forces and comprehend spiritual principle. The Emanation, or state of being, “above” Hod is the sphere of nature and the arts known as Netzach. If I did not live in truth, I would not be as affected by the beauty of nature or the great works of humanity and not as compelled to create beauty myself. I know that if I did not live in truth, I would have been unable to experience the Vision of Harmony and the Mysteries of Sacrifice in the state of being above Netzach known as Tiphareth, the Christ center.
   Living in truth, the virtue of Hod, is one of the most difficult things a person can do in this society. I have struggled over the years to know the truth about myself mainly because of the misery caused by chronic illness. During a long process of experimentation I figured out that I am allergic to eggs, milk, and wheat and eliminated them from my diet, but I did not, until recently, realize how seriously gluten was threatening my health. For far too long I remained ill, no matter how much I experimented with my diet. After awhile I developed a heightened awareness of evil as black subtle forces assaulted me.
   According to Beth Beurkens, M.A., a wake-up call “may come to us involuntarily, tearing the fabric of daily life. Accidents, illness, loss, and misfortune can all have a spiritual dimension to them. The loss of a career, a serious illness, a near-death experience or the death of someone close may all serve as turning points for rethinking the purpose and meaning of our lives. Feelings of disconnection, disorientation and suffering often accompany the inner call to a spiritual path.” She goes on to say that “emotionally challenging, sometimes life-threatening crises are similar to the calls that indigenous shamans receive. They may be the beginning of the initiatory process”(2). My daughter's stroke and miraculous recovery might end up being her wake up call, just as my chronic illness and my visions during meditation were my wake up calls. As I mentioned, I managed to survive by purifying myself physically and mentally, with the added benefit that I became more psychic. It’s second nature for me now to perceive dark energies and spiritual taints with my subtle senses--in myself and other people.
   There are spiritual taints in places where you least expect them. I feel them, and I can see them in my mind’s eye, not because I want to or because I am biased against anyone in particular, but because they simply present themselves to me. For instance, one day I saw in my mind's eye a "hive" of spiders above a bed in my house. I shuddered and soon forgot about it. A few years later, my daughter described a dream in which spiders were dangling down from a "hive" above the bed and crawling all over her. Coincidentally, she was at the time sleeping in the room where I had "seen" the astral spiders. 

   Another time, I stepped into the office of a person at a local college one day and immediately sensed something was terribly awry despite all appearances to the contrary. The man, whom I had met only once before, was strikingly handsome and genial and did an excellent job revealing how to operate a computer program, but I could see in my mind’s eye that some kind of black slime was floating in currents all around his office. He was nice enough to me, but I was in the awkward position of knowing that he had attracted an evil taint into his sphere of influence. I couldn’t ignore it, but I couldn’t say anything about it without sounding insane and unemployable. The man, by the way, turned out to be a "slime."
   As I have mentioned in a other posts,  sometimes I am physically affected by a person’s antagonistic thoughts. For instance, one of my wife’s friends appeared pleasant when around us both, but she kept hurling hateful subtle energy at me that literally felt like a large screw twisting with great force into my heart chakra. I had no idea at first what was happening until I realized that it only occurred when she was visiting us and when I was talking. I have rarely felt anything so damaging on a subtle level before or since.
   I think it’s true that the best priests have known the worst evil. I can detect spiritual taints because I have experienced the blackness of evil, but  unfortunately I can’t discuss this in most social situations, and so far I have not been able to help anyone understand what kind of psychic damage insidious forces can do, which is unfortunate because they can be as harmful as any physical disease. Certainly spiritual taints can be more long lasting. I eventually found some people, however, who have described to me their own experiences with evil, some of which are very similar to my own.
   I must confess that before I developed this sensitivity, I was often quick to demonize individuals or groups (Republicans and corporate CEO’s, for instance) while I remained oblivious to the presence of the evil beneath appearances. Despite living in a nation with a long history of genocide and slavery, I used to downplay evil as merely a label that we place on aberrant behavior or as a form of treatable insanity. Even if evil existed, I reasoned, a person could remain so morally superior that he or she could remain untouched by it. I’ve discovered, though, that with all the evil in the media, in corporations, in politics, and with all the taints in daily life, maintaining spiritual balance is a struggle that requires constant vigilance and dedication. For me, self-purification is the only effective way to keep evil at bay. The more negative energy I eliminate from my psyche, the more I can see beneath appearances. More importantly, I have also found ways to neutralize evil to create balance.
   I suspect that thanks to the spiritual taint associated with my illness, I have also drawn several extremely negative people into my life. Once, I drove with my wife to a friend's house to feed his cats--my wife was afraid to go alone. While waiting for her to finish providing the cats with food and water, I had the overwhelming sense that someone was hanging out in one of the back rooms of the house. Sure that I would find a transient squatting in the house while our friend was on vacation, I tiptoed toward the back bedroom. The closer I got, the more certain I was that some angry, hateful person was hiding in the house. I approached the doorway to our friend's bedroom with some trepidation, but when I peaked into the room, to my surprise I didn’t see anyone. I searched the closets and under the bed without finding any evidence of another person, the whole time feeling like I was being watched. As I was leaving, I turned to take one last look and felt a kind of energy emanating from the corner of the room that I can only describe as demonic. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but now I realize that our friend had probably attracted this evil through his own thoughts and feelings. Soon after that experience in his house, whenever I saw him I felt a homicidal rage emanating from him even though he was very good at maintaining appearances.
   Before the fire, Tamarack Creek for me provided a sharp contrast to modern society. The San Joaquin Valley where I live, over 7,000 feet below, has some of the worst air pollution in the nation. Since I lived in L.A. until I was eleven, for most of my life my body has been contaminated by toxins in the air. In addition, I now have to eat organic produce and drink purified water or I get physically ill. Worst of all, I experience irregular heartbeats for long periods if I ingest even a smidgen of gluten. It has taken me twenty years of experimentation with different foods as well as a long process of physical and mental purification to return to some semblance of balance in my life. 

   My mother died from a stroke. My daughter almost died from a stroke. My father died at the age of fifty-five from heart disease. I know that I could die from a stroke or a heart attack if I continue to eat gluten, an indigestible protein that affects everyone who eats it to some degree.
   Humanity is experiencing a world-wide crisis due to overpopulation, climate disruption, economic meltdown, the pandemic, pollution, ecosystem loss, species extinction, weapons proliferation, the potential for nuclear war and the rise of fascism. Call me a fool, but I believe that these crises will become humanity’s wake up call. After centuries of building to these crisis points, we will no doubt take many years to reestablish equilibrium. It took me many years to purify myself and overcome my illness--only after I had reached a point where I had one choice: change or die. We will no doubt as a species experience several agonizing periods where we have to move beyond social conditioning and break out of conformity in order to deal rationally and effectively with large-scale challenges on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels.
   One day after purifying myself, I envisioned the color pink in my heart center. I was startled but remembered that the color pink is prevalent during Valentine’s Day. I checked the color code of the Tree of Life for the colors associated with the heart center and discovered that pink is the color that represents the highest form of spiritual love. That day, as I was strolling by my wife, I envisioned the same color in her heart center as well. Perhaps once we have purified ourselves and dealt with our crises and brought balance back into our world, we will be able to see that color in the heart of every human being.

(1) http://www.chem1.com/acad/webtext/atoms/atpt-2.html
(2) http://www.shamanicuniverse.com/shamanic-initiation.html