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

Fairy Lanterns and Wood Stars

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THE HOLY SPIRIT AND DISASTER CAPITALISM

   Once, in a vision I was strolling in a soft-blue monk's habit on a stone path through an enclosed garden. In the distance I could see a stone statue, which I suspected was religious in nature. As I approached, I saw a statue of Jesus on the cross, and I knelt down, but when I looked up, to my surprise, the statue had transformed into the Virgin Mary.
   This vision occurred while some friends and I were “chakra toning,” a New Age technique for stimulating the energy centers of the aura; in other words, we sang or hummed the musical note associated with each primary chakra for an extended period without stopping, from the root chakra to the crown, a total of seven in all. The toning session begins with the note corresponding to the lowest chakra and proceeds up the scale without interruption to the highest chakra. By the sixth note, after humming nonstop for about thirty minutes, I had achieved an altered state of consciousness through hyperventilation.
   I was surprised by the vision for several reasons. First of all, I have never worshiped Christian icons, and before then I had mainly experienced visions of symbols associated with the Tree of Life, the sacred glyph of the mystical Qabalah. Even more surprising to me, in the vision I was a monk in a monastery garden. I had entertained the idea of becoming a pagan priest but never a Christian monk. Moreover, I was wearing a hooded robe of the purist soft blue, which both intrigued and confused me, because I thought that monks only wore black or brown or white robes. Before then, I had never imagined kneeling myself before the Virgin Mary or any other feminine deity, an act which I interpreted as a show of willingness to sacrifice myself in some way. The very act of becoming a monk, of course, requires sacrificing a worldly life for a spiritual one. Donning the robes proclaims detachment from the ornaments and distractions of the world.
   I told my friends about the vision but soon forgot it since the symbolism seemed boringly conventional. At the time, I did not know enough about the complex symbolism of the Tree of Life in the Western esoteric spiritual tradition to truly understand the vision. Finally, after many spiritual experiences and over ten years of study, the meaning of the vision, which is more Qabalistic than I had initially imagined, has grown much clearer.
   Without even knowing it, for most of my life, I have manifested the archetypal energies of the Goddess, no matter the circumstances. In the vision, I was worshiping the celestial Goddess, the feminine principle of creation, and revealing my devotion to Her. Though strange, the vision seemed appropriate to me because of my devotion to the arts and the natural world from childhood on, but the vision revealed a deeper level of meaning that can only be understood in the context of the Tree of Life.
   There is an old saying in the Mysteries: “All the Gods are one God, and all the Goddesses are one Goddess, and there is but one true initiator.” In terms of the Tree of Life, that means that the feminine principle shows up as different Goddesses on different levels, or “paths.”
   The Tree of Life reveals the evolution of the cosmos from the finest spiritual energy to the densest physical manifestation through ten primary states of being known as Emanations, or Sephiroth in Hebrew. Each Emanation within the cosmos emerged from the previous state of being and eventually emanated the next. The first three states contain the basic principles of creation, for instance the duality of the masculine and feminine states and the existence of unity within multiplicity, but remain outside of manifestation. The Virgin Mary is symbolically associated with the third Emanation on the Tree of Life known as Understanding, in a dimension above the Abyss.
   The celestial Virgin, the archetypal feminine principle above manifestation, therefore experiences immaculate conception, and gives birth to a savior God, the “Son” of the Trinity manifested on this plane. Understanding, the Emanation of the celestial Virgin, is the primal womb of manifestation from which all form originates, hence its association with Saturn, with stone, and with the sea. The third Emanation, though outside creation, ushers in the lord of all terrors. The word Mary comes from the Hebrew word marah, “bitter” or “bitterness.” The great sea of evolving life is bitter: Whatever is born must die.
   The feminine principle, as I mentioned, is associated with other Goddesses on different paths on the Tree, most notably with Victory, the seventh Emanation ruled by Venus—the sphere of nature, beauty and the arts. I was born under the sign of Aquarius, which on the Tree links the Emanation of the Moon known as the Foundation with the Emanation of Victory, each of which emphasizes different aspects of the Goddess. 

   In my vision, though, I was worshiping the celestial Goddess. I had already manifested the energy of Venus through my art and adored Demeter through my love of nature. I had experienced the energy of the Moon through meditation and the arts and had worked for Ma'at through my efforts for truth and justice. In terms of the Tree of Life, the vision made perfect sense: I have sacrificed my personality to manifest the energies of the Goddess in different ways.
   Several connecting paths on the Tree of Life, including the Path of Gimel, the Path of Daleth, the Path of Teth, the Path of Lamed, and the Path of Tau, also reflect aspects of the Goddess, so the adventurer on the Tree of Life has the opportunity to meet the Goddess at many points on the spiritual journey. In the archetypal hero's journey, the meeting with the Goddess represents a stage in the adventure when a person experiences a relationship that has the power and significance of an all encompassing, unconditional love. Also known as the sacred marriage, the union of opposites, the “meeting” may take place on a purely psychological level, representing the unification of the self during which the hero begins to see himself in harmony with all creation.
   A psychic, about a year before my vision, told me that my aura is soft blue, which may partially explain why in the vision the monk's habit is blue. Renditions of Mary portray the Queen of Heaven and Earth and the Great Sea in blue also. My monk's garb in the vision is, on one level, an emblem of my adoration for the Goddess. Pure, soft blue is also associated with the spiritual level in Wisdom, the sphere of dynamic, masculine energy opposite Understanding; in that way my vision symbolically connects the primarily masculine energy of the celestial God with the energy of the celestial Goddess.
   According to Dion Fortune, an authority on the modern Qabalah, the bible, which is essentially a Qabalistic book, contains God-names that pertain to the different Emanations on the Tree of Life (1). For instance, all references to the Father concern the manifestation of the Source known as Jehovah in the Emanation of Wisdom; all references to the Son apply to Beauty, the Christ-center; and all references to the Holy Ghost, the feminine principle within the trinity, correspond to Yesod, the Foundation, the Emanation associated with the Moon. From the Foundation evolved the Kingdom, the physical plane. The Holy Ghost attracts archetypal spiritual forces like a magnet to the Kingdom, the material world. The dance of the Gods, feminine and masculine, is the dance of the archetypal energies of one Source through different dimensions of the cosmos, energies which ultimately manifest in the physical realm.
   The paths of the Goddess bring peace and harmony and a sense of oneness with all creation. Only after I started meditating and envisioning spiritual symbols did I realize that the feminine force goes by different names, World Soul, Holy Spirit, Goddess, and that one aim of occult spirituality is to contact this great force and experience its powerful influence—and also contact through its influence other great forces that in Christianity go by the name of the Son and the Father of the trinity.
   Recently I experienced an epiphany about why, during an extended period of meditation, I had a vision of a golden, equal-armed cross. In the vision, the golden cross floated in a deep, blue sky, and at each end of the cross an angel hovered, each angel in a colored robe, one yellow, one red, one blue and one white. This was one in a series of visions of archetypal symbols, all of which, I eventually discovered, are associated with the Tree of Life, the great composite symbol of the mystical Qabalah. As I have mentioned before, the visions came as a total surprise: Before I began meditating at the age of forty-two, I was oblivious to spiritual symbolism in general, so the full meaning of the symbols that I have envisioned has sometimes taken me a long time to understand.
   According to Dion Fortune, the brilliant 20th Century Qabalist, Beauty, or Tiphareth in Hebrew, is a point of transition or transmutation between the planes of form and formlessness, and the Foundation, or Yesod in Hebrew, is a subtle plane of form directly “above” the physical plane.
   Even though I was unaware of it at the time, the vision of the equal-armed cross and the angels revealed the basic structure for rituals that involve the spiritual energies of the Holy Ghost and the four archangels representing the elements that form the background energies of manifestation, the basic structure, in other words, of the banishing and invoking rituals used by occult lodges. Since her book is so dense that at first it seems written in code, it has taken me years to unpack the meaning of Fortune's Mystical Qabalah. In what first seemed to me merely a passing remark, Fortune mentions that the occult lodges worship the Holy Ghost, associated with Yesod, the Foundation, from which the physical universe emanated (2). In a previous section, Fortune reveals that the Holy Ghost is the feminine aspect of the trinity (3).
   These two key points have profound implications for Christianity and society as a whole. One of the goals of personal mysticism is communication with the Holy Guardian Angel, or higher self, which is connected to the divine core of being and transcends space and time. The mystic, as Fortune points out, begins in the humble manger, not on the Mount (4), so the first communications from the higher self come through Yesod, the Foundation, the state of being associated with the Holy Ghost and the feminine principle of creation, in visions of archetypal symbols and voices. The composite symbol of the Tree of Life itself, which represents the unseen forces in the collective consciousness of humanity, is a gift from Yesod, the subtle realm that reveals spiritual principle through symbolic form.
   Higher psychism is the domain of the Son, Tiphareth, the Christ center: The subconscious mind, in other words, first accesses spiritual principle through archetypes and symbols in Yesod, the subtle plane of form above the physical plane. Beauty, the Christ center, is the sphere of the Sun, of blinding illumination, where form dissolves in light. Only after shaking free from the physical plane and making initial contact with the Foundation and experiencing spiritual principle through visions of symbols can the mind begin to make sense of illuminations from the higher planes. The mind slowly builds, piece by piece, an inner temple with symbols representing spiritual principle, which makes comprehensible the experiences of illumination and exultation that swing the mind beyond the Foundation into the blinding sphere of the Son, the center of cosmic equilibrium, harmonizing love and spiritual inebriation.
   According to Fortune,

Illumination consists in the introduction of the mind to a higher mode of consciousness than that which is built up out of sensory experience.... Unless, however the new mode of consciousness is connected up with the old and translated into terms of finite thought, it remains as a flash of light so brilliant that it blinds. We do not see by means of the ray of light that shines upon us, but by means of the amount of that ray which is reflected from objects of our own dimension upon which it lights. Unless there are ideas in our minds which are illuminated by this higher mode of consciousness, our minds are merely overwhelmed, and the darkness is more intense to our eyes after that blinding experience of a high mode of consciousness than it was before. In fact, we do not so much change gear as throw the engine of our mind out of gear altogether. This, for the most part, is what so-called illumination amounts to. There is enough of a flash to convince us of the reality of superphysical existence, but not enough to teach us anything of its nature. (5)

   Before I knew the Tree of Life even existed, I had during meditation envisioned many of its symbols. Eventually I realized that these symbols have enabled me to translate spiritual principle into “terms of finite thought” so that illumination would not merely blind me. The symbols reveal not only spiritual principle but, in one instance at least, the basic structure of practical magic that connects the practitioner with powerful subtle forces, such as the Holy Ghost and the Son of the trinity as well as Archangels and Gods and Goddesses fashioned by the human mind to represent unseen subtle forces throughout the ages. Contemplation of the paths of the Tarot on the Tree of Life and of the symbolic representations of the Gods is an effective way of translating spiritual experience into comprehensible ideas.
   The Annunciation, on one level, symbolically suggests this process. The Annunciation is the announcement by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive the Son of God. Gabriel told Mary to name her son Yeheshua, meaning "YHWH is salvation.” The Archangel Gabriel in the Qabalah is assigned to the Foundation, the sphere of the Holy Spirit: Through the feminine principle, the first conception of the Son—the recognition of the higher self—occurs. The higher self then can link up with the macrocosm, the cosmic consciousness of the Father. In fact, the God name of Beauty is “Eloah va Daath,” which can be translated as “God manifested in the mind.” The feminine principle, the Holy Ghost, elevates the mind into the superphysical, into this greater illumination.
   As Fortune points out, through the type of consciousness associated with the Foundation, “mystical experience gradually builds up a body of images and ideas that are lit up and made visible when illuminations take place” (6). In order to build this temple of images, symbols, and ideas illuminated by higher modes of consciousness, the mind must be open to spiritual influences, which requires a passivity and a receptiveness associated with the feminine Holy Ghost and the Foundation. One must go deep into the subconscious mind, below worries and desires and fears and frustrations, to experience the astral treasures with the psychic senses. Spiritual development, instead of just being a series of magnesium flashes of illumination and exaltation, is a gradual expansion of the mind, a process that is mapped out by the Tree of Life.
   Before I began having visions, I was a materialist, believing that only the physical universe exists. To understand my visions, however, I was forced to expand my idea of the cosmos. I had also experienced accurate premonitions and intuitions which revealed that some part of my psyche can transcend my brain and physical senses, but I had simply forgotten or dismissed them—until I began having the visions. When I started piecing the moments of illumination together, I discovered that it is helpful to think of the cosmos as consisting of many types of energy in one vast fabric, from the finest spiritual vibrations to the grossest physical matter, and that as an extension of the cosmos, my being also contains those energies, hence the paranormal experiences of nonlocal consciousness that have occasionally surprised me over the years. At the “higher” end, the energies are formless, evolving into planes of form, the physical universe being the plane of densest matter. We experience “nonphysical” or subtle planes of form in the imagination when we dream at night or daydream or have visions of symbols. When we simply know something is true through intuition, consciousness is operating on a higher, formless plane, rising from Beauty, the sphere of the Son, to Wisdom, the sphere of the Father, and in the Book of Creation, the Sefer Yetzirah, Wisdom and the Crown are equal.
   Immersing myself in nature, the realm of the Goddess, is one way that I began to open myself to the Holy Spirit and the illuminations of higher consciousness, at first unknowingly, then intentionally. The beta mode of consciousness, the dominant mental state in this highly competitive society, allows intense focus on the external world but blocks access to subtle spiritual influences, which is why for me at least there will always tend to be a basic conflict between the driving forces of capitalism and the subtle forces of the spiritual dimensions, why, in fact, I lived forty years in a spiritual desert. The affairs of business channel the mind away from spiritual frequencies. In a predominantly masculine, patriarchal, capitalistic culture, a barrier remains: Attaining Christ consciousness requires receptiveness and a fair amount of passivity, both qualities associated with the feminine.
   Dion Fortune states that a religion without the Goddess is halfway to atheism. In the Qabalah, the masculine and the feminine as well as the physical and the spiritual are polarities that allow the One to manifest as the Many. To vilify, exploit, or misuse the physical or the feminine is to blaspheme the Source of all creation. By demonizing feminine, passive, receptive states of the mind, patriarchal religions and societies block access to the Holy Ghost, thereby effectively establishing a barrier to the other forces of the trinity. One can experience the illuminations of the Son, the Christ force, but cannot fully understand them without experiencing the feminine state of the Holy Ghost in the Foundation—and, let us remember, the Son shows us the Father. Perhaps that is why so many Christians love the Virgin Mary and Saint Francis of Assisi, the great soul who loved all creatures, who empathized so much with the Christ and the suffering of humanity that he experienced the stigmata.
   One of the places where I have often experienced the Holy Spirit is the San Joaquin River Gorge, an ecosystem that was almost destroyed by a dam at Temperance Flat. In an example of an economic development described by Naomi Klein as “disaster capitalism,” which results in a redistribution of wealth from the public sphere into private hands (7), farmers in the San Joaquin Valley used the drought as a way to “take” public lands for private benefit even though a large percentage of the water created by a new reservoir would go to water-guzzling crops such as almonds in a semi-arid region (the biggest crop in the San Joaquin Valley is almonds, and each almond takes over a gallon of water to produce), as well as to other commodity crops and fodder crops that have no business being grown in a desert. For ensconced private interests, a dam would save the economy because those with wealth, land, and the means of production would have the opportunity to continue business as usual. If the dam had been approved, the private interests who benefit would not have been required to replace unique public land with another public park or to compensate the public in any meaningful way for the loss of land, nor would those private interests be forced to change their unsustainable practices (8).
   The bottom line of capitalism dominates. Based on my experience in the political realm, I've discovered that the public's opportunity to connect with the spiritual forces within nature is rarely, if ever (I am tempted to say “never”), a concern to those with power and money or to the politicians they influence. Approval of the dam would simply be one more example of how capitalism effectively blocks connection between the individual and the Holy Spirit, and by extension with the Son and the Father, revealing once again a basic conflict between Christianity and capitalism.
   The feminine brings forth physical life, and since whatever is born must die, the feminine also ushers in the King of Terrors. Physical life is corruptible, always subject to the vagaries of time and the infirmities of sickness and old age. But to the Qabalist, “the natural is but the dense aspect of the spiritual”(9), the outer robe of concealment that covers the inner robe of glory. All life, including plants and insects and reptiles and animals, is spirit manifested in matter. Everything dies but rises through regeneration. Spiritual beings exist everywhere around us in physical forms that sometimes ravish us, sometimes amuse us, sometimes repulse us, sometimes terrify us. The false dichotomy that presents physical energy as impure and spiritual energy as pure suggests that at the heart of patriarchy is the fear of the subtle emotional, sexual, psychic and spiritual power of women, a fear that has manifested throughout the centuries as witch hunts and as an emotional disconnection from the Holy Ghost.
   In the Tarot, the equal-armed cross, which is called by initiates the Cross of Nature and represents power in equilibrium is included in cards that represent aspects of the Holy Spirit: Judgement, the Ace of Cups, and The High Priestess. In the Tarot, color has great symbolic significance. In the Ace of Cups the cross is black, in Judgement red, in The High Priestess white. In the symbol system of the Tree of Life, the black equal-armed cross is associated with Malkuth, the Kingdom, or physical universe; the red in Judgement symbolizes compassion, which is linked through the Archangel Gabriel with the Foundation; the white in The High Priestess is associated with the unity and the spiritual laws of the supernal Emanations above the Abyss. The gold equal-armed cross, which appeared in my vision but does not appear in the Tarot, is symbolically associated with Beauty, since gold, representing the incorruptibility of the spirit, is the color associated with the Sun, the Christ-center. In my vision, the golden equal-armed cross links the Son with the Holy Spirit.
   In the Tarot card Judgement, the Archangel Gabriel, who is associated with the Foundation and the Holy Ghost, blows a trumpet to awaken souls in their tombs, and the souls arise in gray, etheric bodies. These souls heed the trumpet call with psychic senses, not physical senses, and rise in exultation. In two other Tarot cards with Archangels, Temperance and The Lovers, each Archangel represents a higher mode of consciousness linked with the  higher self. In Judgement, the Archangel Gabriel suggests an individual's encounter with the Holy Ghost and the superphysical nature of the psyche, which as I discovered can lead to a reassessment of the nature of existence.
   In the symbol of Venus, the circle on top of an equal-armed cross reveals the perfection of the spirit above the elements in equilibrium. In the Ace of Cups, on the other hand, the equal-armed cross within a circle is being carried by the dove into the cup of manifestation: The Holy Spirit brings the black, equal-armed cross within the pure, white circle to the realms of form where the spiritual and the physical coalesce. In this way also, the Holy Spirit conceives the higher self in the planes of form, resulting in the integration of the psyche.
   On the path of The High Priestess, the soul is confronted by the feminine principle on a higher arc on a path that crosses the Abyss between the planes of form and the supernal planes of formlessness. Here the equal-armed cross is white, representing unity, in opposition to the black cross of Malkuth, the Kingdom, the white cross suggesting the logic of unity, which is very different from the logic of the physical world, suggesting that the logic resulting in harmony within higher modes of consciousness is also very different from the logic of brain consciousness and the lower personality dealing with the exigencies of physical existence. Spirit can bring the soul into balance in a way that the lower personality doesn't expect or even understand at first. As in the Tarot card The Lovers, the masculine aspect of the psyche looks to the receptive feminine aspect in order to know the higher self, which is very different from the belief systems of societies with long, embedded attitudes of patriarchy.
   Several times recently during invoking rituals, I have experienced a vision of the jewel in the lotus, representing the spiritual energies of the Source which come down the planes through the primary chakras to the earth. The vision emphasizes for me that the Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram, combined with the Middle Pillar Exercise, brings spiritual energy into the mind and manifests it in the world here and now. These visions stem from the equal-armed cross, associated with the Holy Ghost and the elements in equilibrium. I am living proof that, with an openness to the feminine aspects of the psyche and the cosmos, and with a little effort, a dedicated person can bring powerfully transformative spiritual energies into his or her sphere of influence.

(1) Fortune, Dion. The Mystical Qabalah. (London: Society of Inner Light, 1998) 179.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid,, 47
(4) Ibid., 180
(5) Ibid.
(6) Ibid.
(7) http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
(8) http://www.cheatsheet.com/business/3-disheartening-truths-about-americas-commodity-crops.html/?a=viewall
(9) Fortune, Dion. The Mystical Qabalah. (London: Society of Inner Light, 1998) 194.

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

Angels

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EARTH'S ANGELIC HOSTS

   Wherever I walk in the forest, I encounter angels.
   It all started one spring when my wife and I were driving on Watt's Valley Road east of Fresno, and we stopped next to a hillside blanketed by flowers. Though an agnostic, I couldn't help but mumble, “There is a God.” I returned a few years later after I had experienced a spiritual awakening through meditation, and I scrambled up the slope in the rain, my feet slogging through a tapestry of fairy lanterns, Chinese houses, tarweed, and Ithuriel's spears. That day, no matter which way I turned, magnificent arrays of flowers ravished my soul, and I eventually paused for a long time—not just because I was trying to avoid stepping on any more plants. I could sense a unique consciousness emanating from each species, a slightly different frequency of the life-force, all the species within their niche tuned to each other. Later, I read in a book on esoteric philosophy that each species in nature is the manifestation of an angelic, overarching consciousness. I like that. I like to imagine that each species is an angel that I can experience with both physical and psychic senses. I am extremely cautious while in nature because every animal has the right to survive and defend itself and its young, but after I have been in the forest awhile I tune my spirit to the energy of its angels. Even rocks seem to contain a strange, angelic energy, more primeval than the grass and trees, manifesting on earth far longer than any protoplasm.

   Recently I woke up in the middle of the night and could not get back to sleep. Suddenly, after many anxious thoughts, I found myself within the sun, and I sensed its power and light within all the manifested angels of creation. I believed that I knew my purpose, as one sometimes does in the middle of the night when one cannot sleep: I was born to spread the word that everything in nature is the dense aspect of the spiritual, each species the manifestation of an angel, each physical angel brimming with spiritual light. Then I understood why shamans connect with power animals: Each animal is one of Earth's angels, at least as significant to humans as the shining ones of other spiritual realms. As physical beings, we are always closer to Earth's angels than to nonphysical beings. In other words, it is inevitably easier to commune with the host of Earth's angels than with angels from other planes of being. These earthly angels can each give us power and knowledge and help us to survive and thrive in the material realm.
   A conventional image of an angel, of course, is a personification, a symbol, but the human mind naturally anthropomorphizes as a way to give form to the unseen realities of spirit. Some animal species, such as humans, are evolving individual consciousness, yet as humans we also retain the potential for contacting subtle forces and experiencing the underlying unity of all consciousness. The figures of angels and gods have helped the human mind make this contact throughout history. The mystical Tree of Life shows the relationships of these archetypal subtle energies; a study of the Tree reveals the types of unseen energies represented by gods and angels throughout history.
   When I woke up the next morning, of course, I came to my senses, realizing that many people, especially the most “rational” among us, would consider my new "mission" ridiculous or insane. Most atheists and religious people, I've discovered, have their own belief system already set in stone, and skepticism, if my experience is any indication, fuels agnosticism. What if, though, humanity suddenly experienced a sea change in attitude and believed that each species is one of Earth's angelic hosts and then extrapolated that Earth is the dense, physical manifestation of a spiritual Source that is both immanent and transcendent?
   As I have progressed through life, I can't help but discern patterns and abstract meaning from circumstances. I call this meaning spiritual principle. Others might call it a gestalt or some other term. For example, I have striven over the years, successfully or not, to develop myself as an artist, writer, composer, activist and spiritual seeker. Each of these pursuits has required sacrifices of time, energy, and money. In each case, I have had to give up something basic to achieve my goals, and I have had to forgive people who have harmed me along the way. (No doubt some of them have had to forgive me). When I look back, however, I realize that I have experienced an expansion of consciousness from each inspiration and each sacrifice. And, at some point during each sacrifice, I have experienced a new and larger sense of self.
   Moreover, I have come to realize that spiritual principle applies whether or not I feel religiously inclined. For instance, in retrospect, even when I was an agnostic, without knowing it, whenever I sacrificed something for beauty, justice, or truth, I was manifesting spiritual principle. Eventually, after encountering natural splendor many times, I became more aware of the existence of the higher self and the angelic hosts within nature and spiritual principle in general. I now can clearly see that my readiness for an expanded perspective developed from a series of experiences associated with inspiration and sacrifice.
   The spiritual principle known as the “Mysteries of Sacrifice,” I have discovered, consists of a process with three stages: first, of course, the actual sacrifice, the giving up of something for a greater good; then, forgiveness of anyone who harmed me along the way; and finally, transformation, a blossoming into a more inspired state of being. These stages have occurred and the spiritual principle has applied whether or not I have been the least bit concerned with religion or spiritual development.
   In the Qabalah, the Christ is a spiritual force that has manifested as different saviors and gods in cultures throughout history. In the West our savior figure is Jesus, in whose story the stages of sacrifice play out dramatically through his crucifixion, his forgiveness, and his resurrection. Each one of us, I believe, experiences these stages to some degree whenever we commit to a greater good, such as raising a family in difficult economic times, creating a work of beauty, or overthrowing a tyrant, whether in politics, academia, or the workplace.
   The process of sacrifice resembles the act of rolling a large rock up a hill, but when the person reaches the summit, he or she experiences an expansion of consciousness, a greater understanding of spiritual principle and the world and a larger sense of self. With sacrifice and forgiveness also comes freedom. The act of forgiveness itself results in a release from bitterness and anger and hatred, a cleansing that leads to a clearer perspective. Don't get me wrong—the act of forgiveness is rarely easy and often only occurs years after the actual offense, but in my experience the elimination of negativity is absolutely necessary in achieving freedom and clarity and an expansion of self.
   Sacrifice and forgiveness also result in breaking away from social conditioning. One recognizes how false and illusory are many beliefs maintained by the establishment culture, which tends to focus on hierarchies and power relationships. For me, sacrifice has led to a greater understanding of spiritual principle, which has released me from the materialistic bonds of a capitalistic society. I no longer feel compelled to gain wealth, status, or power. I am free to act according to the ideals of my higher self, to strive for harmony and exultation through the arts and spirituality. 

   This might strike a sophisticated modern human being as rather archaic. However, I have come to believe in abstractions such as truth, justice, and beauty because life has initiated me. Like many others, I have connected with subtle energies, and I know their place on the Tree of Life, the mystical glyph that reveals the evolution of the cosmos and the evolution of humanity. As I have mentioned before, Life has initiated me in one way through meditation: I had a number of visions of symbols associated with the Tree of Life—even while I was still an agnostic.
   A person often progresses from one stage to another through sacrifice, which requires intention and attention to spiritual principles, such as truth, beauty, harmony, and balance. The mind must make a commitment and focus time and energy on attaining its goal, which is a basic form of sacrifice, instead of simply focusing on feeling pleasure and avoiding pain. When rising above the Kingdom, the material plane, the mind breaks out of purely physical concerns to understand cause and effect, which on the Tree of Life is associated with the plane of intellect known as Splendor. In the sphere of Mercury, the highest virtue is truth, which is a way for the human mind to establish internal and external harmony. After a person has sacrificed in order to align with the energies of Splendor, a person is prepared to tune the mind to the harmony and beauty of nature and the arts, the sphere associated with Venus known as Victory. The mind tunes to the harmony of nature and great human works of art by “feeling with” the spirit within the creation; when a person feels a profound piece of music, for instance, he or she understands the meaning with the heart, whether or not that understanding can be articulated. When a person begins to understand with the heart, he or she is moving toward Beauty, the Emanation of harmony and selfless love and sacrifice, also known as the Christ center.
   I should make clear that I am not a Christian in the conventional sense. I am, however, living proof that a person who has never been "saved" can experience the Christ force. People throughout history have experienced the force of harmony and selfless love even if they have never heard of Christianity, but identifying with the archetype of Jesus, I believe, is an effective way of tuning the heart and soul to that energy, as long as the vice of that sphere, pride, doesn't rear its ugly head—just as identifying with Mercury can help to provide the mind with an intellectual focus or identifying with Venus can help to maintain an artistic focus and a reverence for the angelic hosts of the earth.

   Also, over the years, I have worked with activists who have kept fighting for social and environmental justice despite attacks on their credibility and reputation. I still stand in awe of them. They have revealed to me the power of sacrifice, which sometimes results in people doing the right thing just as a situation appears to be at its bleakest. When I was working as a political organizer, I was an agnostic, but I began to recognize sacrifice as a spiritual principle as I worked with so many amazing activists. In other words, I experienced the Christ-force, not in a church, but while active in politics. I witnessed how other activists sacrificed just about everything they had for a higher purpose, and they continued to fight despite being vilified, threatened, blackballed, or ruined financially.
   An activist chooses a life of sacrifice. Beyond the sacrifice of time, energy, and money, he knows that he is taking a risk when standing up to powerful people in business or academia or politics. He does not know exactly what sacrifice will be demanded but knows that it will occur. In the San Joaquin Valley, an activist learns the score pretty quickly. If an activist is effective, people in power eventually try to undermine him because he threatens their interests or reputation. Local and state governments often practice a kind of faux democracy, where political representatives go through the process of listening to testimony at public hearings in order to fulfill legal requirements, thereby maintaining the illusion that average citizens can influence the political process. Even in the most backward communities, political representatives have learned how to “dot the i's and cross the t's” for legal documents such as environmental impact reports, while relying on their staff and industry attorneys to ensure that their decisions are bullet-proof. Elected officials, however, are more often than not influenced by money, and their votes too often boil down to what is expedient and beneficial for their contributors, not what is morally right or in the public's best interest.
   Vested interests use a number of tactics to undermine activists behind the scenes. Powerful people can complain to the activist's employer, for instance. They can get politicians or business leaders to question an activist's credibility. For example, one activist in the Valley sued a developer for inadequate environmental review. During the settlement process, in which the activist demanded that the developer preserve a tract of farmland in perpetuity as mitigation, a local government official phoned the activist and stated that he had called the school district where the activist worked as a substitute. The official wanted the activist to know that he had complained about the activist's organization to the school district. When I spoke to him last, the activist had not been called to work for the school district in over a month, yet even that didn't stop him.
   I too have experienced forms of ambiguous intimidation. I have lost several jobs, for instance, one after an unscheduled evaluation where the administrator begrudgingly marked excellent in each category. He, however, refused to hold a post-evaluation meeting with me, and I discovered a few days later that I would not be rehired as a teacher at that community college. (Part-time instructors are usually hired on a semester by semester basis.) This was a few weeks after a local newspaper had published an op-ed piece of mine opposing dams on public land. I had worked as an adjunct instructor at the college for over twelve years, receiving a rating of excellent in every category on every evaluation. I had never received a reprimand or a warning, yet I was not rehired. A similar process occurred a few years later. I was still publicly opposing proposals that would benefit agribusiness and destroy public land, and I received an email informing me that I was not being rehired at the community college. This, coincidentally, was not long after a “People vs. fish” rally that members of the college took time off to attend, during which they carried signs supporting the ag industry. Some employees of the college brought their signs back to the college campus and stashed them in their offices. A few years after I had been fired, or, as the case may be, “unrehired,” scientists could only find one delta smelt in San Francisco Bay. Apparently the farmers had won their PR campaign.

   I can't, of course, prove that I was fired or unrehired for opposing the ag industry. I am, however, pretty sure I have been fired from several other jobs in academia simply for telling the truth, but since so much occurs behind closed doors, and loose lips can lead to lawsuits, I cannot provide any definite proof. Coincidentally, academia is the sphere of Mercury, where truth is the highest virtue—and deception is its vice. My experience with academia is no doubt similar to experiences in corporate culture: In academia, maintaining and supporting power relationships is usually more important than truth or merit.
   In a faux democracy, an activist can grow quite paranoid. For instance, a friend from collage called me out of the blue one evening. I hadn't heard from him in years. The first thing he asked about was an op-ed piece that I had written opposing development in the river bottom. He invited me to a party, and he and his friend and I jammed on electric guitars for most of the evening. As I was placing my guitar in the trunk of my car, for some unknown reason my friend tried to get me to drive even though I had imbibed at least four beers. He had been friendly the entire evening until I insisted that my wife drive home. Then he snarled offensive remarks that impugned my masculinity. His friend also made fun of me while I was getting into the passenger seat of the car. When I refused to drive, they both seemed to panic, as if they both were desperate to get me behind the wheel in an inebriated state. Their remarks were so vulgar and mean-spirited that I kept an eye out for a cop car, and while my wife was driving home I noticed not far from my friend's house a man sitting in what might have been an unmarked police car.
   Before that wonderful party, I had published an article critical of a judge who had fined a local activist hundreds of thousands of dollars for a frivolous lawsuit. During the last public hearing the activist had submitted testimony about the precedent-setting and growth-inducing impacts of rezoning the river bottom, and the judge considered his testimony insufficient for a lawsuit, a legal decision which could have established precedent that would have enabled developers to sue just about anyone who does not participate in every stage of a land use decision. The judge's decision was overturned on appeal, but not before the activist had been driven to bankruptcy.
   Even though we'd had a blast during the party, I never heard from my former “friend” again. Believing that a former friend might try to get me arrested on a felony DUI charge might seem like a case of extreme paranoia; I cannot help but remain in a state of agitated hyper-vigilance, however. Causing an activist's life to unravel is an extremely effective way to keep an activist from participating in the democratic process.
   For several years, I worked as the director of an effective environmental organization. I organized coalitions, testified at public hearings, spoke at press conferences, and gained public support in a number of ways. Just when the organization was stopping projects such as coal-fired power plants and a hazardous waste incinerator and establishing the public support to pass legislation forming a Unified Air Pollution Control District, I was named in a sexual harassment lawsuit because I allegedly allowed sexual harassment in the workplace. I had not witnessed, nor had I seen any evidence of sexual harassment, but the organization in Fresno eventually had to close its doors due to the lawsuit: The organization, already in the red, had to settle out of court instead of paying extremely high court costs. At the same time, the organization was evicted from the building where it had rented office space for over four years--not for failure to pay rent, but for failure to pay overdue late charges. As the director, I experienced trouble every day from every side. For instance, a bogus organization, which paid its employees under the table, started canvassing on similar issues. Burglaries of the office became commonplace. The local newspaper started placing our recruitment ad in the sales section of the classifieds even though we were not selling anything. We were simply exercising our right to free speech and involving the public in the democratic process.
   Activism matters in one way at least. Even though laws and policies are always subject to change, and even though activists in places like the San Joaquin Valley remain vulnerable, I have seen how the most effective activists through discipline and sacrifice manifest the ideal virtues associated with the Tree of Life. 

   Sometimes I can't help feeling that I have failed as an activist. Often, as soon as I become effective on an issue, I also become beset by nearly insurmountable problems, and sometimes I never achieve even a fraction of what I had hoped to accomplish. In the process, I have alienated many powerful people in academia and business and politics. I now stand alone, which is not usually a good thing when one is trying to develop public support for a political or moral position. However, I believe now that manifesting the ideal energies associated with the higher self can deeply affect people on the emotional and spiritual levels. 

   The best activists, I have discovered, maintain a powerful sense of "dominion," a strong sense of self. Those who have sacrificed a great deal have had a powerful effect on our collective consciousness. The more they sacrifice, the more they inspire and motivate others to do the real work of creating and maintaining sustainable communities and protecting the angels of the earth.

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

Oak Tree and Lupine Bushes at the Confluence

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THE JUDGE

   An oak tree towers above two rivers and a one-lane road. Over a decade ago, I stood transfixed for ten minutes as an oriole trilled from one of its branches. Today, as I stare into its canopy, I remember that its branches soared above me fifty years ago when my father first brought my family to the confluence. We had parked by the road to search for a fishing hole, encountering bush lupine in bloom and a tranquil pool that suddenly sweeps around a curve to merge with the Kings River. That day fifty years ago as I stood dwarfed by the oak tree, I was comforted by the false belief that trees, no matter how majestic, are inferior to humans because they lack intelligence or a soul. I was eleven, too young and full of myself ever to have entertained the idea that other creatures are sentient, too young to have entertained the possibility that my grandparents and father and uncle would all, within a short period of time, pass away. My mother at the age of ninety-two recently died from a stroke after a long battle with dementia. The oak is somehow more magnificent than ever. My brother and I that day fifty years ago hid behind lupine bushes, heaving rocks at each other. No one else now shares that memory. The oak seems more open to the awesome forces of the sun and the moon than I ever have been. For a moment, I want to believe that the oak remembers a few fleeting moments of my family's history. I have nothing to confirm that belief, but I know that living things are connected in ways that are sometimes difficult to comprehend. In one way, the oak is my judge, if only because it compels me to reexamine fifty years of my life.
   The Rough Fire charred the eastern slopes above the road, but now the slopes are vivid green, and most of the oaks look like fire has never molested them. Due to above-average rainfall and unseasonable warmth, flowers are blooming about a month early. The first white-tipped lupine crowds the grass near the road and poppies ignite the hillsides. Within blazing orange patches, a few large patches of white stick out like blemishes, as if some pale cancer is spreading through the fiery flesh. At first I think the white might be unusually dense patches of popcorn flowers, but then I find an abundance of bird's eye gilia along the road, and farther up the hills I see forces of blue and white and orange, lupine and poppies and bird's eye gilia, clashing with each other, the three species of flowers after the Rough Fire in this wet year vying early for dominance of the hillsides. The word lupine is based on the Latin word lupus, which means wolf. Like the wolf packs of old, lupine has the tendency to take over an area, but these two other species seem just as exuberant and aggressive and unwilling to give an inch of their territory. I am witnessing the battle of three brilliant armies from afar, a battle I have never witnessed before and might never again.

Three Armies: Bird's Eye Gilia, Lupine, Poppies

   As I peer up the hillsides, I can see that this battle contains unparalleled splendor, which tempts me to scale the dangerous slopes. Since the steep hillsides were blasted away to create the thin, gray ribbon of road, the way up the hill is too challenging or overgrown in most places, but I finally discover an incline gradual enough and open enough for me to climb, and I gain somewhere between five hundred and a thousand feet in elevation before I step into the battle of three armies. There are times when one is forced to revise one's limited notions about nature, especially when confronted with a splendor that is arguably more ravishing and more tranquil than anything in human society. 

   The individual flowers of each species might be struggling for a place in the sun, but these species share a niche that is no doubt far older than any human community in North America. I don't sense hostility in this niche, only freshness and unity. Soon I feel my mind tune to a kind of vibration that induces a feeling of oneness. I am once again connected to an order containing intelligences that are less fragmented and separate from the Source than my human consciousness.
   My immersion in the battle of the flowers awakens awakens within me the intelligence of my soul. I feel a different vibration emanating from each species, a slightly different frequency of the life-force. I feel an eternal spirit within each species that is not limited to their cyclic, transient manifestation on this earth. I also feel a timelessness that makes modern ideas about human progress seem absurd. The sense of loss that I felt so keenly under the towering oak completely vanishes. I sense that each human being is just as eternal but with a unique intelligence, whereas each species of flower is part of a group mind. I also sense that humans often feel fragmented and separate precisely because we have each evolved a distinct, individual intelligence. Yet humans, since we have evolved within nature, also have the ability to shift consciousness to experience the unity and eternity within ourselves and other forms of life.
   On the Tree of Life, this difference in consciousness is represented by Victory, the Emanation of nature and beauty and the arts associated with Venus, and Splendor, the Emanation of concrete intelligence associated with Mercury and the intellect. Victory on one level is the sphere of the instincts and the group mind within nature; Victory, according to the Qabalists, emanated the sphere of Splendor in the process of cosmic evolution. Splendor is the Emanation of unique individual intelligence represented so spectacularly, especially in modern times, by human consciousness. This evolution has enabled humanity to create amazing civilizations and technologies, but the sense of fragmentation and separation that accompanies distinct individual intelligence has led to much conflict. Once trapped in the sense of separateness and individuality, the human mind can fixate on prejudice and anger and hatred, which makes it difficult to feel the power of the forces of nature. I know from experience that a person in this condition of fragmentation and separateness can no longer see with the eye of the soul and understand that the physical is the dense aspect of the spiritual.
   Years ago in this river canyon, in a troubled time, I asked out loud what I should do next, and the answer came immediately, “Be free.” I did not expect that answer, but I am beginning to understand what freedom means. As I stand in the stunning flowers, without effort I let go of beliefs about my personality, about what should be or what should have been, and I simply breathe. At times in this canyon over the years, I have felt a great sense of loss because memories of my family fishing at the North Fork of the Kings River flood back to me. My father died when I was seventeen, and my sense of security and continuity died with him, so by the river I sometimes mourn the end of my childhood. But as I breathe in the fresh air from the flowers, I feel free of loss. I feel a twinge of nostalgia when I recall those times, but the grief and sadness disappear. Oddly, my sense of freedom is not about escape from my life or my responsibilities but is tied to my sense of spiritual connection, my ability to forget myself and shift consciousness so that I feel the eternal, underlying unity of life.
   At one time I stood before a great tree and could not understand its significance. I ran through flowers without recognizing their loveliness. I did not feel the peace within nature until I experienced much stress and conflict and fragmentation and separation. I did not know then that there is a transcendent aspect of the human psyche that can link us to the underlying unity of all consciousness. Surrounded by the flowers, I have the feeling that internalizing that knowledge would end humanity's tribalism and divisiveness in a heartbeat. I did not know how precious and mysterious life is until I experienced many losses. I believed then that my family and society would last forever. 

   Now when I gaze upon the tree by the confluence I simply want to know the history of the river and the flowers as well as the people and animals who have passed through, the history of the effects of fire and rain and the sun and the moon. Somewhere in that history, perhaps, my family searches for a good fishing hole and my brother and I throw rocks at each other and chase each other through the lupine by the river.

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

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SURPRISED BY THE HIGHER SELF

   Once, during my regular meditations, I often experienced visions of a golden crown, a golden equal-armed cross, a golden cup and plate on a brilliant white tablecloth, and a brilliant sun. I finally realized that together they represent the magnificence, harmony, and abundance of the human spirit and the cosmos. I was not aware then of any spiritual tradition that features these spiritual symbols. One day I was searching for a grave at the San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery and found a similar group of symbols on a headstone. Most of the other headstones exhibit the Christian crucifix, but one headstone displays a cup, a plate, an equal-armed cross and a sun. I stepped back in amazement when I encountered it. "Someone else has seen them!" I exclaimed. "Someone else has had the same visions." The only symbol missing on the headstone is the crown. 

   Soon, in February, the hillsides at Big Creek will blaze again with poppies. When I am at Big Creek during the beginning of spring, many of my paths over the years, though often rocky or difficult to see, link together in my mind. I understand why I have explored those paths and feel blessed because opening my heart and mind to nature and the arts and the Mysteries, despite all the times that I’ve felt lost, have ultimately led me to understand the energies of healing and harmonizing love and sacrifice. Despite many hardships, seeking inspiration on this path eventually enabled me to know the subtle archetypal forces of nature and the power of the Sun. At Big Creek one day, with the hillsides on fire, I could see my spiritual path clearly from its beginnings, winding through the spheres of the Moon and Mercury and Venus and ultimately to the sphere of the Sun, where I feel the influx of the forces of Mars and Jupiter, which is why I have repeatedly envisioned the golden crown. Others might have considered me a malcontent because I have repudiated a capitalistic society that ignores and dismisses and even sometimes demonizes these forces, but I can say now that I finally managed to experience a part of myself that for forty years I never even knew existed, which has led me to know the triumph of the spirit.

   I have suffered from a chronic disease my entire life. For fifty-five years, the vast majority of people, including doctors, never thought that I was “really” ill, just depressed or psychosomatic. Only in the last few years—after I started experiencing atrial fibrillation whenever I ate gluten and after my stomach stopped digesting food efficiently—a few people have started to believe me: It’s hard to deny that a person has a physical problem when his heart goes haywire after he eats certain foods and he can’t digest fiber and meat properly. But celiac disease and food allergies also affect emotional and mental states. A constant diet of foods that are toxic to the body eventually leads to brain fog, severe depression, even psychosis. And, unfortunately, instead of receiving support during my worst health crises, people have tended to blame me for being weak. 

   I remember how one day at Big Creek, after I had eliminated everything harmful from my diet, I knew that the veils had fallen: even though based on my experience I have little reason to feel optimistic about humanity, I could feel the magnificence, harmony and abundance of the human spirit, and I was sure that with a strong spiritual will and the powers of harmony we can heal ourselves and each other and our society to end even the most terrible crises.
   I have never been a religious person. Over the years, however, I have evolved spiritually without ever even attempting to be spiritual—mainly because of a strong compulsion to experience  the inspirations provided by nature and the arts. Each inspiration has resulted in an expansion of consciousness that has never quite retracted, and with each moment of inspiration has come greater illumination, which has created the capacity within me for understanding spiritual principle. In the physical and emotional and mental and spiritual realms, we only see what the light illuminates. At one point, for instance, after I cleansed my aura through mental purification, I began having the above-mentioned visions of spiritual symbols from the higher astral plane, and due to the cumulative experiences of illumination and the expansion of consciousness from numerous moments of inspiration, I could understand the abstract spiritual principles represented by the symbols.
   I do not regret now that instead of striving for status or power or money, I have explored nature and the arts. As far as I was concerned, the spiritual inebriation caused by inspiration often made socially valued pursuits such as landing a great job and making piles of money seem like huge wastes of time and energy. Eventually, after I found the Qabalah due to spiritual visions and synchronicities, I discovered that these inspirations often occur in the sphere of the Goddess Venus, who rules Netzach (Victory), the seventh Emanation on the Tree of Life. In my twenties, after I graduated from college and wandered away from the sphere of the intellect, I entered the forest and returned to the arts to experience moments of inspiration again, and I have since concluded that the Emanation of Victory, the realm of Venus, remains forever dangerous to the status quo: The inspirations of Venus open us up to the great subtle cosmic forces that inspire us and burn away false and limiting beliefs.
   In the realm of Mercury, known as Hod (Splendor), the eighth Emanation on the Tree of Life, I can know those forces intellectually, but in Victory, I feel them with my heart, and the resulting exultations, which I seldom experience in the daily grind of this capitalistic society, have often led me to question human institutions that have blinded us to the liberating cosmic forces that make the soul flower. To Christians this might be especially significant: The exultations of Venus can swing the soul across a gulf into the Emanation of The Sun, the sphere of harmonizing love and spiritual inebriation, the Christ Center. 

   A society that is both Christian and capitalistic, however, is in conflict. Capitalism despoils nature and treats everything within it as a commodity and leaves us all to fend for ourselves. We often cut funding for the arts in our schools and communities, thereby closing the door on inspirations that can awaken the higher self. We cannot know the Son without numerous experiences of inspiration and illumination—and the Son shows us the Father.
   “As above, so below” is a maxim within esoteric traditions. In other words, the energies within the macrocosm (the cosmos) correspond to the energies within the microcosm (the individual). Another way of looking at it: There is no part of you and me that is not part of the Gods. “Know ye not that ye are gods?” asked one of the most revered spiritual leaders of the past two thousand years. Imagine what sea change would occur if this society actually understood and internalized the meaning of these words, especially in troubled times.
   Without knowing it at first, through each inspiration I was slowly building an inner temple. Repeated experiences of inspiration helped me to contact the subtle forces of the cosmos and the corresponding energies within myself. Victory, the Emanation of Goddess Venus, is the realm of the “Elohim” (Gods). In other words, within the realm of Venus the soul awakens to the subtle forces in the cosmos and in ourselves that throughout history the human mind has personified as Gods and Goddesses. Once we begin to awaken these subtle forces, we eventually open the psyche to the Emanation of the Sun, the sphere of harmonizing love and spiritual inebriation associated with the Christ, a force that each human being can manifest.
   Before my unexpected awakening, I never would have believed that a higher self exists. Part of me always wanted to believe what I had been taught over the years—that external validation and ego satisfaction from worldly success would result in some form of happiness. After my awakening, however, I realized that the higher self has nothing to do with ego satisfaction. Instead, awakening the higher self is caused by the exultation of spirit: A person who clears a path to the higher self through mental purification and inflames the soul through inspiration eventually awakens spiritual awareness. Only after my higher self awakened did I feel the triumph of spirit that is the birthright of each person, a birthright that has been stolen from the vast majority of us in this capitalistic society through obsession for profit, momentary gratification through consumerism, and ego satisfaction.

   When I meditate or perform rituals, I have often felt an invisible energy penetrating my forehead and gently touching my face. Recently, I have regularly experienced this energy during my rituals, usually immediately after I ask God to send down an angel to keep me focused. (My mind tends to wander occasionally.) One day I suddenly envisioned the Archangel Raphael behind the angel who keeps me focused, which is what I call him now (I say "him" and "he" even though I'm pretty sure angels don't have a gender); the angel was revealing that he is from the angelic order of the Melachim, which is ruled by the Archangel Raphael. As some of you who have read this blog might recall, I have experienced profound, life-changing moments with the Archangel Raphael. The Archangel has supported me through some extremely difficult times.

   The great Archangel Raphael, "Healer of God,"  is associated with the Emanation of Beauty on the Tree of Life, the Emanation of the Sun and the energies of harmonizing love and sacrifice. 

   Since gold is incorruptible, it is also associated with the Emanation of the Sun. The symbols that I often envisioned in meditation, the crown, the balanced cross, the cup and plate, are golden; the sun and the tablecloth are both brilliant white and suggest the unity and brilliance of the spirit. During my rituals, I feel more and more connected with the angel from the order of the Melachim and Archangel Raphael and the great powers of harmony within the Emanation of Beauty. These awesome powers have healed me, neutralized evil, and helped me to reestablish balance in my life on many occasions. They have supported me through decades of illness and hard times--even when I was an atheist.

   I know this now because the higher self creates a bridge to the awesome cosmic powers of harmony as well as to the divine core of the self. We can access these powers of harmony to heal ourselves and others and the world around us even as the corporate elite continue to pillage our society and desecrate the natural world and lead us all to the brink of disaster. Each act of healing ripples through the collective consciousness and slowly makes humanity whole again. Each act of harmonizing love and sacrifice raises the collective frequency of humanity.

   Not that long ago, people used to believe that the earth was the center of the universe, perhaps to reassure themselves that God considers humanity and the planet significant and cares about us. Even though in the cosmic scheme of things we actually live on what amounts to a tiny speck of dust, God and the Archangels and the angels do care about us and support us even if we are unaware of their existence. It's a miracle.

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

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THE CAMEL IN THE CARPET

   My father spent much of his adult life gripped by the desire for a better life, so he kept finding slightly better jobs, and we kept moving every few years to a slightly bigger house. When I was eleven, my family escaped the racial tensions that pervaded Los Angeles after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy by relocating to a small town in the San Joaquin Valley. The day after we moved in to our new home in Fresno, I was unpacking boxes on the plush orange carpet of our family room and discovered a zipper bag stuffed with miniature plastic toy figures, soldiers from different wars mixed with exotic people and animals from different continents. All were smaller than the average toy figure, which made me feel godlike as I positioned them on the furniture or the floor in some dramatic scene such as an ambush or a battle.
   When I opened the bag, tempted to play with the toy figures again, I found a tiny camel, pale lemon yellow, which came with a flat plastic stand that resembled a puddle of sand. As I searched through the bag, I suddenly experienced a premonition that the camel would have some great significance for me in the distant future. Flustered, I searched the new house for someone to ask about it, suspecting that I might not be able to find the right words. I couldn't find my father or mother or grandparents but eventually discovered my brother in the garage.
   “You're full of it,” he sneered after I explained the premonition. I wanted to tell him that I was simply trying to understand my premonition but then realized that I was once again suffering the fate of a younger sibling, irritating my brother merely by my presence.
   Forty-four years later, my brother and I had to sell the house to pay for my mother's long-term care. While living alone in the house, she had experienced bouts of dizziness but didn't complain about them to anyone. She eventually fell face down onto her concrete patio and ended up undergoing a craniotomy for a subdural hematoma with a mid-line shift (in other words, serious bleeding in the brain). After the surgery, she lived with me and my wife for almost two years. Then she fell and broke her hip and spent two months in rehabilitation.
   Two weeks after she came back to live with us, she suffered a severe stomach flu, which led to dehydration and infection and a serious spike in blood pressure when she attempted to sit up. She could no longer get out of bed, and I, believing that she would recover like she always had before, hesitated to take her again to the emergency room. I soon realized that she needed someone more qualified to care for her. I had, despite my best intentions, made an error in judgment that could have ended her life.
   While she was living with me and my wife, her house was, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. I checked on it every other day and did what I could to maintain it, taking care of termites and filing an insurance claim for mold and fungus. I also had to file several insurance claims for burglary and vandalism. Because burglars shattered a window pane in her front door as well as her back sliding glass door, she ended up with new carpet for the front room, family room and hallways, but enough was enough.
   When my brother and I were clearing out the house, getting it ready to sell, my brother found the tiny toy camel on a shelf in the garage and smiled as he handed it to me. For a second, I hoped that we would find the sack full of other toy figures, but then I recalled, as though suddenly recalling a vivid dream, the baffling premonition that this camel would at some point have great significance for me. I don't think that my brother remembered what I had told him, and I didn't want to remind him of it because I knew that I would probably just irritate him like I did forty-four years earlier.
   When I pulled the camel out of the bag so many years ago, I foresaw the future. I can recall at least four other times in childhood when this happened to me. In each case, I either heard a voice tell me about the future or felt a premonition—I didn't just suspect or imagine that something was going to happen, in other words—I knew with unshakable certainty. In each case, I only remembered when the event came to pass many years later, as if each premonition were meant to be forgotten and unexpectedly recalled so that I could place the experience in perspective. I doubt that anyone can provide an adequate scientific explanation for these experiences, but I suspect that in the physical dimension, the five senses limit humans so much that we can only experience linear time but in some other dimension all time exists at once, and a higher or deeper aspect of the self, a holy guardian angel or genius that transcends space and time, can access knowledge about what we in our dimension can only know as the future. If true, this would make the already knotty issue of free will even harder to untangle.
   Since I foresaw the future at least five times while I was growing up, I must conclude that these premonitions are more than mere coincidence. These episodes of precognition tie the future and the past together for me in a way that most memories do not, suggesting to me at least that I am meant to place these experiences into a larger perspective.
   About fifteen years or so ago, I became obsessed with the modern Qabalah after a series of visions during meditation introduced me to the symbol system known as the Tree of Life; after I found the toy camel, I immediately associated the camel with the Path of Gimel, the thirteenth path on the Tree, which connects Tiphareth, the Christ center, with Kether, the Crown of creation. The Path of Gimel is a central path that travels across the Abyss between the planes of manifestation and the spiritual planes (from which comes intuition). The Hebrew letter Gimel means “camel,” suggesting that something other than intellect or conscious determination is necessary to travel across the Abyss, the way a camel, through sheer primal strength and willpower, crosses a desert.
   I stared at the camel for a few seconds, suspecting that some greater significance related to the Path of Gimel would soon unfold. The camel, I realized, was like a symbol in a dream. Coincidentally the Path of Gimel is associated with the moon and dreams. The reappearance of the toy camel suggested to me that sometimes symbols are embedded in events as they unfold in linear time to help us understand their significance the way that symbols are embedded within dreams.
   As I stared at the camel in my hand, I realized that I was as old as I had imagined I would be, my hair gray, when I as a child foresaw the future. But I felt pretty much the same as I always have. Most of the people in the neighborhood had died or moved away while the camel had languished alone on that shelf. My mother was eighty-nine years old and getting frailer even as we emptied her house, but in personality she seemed pretty much the same as she had been when I was a child. At that moment, I believed that people feel pretty much the same their whole life, which comforted me, but I was saddened by the inexorable black hole, never visible but always near, that keeps sucking everything, like all my other toys, into it.
   And at that moment, in the house that I had not lived in for thirty-seven years, the only thing that held much significance for me was the tiny toy camel, as if the rest of my childhood was irrevocably lost due to a lack of anything tangible that I could touch, but oddly, at that moment, I was happy. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I sensed that the camel confirmed everything I knew to be true.
   I placed the toy camel on the dashboard of my car, and in the Valley heat three of its brittle plastic legs broke off one by one, leaving little stubs. If I were to speculate about the symbolic significance of the one-legged camel, I would interpret it to mean that on the spiritual journey across the Abyss, legs don't matter, only the spiritual will to continue, against all odds, on the journey.
   It took me a few days to figure out why at that moment I was happy because I wasn't always in an upbeat frame of mind during that time. I felt that I was slowly emptying all memories of my family from the house as items departed to the dumpster or storage or the Salvation Army. My grandparents and my uncle, my father and mother, and my brother and I had comprised the whole of the family that settled in Fresno in 1971. By the mid seventies, my grandparents had both passed away. Then, in 1977, three days before his fifty-sixth birthday, my father died of a heart attack. I moved out when I was eighteen and my brother moved to a different state soon after. My mother remained alone in the house. My brother and I became busy with college and jobs and families of our own and didn't stay in touch, and I didn't see my mother that often even though I lived down the street. By the time my uncle died in the early eighties, what was once a family unit seemed more like a mirage.
   After a week of helping me clear out the house, my brother and his wife had to return home to resume their daily lives. During the process of dealing with my mother's house and belongings after they left, I dropped her car off at the repair shop and took a shuttle bus home. I asked the driver to let me off at a corner so I could stroll through my old neighborhood, past the house that I had rented for twelve years.
   Strolling by my neighbor's house, I remembered that several of my cats had disappeared. One cat showed up after a few days and tore through the house with a pellet from a gun lodged in his throat. While my son and I were playing electric guitars one day, our neighbor, uninvited, barged into the house, dashed to the back bedroom and started screaming at us. A few weeks later, his sister told us that he had died alone, his body discovered several days later surrounded by cages, in which, I suspect, he imprisoned neighborhood cats and tortured them.
   I ambled by the house of my daughter's friend, Jenny. At one point when Jenny had just turned eighteen, the police found her in suspicious circumstances. She had somehow suffered damage to the frontal lobe that would make it difficult for her to function the rest of her life. She woke up handcuffed to a bed in a hospital but could not remember what had happened to her—the police initially believed she had stolen a truck, only to discover that the man who owned the truck had drugged her and kidnapped her. A few years earlier, Jenny's brother had also suffered a similar type of brain damage in an automobile accident and had fallen victim to a child molester.
   Steve Watson had lived across the street for a year or so. I was a year older that Steve. He had been in my fourth-fifth grade combination class. We were also on the same little league team during middle school, at a time when I was losing all interest in sports. He had turned into an amazing athlete who could throw the most mind-boggling pitches, one of which, I remember, always wove unpredictably past my bat. He ended up in the minor leagues on his way to a career in professional baseball, but health issues interfered. I had recently encountered Steve on a gurney in the hospital around the corner from my mother during her bout with the stomach flu. He had driven a bright red corvette when he had lived across the street from me, but in the hospital he was shaggy and dirty as if he had been living on the street for quite some time. As I passed him on my way out of the hospital, he asked if I remembered him. Oddly, his name popped out of my mouth even though his face was almost unrecognizable under long gray hair and scraggly beard, and we had a short chat, during which he informed me that he had lost everything due to a chronic illness.
   I past the house of a portly man whom my wife and I had called “The Mayor.” He had retired many years before and often stood in his garage monitoring the neighborhood. Once he nailed yellow ribbons to all of the liquid ambers on the public easements along the street in support of the troops in the Persian Gulf. He died after we moved away, and the neighborhood seemed a little less safe.
   Many of the people of my parent's generation who had lived in that neighborhood had also died, and I recalled their names as I strolled by their old haunts.
   Two houses down from my mother's house a shy girl named Shayla had grown up. After her father died and her mother was moved to the memory care unit of a nursing home, Shayla continued living in her parent's house. Shayla once had a crush on my brother, someone told me, and I had spread the rumor throughout the neighborhood. She later raised two children in that house and died in her early forties from breast cancer. I had no idea where my other neighborhood friends were now.
   When I reached my mother's house, I felt alone. Each of the people in the neighborhood who had passed away, I mused, had lived a brief time to clothe their dreams in flesh. When I stepped into the house, I pulled two heavy key chains out of my pocket to place them on the kitchen counter, and the toy camel fell out of my pocket onto the floor. The camel could only have great significance for me now: As a child I could not possibly have known such a heightened sense of flux and impermanence. I should just let go, I thought, as I gazed mournfully at the camel, just let go of all of it. Strangely I did not need to try: I no longer felt any desire to keep the camel or anything else that was once in the house.
   As I entered my mother's empty kitchen, I remembered my first day of school after our first night in Fresno. Early in the morning, my mother took my brother to sign him up at middle school and left me alone for at least a half an hour before she came back and drove me to my new elementary school. When they left, I was free, I realized; I had never been left alone in a house before. Strange noises terrified me though. Forty-four years later, I felt almost the same, aware that I am free, not lonely but alone, aware of all the pops and creaks in the house but not afraid. I had the strange feeling that I was eleven again even though I was the same age as my father when he died of a heart attack.
   Her empty house made me unexpectedly happy because I felt free of anyone else's expectations, free of social conditioning. All of the relatives who had gathered with us over the years were gone or had lost touch. My eighty-nine year old mother now barely remembered any of those gatherings that were once so important to my father, who spent his life getting a better job every few years and buying a better house and bigger car, finally settling in a neighborhood at the northern edge of Fresno, CA, not far from one of the first malls in the Central Valley. Soon all the fields and orchards north of Shaw Ave. would be plowed under; the northern edge of town now is miles away, bordering the San Joaquin River. A town of one hundred thousand has grown to half a million since my father passed away four decades years ago.
   The camel in the carpet, even more diminutive after the loss of its legs, was so small that I hardly noticed it as I surveyed the empty room even though I knew where it was. It would no doubt be overlooked by most of the people who came to view the house if I left it there. The camel, alone in a vast desert of brown carpet, was free.
   It struck me as I stood in the empty room, remembering when I was eleven, that I have always had the spirit of the camel in me. I have had enough premonitions and intuitions to develop faith and enough challenges to understand the value of it. I have never been a great success at anything, but I at least have developed a love of nature and the arts, experiencing an exultation of consciousness that has led to the Vision of Harmony, associated in the Qabalah with the state of being known as Beauty, a spiritual awakening that instilled in me a sympathy for all things, a connection that some people would no doubt consider either naive or insane.
   The camel in the carpet was signifying that I could proceed now on the Path of Gimel. As I stared at the camel, I knew that I at some point had crossed a line and couldn't turn back. The Path of Gimel leads from Beauty across the Abyss to the first swirlings of the Source, the Crown of Creation. I must travel across the Abyss alone, with only my sense of adventure and exultation and connection with divinity to goad me on despite everything.
   Instead of the dinner table under the small chandelier, where we had gathered so many times with aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and friends, there was only a tiny one-legged camel in the sand-colored carpet. I imagined it still plodding away on a journey into the unknown, drawn by a powerful, invisible force. All desire to remove myself from divinity for the sake of appearances or to expend energy by accumulating the stuff of the tribe had vanished, as though blown away by wild desert winds. I softly shut my mother's front door, and with only a faint moon path to guide me, stepped into my next adventure.