Mystical Tarot Realms
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Rain Water in the Mortars of a Pounding Stone
THE ROCKS
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After the rain, newts plodded
over moss and leaves, recoiling
as we stepped near them. They blended
so well with the wet leaves
that we had to watch each step.
We would stop at an outcrop of rock,
sliding our fingers over soft, wet moss,
and we would swear that the rocks--
harboring other creatures, sprouting
star moss--are as significant
and mysterious as ourselves.
In the sycamores, a phoebe chirped,
the steward of the confluence of the creeks.
People who once ground acorns
by the creeks have vanished,
their descendants building casinos
on nearby reservations. Sometimes
we would honor friends, who, fighting
for wildness, had been threatened, blackballed
or ruined. I once believed we would fight
for wildness the rest of our lives together,
but now you're gone, and I slowly
build a fortress with mossy rocks,
for a moment no longer a trespasser,
my chants protecting the solitude
of the heron, the granaries of the woodpecker,
the ranges of the newt and bobcat and all
the tribes of trees and flowers,
my magic gathered from wetness,
mossy rocks, fallen leaves.
THE EXPERIMENTAL RANGE
Once, when I first began exploring the Experimental Range, a downpour commenced, which was so vigorous that rain water fountained out of rodent holes on the slopes. I splashed down a muddy road over a ridge and found clear rivulets veining the grass and swelling a pond that was thick with buttercups. I followed a rushing stream that led me to a pounding stone with mortars brimming with water, and as rain glittered in sunshine, I turned and realized that I had just hiked across land containing house pits, which, since Native Americans sometimes buried the dead under their huts, remains sacred land, an unmarked burial site. As I explored the stream, I finally admitted to myself that I had no idea which direction I was heading. As I turned around and around, I squinted at gray pines, oaks, lupine bushes, mushrooms, moss--all fields of vibration within infinite fields of energy, and as I listened to rain drops drumming the leaves, I woke to the sentience of the ecosystem. At the time I did not consider myself a spiritual man, but sheltered under a massive tree, I suddenly fancied myself a shaman, tuning my soul to the different powers of the species by the stream, and after unintentionally shifting into a trance-state, I felt the presence of an Over-Soul, a subtle intelligence keenly aware of every tree and bush and stone and blade of grass. My mind resonated with its overarching consciousness, and I felt a surge of love and compassion for all things in the domain.
Established in the mid 1930s, the San Joaquin Experimental Range contains almost 2,000 ha of land (1 ha equals 2.47 acres), consisting primarily of oak woodland savanna. Except for a small sign near the highway revealing that the Forest Service and CSU, Fresno, maintain the land, the Experimental Range from the highway appears no different from the private ranch land dominating the lower foothills. Another sign at the main gate states that hunting and camping are prohibited but neglects to mention that the public is tolerated. In the past decade or so I have explored the entire Range and have encountered a total of three people beyond the main road, only one of whom seemed to have any authority--a scientist who waved around strange sound equipment and didn't acknowledge my presence.
Near the roads stand mysterious experiments: white pipes, sometimes capped, protruding above ground like periscopes; tractor tires cemented into the earth; scrawny bushes, usually dead, carefully enclosed with chicken wire; flimsy poles on which is strung white ribbon that delivers an electric shock; wooden enclosures reinforced by chicken wire that retain thick tufts of grass unmolested by cattle. In the middle of nowhere, one experiment, which resembles an alien space-craft, bears a sign explaining that the equipment measures shifts in the earth's tectonic plates. Besides grazing on grass, the livestock, always present on one part of the Range or another, gobble up dwindling species of flowers that blanket the few ungrazed areas of the foothills, and on the surface it appears that educational opportunities are limited primarily to livestock production and management, but hundreds of studies have been conducted on the Experimental Range, reflecting its initial purpose to explore ways to "better manage these lands" (1).
Cow patties dissolve at a glacial pace all over the woodland savanna and on the roads, but the Range supports a variety of wildlife. Individual coyotes have occasionally loped by near me, thirty or forty feet away, seemingly without fear or curiosity, perhaps hoping that I'll follow them to their lairs. In late afternoon and early evening, I have heard bands of coyotes cut loose a terrifying chorus of howls, usually in the distance but sometimes unnervingly close. I have seen, several times in ten years, a mother pig tailed by a long single-file line of baby wild pigs. Once I almost stepped on a bobcat hidden in tall grass in a house pit; it rose slowly, unperturbed, and skulked away down the hill. And once in a remote part of the Range where I had discovered seven pestles resting on a rock next to a pounding stone, I noticed a tawny cat about a hundred feet away, camouflaged by golden grass. At first I thought it was another bobcat, but then I observed a long tail flopping around in the grass. I have heard that mountain lions like to pounce on the neck, so I spent the rest of the hike looking over my shoulder.
Native Americans for an estimated sixteen thousand years (possibly longer) managed the ecosystems in North America to suit their needs, but compared to the vast changes caused by development and cultivation in the Valley in the past century, the Native Americans had minimal impact on the environment. Nevertheless, the trails, pounding stones, house pits and pestles, so easily overlooked, reveal that a completely different human order once dominated the area. Just below in the San Joaquin Valley, evidence of a Native American presence has all but been obliterated in just a few generations. Rural developments are leapfrogging into the lower foothills, but generally, lack of water has stalled large-scale cultivation and urban development at the edges of the Valley, preserving the evidence of thousands of years of human history for cattle ranchers, trespassers, and an archaeologist or two. Current laws cannot stop large-scale development on private land (except on Native American burial grounds) once the "water problem" has been solved.
Pestle in a Pounding Stone
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Legend has it that Native Americans could not make sense of the ships of the first European explorers because nothing like their ships had ever moored off the coast before, and now perhaps something like the reverse is true. People from urban settings tend not to perceive evidence of Native American cultures. For instance, even though I am generally observant, I hiked on trails through the hills many Sundays before I finally realized that most, if not all, of the trails hook up with Native American village sites. Something in me, moreover, just could not admit that house pits still remain near the pounding stones until after I had encountered shallow oval indentations in the ground at almost every single village site. For me at first it was hard even to imagine that Native Americans ever lived there--let alone survived there for thousands of years. I feel the same about other species that once existed in the area: grizzly bears, wolves, prong-horned antelope, tule elk, and many other species exterminated or cleared out by hunting and modern land use practices.
Even more alien to the experience of people in urban areas are encounters with entities from subtle dimensions beyond the perception of the physical senses, such as nature spirits, Over-Souls, and the shining ones known as Archangels or Gods. The Experimental Range endures as a natural and spiritual zone: The tranquility of the woodland savanna enables a person to shift the mind easily to a timeless spiritual awareness completely different from the surface consciousness that dominates modern society. Until I had repeatedly experienced a sense of connection with different, subtle orders of being, I could not imagine that it was even possible. I only recognized the existence of spiritual beings after repeated encounters, and since few people ever meditate or experience nature, what follows will no doubt seem more like fiction than what might be labelled "incredible nonfiction."
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The San Joaquin River Gorge
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Most of the experiments that dot the Range reveal efforts to improve the cattle industry by increasing water supplies and managing herds more efficiently. In the woodland setting, the experiments shout how every human creation, no matter how clumsy or strange, takes shape first in the mind as thought-forms before being tested in the harsh conditions of the material plane. Due to the West's emphasis on education and experimentation, a growing percentage of the population is developing the ability to concentrate and visualize well enough to create effective thought-forms in the imagination, with groups and individuals exerting control over the environment in ways that people a century ago would be astonished to witness. The experiments on the Range accentuate how, in the last century, humans have become great experimenters with thought-forms, altering environments from their natural state, in some places, like the San Joaquin Valley below, beyond recognition.
A conventionalized symbolic image of a God, Archangel, Over-Soul, or nature spirit is a specific type of thought-form that represents or "personifies" a subtle force. Once established in the imagination and filled with the appropriate corresponding energy, the symbolic image attracts the subtle energy into the personal sphere of sensation, or aura. For instance, the Romans symbolically depicted Over-Souls, known as "genius loci," or the "spirit of place," as deities holding such items as a cornucopia, a patera (a shallow dish used for libations), a snake, or a combination of the three. Through the thought-form, an individual can connect with the essential force of the Over-Soul and achieve a parley or beneficial subtle relationship. The Over-Soul that I first encountered on the Range was distinctly maternal and even seemed glad that I was there, possibly because for millenia, generations had lived in harmony with the woodland stream and very few "modern" humans since the disappearance of the Native Americans have stumbled into the area. On other occasions I have become acutely aware of other Over-Souls who seemed resentful and threatening, possibly due to repeated degradation by modern humans and cattle. Since then, I have encountered Over-Souls in remote areas of the Range that strike me as frightfully primeval; while in their domain I have felt a hostile, alien presence that has raised the hair on the back of my neck. Since then I have concluded that to live in harmony within nature one must achieve some sort of parley with the Over-Souls and other powerful spiritual beings in an area, which requires, purely for survival, consciously moving past the surface mind into the brain wave frequencies conducive to spiritual awareness.
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Goddess of the Sierras
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During my hikes in the woodland forests I have also experienced waking visions of archetypal symbols such as a golden, balanced cross on top of a truncated pyramid. As I hike, I sometimes envision symbols associated with natural forces for sustained periods of time, sometimes up to an hour. Moreover, at Native American sites, visions of Gods and Goddesses have surfaced into my consciousness. At these sites, human figures instead of geometric symbols personify natural forces in my mind's eye. Keep in mind that I remained an agnostic for most of my adult life, and I, like many educated people, once had great difficulty believing in a spiritual dimension, but because of repeated experiences, I cannot deny the reality of these visions, and therefore I have tried to develop a rational explanation. Over many thousands of years in these village sites, the human mind has anthropomorphized the forces of the spiritual world, giving human qualities to the subtle powers and intelligences, and these forces appear to "remember" how they contacted human individuals, the forces having become accustomed to taking on human form in the individual human imagination, which is part of the collective consciousness.
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Ithuriel's Spears
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Of all the strange experiences I've had in the past ten years, perhaps the most startling and profound occurred when I was just hiking along one day and stopped to gaze at an Ithuriel's Spear next to the trail. Suddenly, my personality completely vanished. I was literally no longer myself. Instead, I was a point of awareness within a vast consciousness experiencing It Self--the observer, the observed, and the act of observation, as though God or the Source (or whatever you want to call It) had asserted It Self and taken over my consciousness, and all that I had ever considered my "self" was irrelevant. At the same time, I felt an overwhelming sense of peace and euphoria, but soon I sensed my personality coming back, and the more I resisted its return, the more I lost the feeling of peace. That day, I had done nothing to alter my consciousness beyond immersing myself in the natural world.
A new electronic main gate, which can be opened only with an access code, has recently been installed at the Experimental Range. Now even fewer people will be exposed to the human history, the natural frequencies, and the possibility of spiritual connection with other physical and nonphysical beings. Since the urban mind-set is so strong, it takes repeated experiences to develop even the realization that something "other" exists, which I suppose is one reason why in my work I describe some key spiritual experiences in different contexts. Music and fiction and art help shift consciousness, sometimes into greater spiritual awareness, and I find that simply extending consciousness in unexpected ways makes the journey worthwhile. The influence of Mercury, God of magic and supreme trickster, is strong on the Experimental Range, but I always know, as I gaze down the crumbling road that disappears around the bend, that some adventure awaits in the woodland savanna and the "forest of symbols."
(1) fs.fed.us/psw/ef/san_joaquin
Poppies in February
POPPIES
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Together we have waded through fire,
the heatless flame altering color
slightly at each step and each hour
of the season, the hues of goldfields,
lupine, five-spot, baby blue eyes, and owl's clover
mingling with these poppies
that burn time away
so that an instant or an age
is of no importance, and moving
or standing still, we
are like them,
burning quietly.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND DISASTER CAPITALISM
Once I had a vision that I was strolling in a soft-blue monk's habit on a stone path through an enclosed garden. From a 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 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 opening the energy centers of the aura, which consists of singing the note associated with each primary chakra for an extended period without stopping. In theory, this technique connects the mind with the associated spiritual vibrations of the primary chakras. 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 singing 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 seldom 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 never entertained the idea of becoming a Christian monk. Moreover, I was wearing a hooded robe of pure, 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 or humbling myself before the Virgin Mary or any other 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 wife of twenty years 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. Finally, after many spiritual experiences and 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--perhaps because I have suppressed the knowledge--for most of my life, I have manifested the archetypal energies of the Goddess. During my vision during the chakra toning, 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 Gods are one God, and all Goddesses are one Goddess, and there is but one true initiator." In terms of the Tree of Life, that means that the masculine and feminine principles show up as different Gods and 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 (plural). Each Sephira (singular) within the cosmos emerged from a 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 they remain outside of manifestation. The Virgin Mary is symbolically associated with the third Emanation, a supernal Sephira on the Tree of Life known a Binah, or "Understanding," in a dimension above the "Abyss."
The celestial Virgin, the archetypal feminine principle above manifestation, therefore experiences immaculate conception, and gives birth to the savior God, the "Son" of the Trinity. Binah, 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 of creation, ushers in the lord of all terrors. The word Mary comes from the Hebrew word marah, "bitter" or "bitterness." Binah, 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 Netzach, 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 of Life links the Emanation of Yesod, The Foundation, with the Emanation of Netzach, 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 Luna through meditation and had worked with 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 in various ways to manifest the energies of the Goddess on different levels.
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 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 of creation.
A psychic, about a year before my vision, told me that my aura is soft blue, which may partially explain why in my 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 symbolically associated with the spiritual level in Chokmah, or "Wisdom," the Emanation of dynamic, masculine energy opposite Binah, which connects the primarily masculine energy of the celestial God with the feminine energy of the celestial Goddess.
According to Dion Fortune, an authority on the modern Qabalah, the Bible contains God-names that pertain to the different Emanations of the Tree of Life. For instance, all references to the Father concern the second Emanation of Wisdom, where the Source becomes "aware" of Itself (as if seeing Itself in a mirror); all references to the Son apply to Tiphareth, the Christ-center; and all references to the Holy Ghost, the feminine principle within the trinity, relate to Yesod, the Foundation, from which the physical universe has evolved. The Holy Ghost, the Goddess, attracts archetypal spiritual forces like a magnet to the Kingdom, the physical world. The dance of the Gods, feminine and masculine, is the dance of the archetypal energies of One God through different dimensions of the cosmos, energies which ultimately manifest in the physical world.
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 through its influence other great forces that can have a profound impact on the individual spirit.
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 balanced 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 the second 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 mentioned, the visions came as a total surprise: Before I began meditating at the age of forty-two, I had remained ignorant of spiritual symbolism in general, so the full meaning of the symbols has sometimes taken me a long time to understand.
According to Dion Fortune, "Wisdom" is a state of dynamic masculine energy, Tiphareth a point of transition or transmutation between the planes of form and formlessness, and Yesod a subtle plane of form directly "above" the physical plane.
Even though I was unaware of it at the time, the vision of the balanced cross and the angels revealed the basic structure of 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 employed 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. In a previous section, Fortune reveals that the Holy Ghost is the feminine aspect of the trinity (47).
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, the Individuality that develops through an evolution, 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, so the first communications from the higher self come through Yesod, 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 The Foundation, the subtle realm that contains symbolic form.
Higher psychism begins first in the domain of the Holy Spirit: 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. Tiphareth, the Christ center, is the sphere of the Sun, of blinding illumination, where symbolic form dissolves in light. Only after shaking free from the physical plane and making initial contact with Yesod, first experiencing spiritual principle through visions of symbols, can the mind begin to make sense of illuminations of the higher planes. The mind slowly builds, piece by piece, a temple of 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, Tiphareth, the center of cosmic equilibrium and 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. (180)
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 revealed not only spiritual principle but, in one instance at least, the basic structure of practical magic that connects the practitioner with powerful unseen forces, such as the Holy Ghost and the Son of the trinity, as well as Gods and Goddesses and Saviors created by the human mind to represent unseen 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 Yesod, 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 links up with the macrocosm, the cosmic consciousness of the Father. In fact, the God name of Tiphareth is "Eloah va Daath," which can be translated as "God manifested in the mind." The feminine principle, the Holy Ghost, elevates the mind beyond the physical into the superphysical, into the greater illumination.
As Fortune points out, through the type of consciousness associated with Yesod, The Foundation, "mystical experience gradually builds up a body of images and ideas that are lit up and made visible when illuminations take place" (180). 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 of the mind associated with the feminine Holy Ghost and Yesod. One must go deep into the subconscious mind, below worries and desires and fears and frustrations, to experience these astral archetypes with the psychic senses. Spiritual development, instead of just being a series of magnesium flashes of illumination and exultation, is a gradual expansion of the mind, a process that is revealed 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 consciousness transcends my brain and physical senses, but I had simply forgotten or dismissed them--until I had the visions. When I began 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 of the pole, the energies are formless, evolving out 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 have visions of symbols. When we simply know something is true through intuition, consciousness is operating on a higher, formless plane, rising from Tiphareth, the sphere of the Son to the sphere of the Father--or to the Emanation of the Source Itself.
Immersing myself in nature is one way that I began to open myself to the Holy Spirit and the illuminations of higher consciousness, at first unknowingly, but 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 unseen 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 and the subtle forces of the spiritual world, why, in fact, I feel like I have lived so long in a 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 have blocked 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 Yesod--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 awesome soul who loved outcasts and 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 might soon be utterly 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 (2), farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are using 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 will go to water-guzzling crops such as almonds and grapes 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 commodity crops and fodder crops that have no business being grown in a desert. For ensconced private interests, a dam will save the economy because those with wealth, land, and the means of production will have the opportunity to continue business as usual. If the dam is approved, the private interests who benefit will not be 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 will those private interests be forced to modify their unsustainable practices (3).
The bottom line of capitalism prevails. Based on my experience in the political realm, I have 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 average person and the Holy Spirit, and by extension with the Son and the Father, revealing a basic conflict between Christianity and capitalism.
To say that in patriarchal societies the feminine gets a bad rap is understating the case. 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" (194), 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 please 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 disconnect 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" (197), 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 to The Foundation; the white in The High Priestess is associated with the spiritual laws of the supernal spheres above the Abyss. The golden balanced cross, which appeared in my vision but does not appear in the Tarot, is symbolically associated with Tiphareth, since gold, representing the incorruptibility of the spirit, is the color assigned to 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 Yesod 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. As in the other two Tarot cards representing Archangels (Temperance and The Lovers), on one level the Archangel represents a higher mode of consciousness linked with the higher self. In Judgement, the Archangel Gabriel also suggests the individual's first encounter with the Holy Ghost and the superphysical nature of the psyche, which leads 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 a dove into the cup of manifestation: The Holy Spirit brings the black, equal-armed cross within a pure, white circle to the realms of form where the spiritual and the physical coalesce. In this way also, the Holy Spirit connects the higher self with the planes of form, resulting in the integration of the psyche.
In the Tarot card The High Priestess, the soul is confronted by the feminine principle on a higher arc on a path across the Abyss between the planes of form and the supernal planes of formlessness. In this card, the balanced cross is white, representing unity, in opposition to the black cross of Malkuth, the Kingdom, the white cross suggesting a pure, spiritual logic different from the logic of the physical world, which suggests that the logic resulting in harmony within higher modes of consciousness is also quite different from the logic of brain consciousness and the lower personality, which deals with the exigencies of physical existence. The higher self can bring the soul into balance in a way that the lower personality doesn't expect or might not even understand at first. As in the Tarot card known as the 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 diamond in the lotus, representing the spiritual energy of the Crown Chakra, which comes down the planes through my primary chakras to the earth. The vision emphasizes for me that one of the most important spiritual practices of our time brings spiritual energy into the mind and manifests it in the world here and now. These visions stem from my vision of the golden, equal-armed cross associated with the elements in equilibrium, and I am living proof that, with an openness to the feminine aspects of the psyche and the cosmos, and with a little knowledge and effort, the average 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.
(2) http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
(3) http://www.cheatsheet.com/business/3-disheartening-truths-about-americas-commodity-crops.html/?a=viewall
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All stories, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
Mangled Bridge near Native American Village Site
A LAST HOWL
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Found the pounding stone again
Under a blanket of oak leaves
And heard the cackling woodpecker
Forty years after you died, houses
Crowding closer. Went down on my knees
Before the stone, the mortars
Empty eye sockets, portending an end
Without grace. Had I been asleep--
Hearing the lark as one
Momentary ring appeared in the creek,
Then another, the petals
Of flowers beginning to tremble,
The oak canopy awake
With quiet tapping, whatever
I needed to say lost
In the stillness vanishing
Slowly with my dreams,
The roots quietly sucking up the rain,
The creek beginning to flow again?
On that ridge, I was a ghost
Of another nation, seeing not herds
Of antelope and deer and elk, but a herd
Of cattle in the floodplain, the new freeway
A few miles away, the city
Lost in deepening smog, a last howl
Far off in the distance.
THE WASHED OUT BRIDGE
I'm happiest when I forget myself, a boon often granted by the woodland forest--including the other day when I returned to a washed-out bridge clinging to a megalithic stone in the middle of the river.
When I was a boy, my father often took me and my older brother and some neighborhood kids on fishing trips at the North Fork of the Kings River. One day, a friend confided that he had heard about a washed-out bridge somewhere up river. Without another word my brother and his friend dashed through the floodplain to find it.
That day I felt clumsy and weak, and for the first time I couldn't keep up with them. I stood nonplussed on unstable stones as they disappeared into the forest. They returned over an hour later, disappointed, tight-lipped about their lack of success. No one mentioned the bridge again, and I soon forgot about it.
After my father passed away four years later, I never went fishing at the North Fork again. Forty years later, I happened to stumble upon the bridge's twisted, skeletal frame as I was exploring the river.
The moment I chanced upon the washed-out bridge, I suddenly felt like a boy again--but I had found the bridge while my brother and his friend never had. I also experienced the tranquility and enchantment that drench the river bottom. In the same floodplain, when I was a boy, a voice on several occasions spoke to me of events decades in the future, but I'd forgotten the predictions until the events eventually transpired. I have decided that the perplexing, unpredictable voice is the murmur of my soul, whose knowledge transcends space and time: after awhile at the river, my frustrations slip away, leaving my conscious mind open to other dimensions of the self.
I returned again to the North Fork of the Kings River because I'd sensed when I found the bridge that Native Americans once lived in the area.
My father found a hole in the North Fork not long after we had moved to Fresno in 1971. The river at that time was low enough for an eleven year old to cross, and since I was growing bored, I decided to examine the smooth stone on the opposite side, sure that I would discover something that I could boast about to my parents and my brother.
The stone across the river attracted me because it seemed somehow familiar. I carefully examined every inch of the gray stone striated with white, sure that I would find something--until I finally plopped down, confused by my lack of success. My brother, who had also crossed the river, called to me, wanting me to follow him into a strip of forest at the bottom of the canyon next to the river. I ignored him, however, still certain that the stone held a mystery that I had not yet unraveled. I noticed a crack in the stone and suddenly believed that a knife was hidden there, covered with humus. Elated and never so sure of anything in my life, I dug out the humus and found nothing.
A voice in my head suddenly stated, "Native Americans." (I had heard the same voice once before in the same watershed a few months earlier, in the floodplain of the Kings River at the foundation of a house.)
Startled and confused, I pleaded in my head, "What do you mean?" My elation had turned to frustration, and I wondered why the voice had not used the more common word "Indians" instead of "Native Americans," a term that I was less familiar with.
"You will find out what it means," the voice replied.
"When?" I wondered out loud.
No answer.
My mother noticed how agitated I had become.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
Being only eleven, I couldn't find the right words to explain what had just happened, which made me even more frustrated. "Nothing," I responded. "I just thought I was going to find something, but I didn't."
"What did you think you were going to find?" my mother asked.
"I don't know," I replied. "A knife maybe, or something Native American."
"You mean Indian? Where did you hear the term 'Native American'?" she asked. "What makes you think there's something like that here?"
"I don't know. I was just sure I would find something." Realizing that she didn't understand what I meant, I felt even more exasperated, almost on the verge of tears, and dashed off into the forest to find my brother.
"Watch out for the bears!" my father called.
Just past the edge of the forest, I stopped abruptly, feeling like I had crossed into forbidden territory. The forest was overgrown, but I struggled forward a few feet, terrified, thinking that I saw a trail ahead. "Hey, come back," I yelled to my brother. "Watch out for the bears!"
I heard only the rushing of the river. I felt strangely alone even though I was not far from my parents.
Years later, I stumbled upon a pounding stone as I was wandering in the foothills east of Fresno, California, and I spent the next two decades, in my free time, following Native American trails to ancient village sites all over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, primarily in the watershed of the Kings River. I even discovered a few pounding stones that resembled the stone in the floodplain of the North Fork of the Kings River.
Even though I'd found numerous pounding stones in the foothills, I had never encountered a pounding stone in the river bottom of the North Fork until I returned to the washed out bridge.
After I hiked down the steep incline to the river bottom, I immediately encountered a few baby blue eyes and a light blanket of miniature lupine. Again I sensed a Native American presence. A faint trail in the sandy soil led beyond the clearing toward the river, and I followed it over fallen branches to a hillock where spot rugs of goldfields glowed in the sunlight. Due to slight indentations in dark, midden earth, I knew I had discovered a village site, but to be sure I needed to find a pounding stone in the area.
I searched for several minutes unsuccessfully, finally returning to the patch of goldfields to take a few more pictures before heading back. As I was taking a photograph, I noticed under some trees a flat stone covered with moss and leaves. I could see grass growing from the stone in a number of areas. I dug out one small bed of grass and discovered a mortar, and I could see at least eight other places in the stone where grass was sprouting.
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Pounding Stone next to the North Fork of the Kings River
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I had finally found a pounding stone in the floodplain of the North Fork of the Kings, forty years after the voice had assured me that I would "find out" about Native Americans. I soon found another pounding stone in the area.
That day, I experienced a mixture of feelings. I was grieving for my father, gone almost four decades, because in that river bottom it seemed to me that time had not passed, that time did not exist. I could sense another dimension of myself surfacing, and I asked myself, almost without thinking, "What do I do now?"
That voice replied, "Be free."
I was startled by the simplicity of the answer. I struggled for a moment to figure out what it means to "be free." Due perhaps to the lingering feelings of grief and frustration, the term "frustrated self" popped into my head.
My father spent his entire adult life striving for better jobs and better cars and better houses, struggling for the American Dream and ending up under a gravestone that my family no longer visits, marked only, "US Army....Born March 15, 1921....Died March 12, 1977."
I suspect that he experienced the kind of frustrated self that many know so well: the self that keeps working long hours for external validation, the self that doesn't live in the present, the self that doesn't follow its bliss, the self that is afraid of being punished for doing the right thing.
The frustrated self must have more money, more status, more of the things that will make all the sacrifices worthwhile. The frustrated self becomes angry and resentful when the promised moment of satisfaction never arrives.
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Pestles on a Pounding Stone
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The frustrated self is partly maintained through the pressure to stay in the surface mind for survival. The human brain in fast-paced, competitive urban societies tends to remain in a mental state that limits the use of the "subtle senses." These psychic senses or "soul senses" are similar to the physical senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch, except that they are stimulated by nonphysical or "subtle" forces and intelligences. The subtle senses are only open or active if the brain is in a receptive state.
Electrical activity produced by the brain in various states can be measured using an electroencephalograph, or EEG, which displays activity as brain waves. Currently there are four accepted categories of human brain waves: beta, alpha, theta, and delta. Beta rhythm (also known as beta waves) refers to the frequency range of human brain activity between 13 and 30 Hz and represents an intense state of alertness, concentration, logical thinking, and memory. An individual during meditation can consciously move beyond the beta rhythms of the surface mind to alpha, theta, and delta brain wave frequencies. Nature as well as meditation can induce a brain wave rhythm where one experiences tranquility, pure intuition, visions, and wise inner voices. In fact, with regular meditation and excursions into nature, the subtle senses can open in a way that a mind stuck in surface consciousness and dominated by the media would find extremely difficult to believe. Anything other than beta brain waves tend to be associated with fuzzy head-in-the-cloud thinking and the inability to function properly in the real world, an attitude that has become a major obstacle both to connection with nature and to spiritual development.
Frustration sometimes stems from something deeper than the desires and distractions of the surface mind. Expectations, often passed down from one generation to another--and often unrealistic--can lead to conditional love that traps one in a false ideal of the self. The deeper dimensions of the self vanish into the subconscious in order for the personality to achieve the "identity ideal" that is subtly or overtly demanded by the people one counts on for physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual sustenance, from childhood through adulthood.
The struggle to achieve the ideal identity imagined by others, and thwarted efforts to realize unrealistic expectations can create blocks to awareness of the spiritual dimensions of the self. As I stood next to the pounding stone, it seemed to me that this frustration is so pandemic in Western society that it is considered normal, but it is one reason for a lack of empathy that is the source of many forms of conflict and exploitation and tragedy, including the most extreme forms: genocide and ecocide.
I rarely saw my father except for the times we went fishing. In retrospect I understand why he loved to fish: Frustrations melt away in the river bottom, and other dimensions of the self surface as peace arrives unbidden.
(1) brainworksneurotherapy.com/what-are-brainwaves
(1) http://www.chem1.com/acad/webtext/atoms/atpt-2.html
(2) http://www.shamanicuniverse.com/shamanic-initiation.html
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All stories, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
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Native American Site at the Confluence of the Kings River and Sycamore Creek
THE CONFLUENCES
Descending the steep slope
on unstable stones,
I remembered--
from another life--
a vision of my return--
before the dam,
before the road,
I had seen my future self
among dark skeletons
of oaks and sycamores
preserved by cold water,
and bridge abutments,
like walls attached
to nothing--
As I lived the vision,
the river meandered
in the drought
as it did before
the dam, pestles still
near pounding stones--
ancient paths
still vanishing
in the grass.
Am I living
a vision
even now,
always
at the confluences?
CONFLUENCES
At Pine Flat Reservoir, where a pounding stone juts from the steep denuded slope halfway between Trimmer Springs Road and the lake below, a soul path grows clearer. The canyon below holds the dark weight of suppression: buried beneath the water, at the confluence of Sycamore Creek and the Kings River, lingers the ancient village site of a vanished tribe, the reservoir stretching out like a vast collective shadow.
Under water now an old dirt road meanders through the village site between skeletal oaks preserved by cold water for over fifty years, the support columns of a bridge like abandoned fortress walls within the creek bed. Not far away, where Big Creek meets the Kings, a stone chimney looms above the cockleburs that have spread wherever the reservoir has devoured the oak woodlands.
A soul journey can be strangely unbalancing. Legend has it that two out of three who enter the magical forest go mad. In a drought year, when I was exploring the former contours of the river and creek at the bottom of the reservoir, my soul flowed into a confluence of time: Even though I had never been there before, I suddenly recalled that I had in a past life envisioned what I was experiencing, and my soul not only foresaw my return but also knew that I would remember the vision.
As I was living this vision from some other life, I sensed that my core self is like a vast watershed with forgotten trails and streams, transcending the comfortable "I" of my personality, transcending even what the culture has done to ecosystems and races. Somehow my soul knew of the devastation of this place beforehand and knew also that I would experience its aftermath.
I have hiked all over the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, finding Native American trails and village sites wherever I go, on public and private lands. The pounding stone on the steep slope is atypical. Most pounding stones dominate comparatively flat land where the tribe could build huts, on ridges or near water. The reservoir has eaten away the trails as well as the vegetation, so it is impossible to know how the stone connected to other sites, but I at least can surmise that it served as a lookout point where women could ground acorns and warn the village below of potential threats.
As I peer down into the reservoir from the pounding stone, I hear only the lapping of water and the wind moaning occasionally around the canyon. The sense of disconnection is palpable. A trail must have led down to the village site that is now under water, and up to other encampments because vanishing trails still link Native American sites in one huge net across the entire range, the boundaries rewoven with barbed wire. This pounding stone on the denuded slope represents social and environmental and historical disconnection on a large scale, but what my soul revealed in the vision at the bottom of Pine Flat Reservoir is that everything is connected, even beyond space and time, transcending the disconnections caused by race and culture. The soul, or higher self, a state of lucid meta-conscious awareness, knows the divinity and kinship of all things; the collective shadow reveals in stark contrast the need to strive for the courage to live from the perspective of eternity, to re-establish the sense of kinship, harmony and order for self, family, and community.
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Pounding Stone at Confluence of Sycamore Creek and the Kings River
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For years I have explored the watershed of the Kings River, finding again and again places that feel familiar, the paths next to streams leading to ancient Native American village sites--places so familiar, in fact, that I have often believed without a doubt that I once haunted the watershed in another life. At the same time, I feel in some ways that over the past thirty-five years, I have lived the archetype of Job (except perhaps for the end of the story), not quite as dramatically or as tragically, but with similar effect, as part of some alchemical process of the soul. I'm not sure that I believe in fate, but the feeling lingers that I was intended to know the terrible shadow of disconnection during those years, resulting in a spiritual transformation that has moved me from a transient sense of identity to a sense of eternal and expansive Being. If there is fate, then I have to believe that some part of myself, my higher self perhaps, did not let me veer from the path even though my incarnated personality expected many other things.
Because I have experienced disconnection on many levels in the past thirty-five years, I continue to explore a spiritual path that honors ancient wisdom and allows me to experience the mysteries without fear of purgation or hell, a path that enables me, in shamanic relationship with the land, to call forth the elemental energies of nature and the powers of local deities and great Shining Ones, a path that celebrates the interweaving of visible and invisible energies, Other worlds and Under worlds, and the spiraling cycles of transformation, birth, death, and regeneration.
My spiritual territory contains an oak grove on a ridge above Sycamore Creek. Because I have purified myself, the subtle senses of my soul have awakened, and I experience unexpected intuitions and synchronicities. For instance, every time that I hike the trail through the grove, I feel like I am being watched by a mountain lion--even though wildcats are rare (I've seen only three in twenty years). One day recently as I was strolling through the grove, I rested my palm on the handle of my buck knife, asking myself what I would do if I ever came face to face with a mountain lion--and at that very moment I glimpsed a wildcat ahead of me near the trail about to pounce on a squirrel. It bounded off into deer brush nearby as soon as it noticed me.
I get the same feeling regarding invisible, intelligent natural forces known as "genius loci," or the "spirit of place," which the Romans often depicted as a figure holding a cornucopia, a patera (a shallow dish used for libations), a snake, or a combination of the three. These spirits, personified symbolically by shamans over millennia, are powerful and intelligent, and tend to rise into my conscious mind when I am near an ancient Native American village site. Since they are invisible forces that maintain natural systems, they are more easily revealed by symbols, the language of the subconscious, rather than words. Some consider them nearly omnipotent and omniscient inside the realm they inhabit, while others consider them vast, semi-sentient wellsprings of magical energy. They are part of a spiritual territory that we have inherited and tend to ignore since one can only perceive the invisible natural forces with the psychic senses.
Another time, in the same watershed, I climbed a hill next to a stream. In the wetness, under the buckeyes and oaks, I felt a presence, so foreign to me in this life, but so familiar to my soul, that I performed a small ritual of adoration. A few minutes later, I "felt" a warning of impending danger. I rested next to the pounding stone for a few more seconds, then quickly descended the trail. A minute later, I heard the bellowing and snorting of a bull on the ridge close to where I had been. I believe the Over Soul, the spirit of the place, had communicated with me through subtle currents of "thought," warning me about the raging, territorial animal. (Ten years ago, to my detriment, I would have ignored that warning.) Another day on a different ridge in the same area, I found several pounding stones and house pits. Suddenly the image of a God wearing a blood-red robe and deer antlers rose into my mind's eye, and I felt the urge to run up the hill. A few seconds later I heard a deer bounding through the brush on the hill above me. I jokingly apologized to the God under my breath for being too old and out of shape, and I "sensed" a wave of laughter washing over me.
Humans throughout history have assigned a personality to things for a reason; for instance, a river might be known as "old man" or the sea might be known as a woman: Humans sense life, conscious, intelligent, and invisible, within organized natural systems. In the Sierra Nevada Mountains, for me now every river and stream has a different "feel" to it. Some local spirits seem to welcome human beings, some seem distrustful, even afraid, while others seem hostile. One stream in the lower foothills, for instance, contains an Over Soul that is welcoming and maternal. Every time I've strolled next to the stream, I have sensed that the spirit has a loving psychic connection with every blade of grass, every mushroom, every bush and tree and flower within its domain. The stream flows next to an ancient Native American village site, and I sense that the spirit experienced a loving relationship with generations of people there, and therefore is glad to "see" me. In contrast, the spirit of another stream nearby, closer to a modern habitation, seems resentful, as if it has experienced too much degradation at the hands of humans in recent history.
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​Pounding Stone with Pestles
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A few years ago, I had begun to feel so fatigued due to a chronic illness that I had to take a nap every day. The last thing I expected at the time was a spiritual experience; in fact, for several decades before then I had doubted the existence of the soul. But I started to meditate, usually when I woke up from my nap, emptying my mind completely. Unexpectedly in my mind's eye, I started envisioning pearls in the joints of my fingers and a rainbow of wheels, known as chakras, spinning in front of me along my spinal cord. I noticed impurities in the vortices and mentally wiped them clean. Some of the spinning wheels were harder to keep clean than others, however. I kept mentally draining the blackness from my heart and emptying trash from my crown chakra, for instance, but the blackness and the trash kept returning, so for a long time--in fact, until this day--I continue to purify my aura.
One day when I finally felt purified, I began having visions of symbols, such as a simple mandala comprised of a golden, equal-armed cross with angels at each end, each angel in a differently colored robe; a gray, horizontal figure-eight above my head; and a pure, white flower with countless petals above my head. (I had thought at first that the flower was a rose, but a voice in my head whispered, "Lotus.")
Nothing had prepared me for these visions. No one could explain them and very few people felt comfortable discussing them; some people were even openly hostile if I mentioned them. I do not harbor Panglossian notions; the cosmos on our plane is essentially a predatory system. Our present form of capitalism is arguably one of the most predatory economic systems that has ever existed. Every weekend I look at the pounding stones of a culture destroyed over a century ago, and I cannot believe love conquers all, but I know that purification and exultation of consciousness leads to higher states where one truly experiences a sense of harmonious unity within the self and nature. Many people, in this society especially, from bitter experience insist that this sense of oneness is false, an illusion. The Fall from grace, however, is a fall into form that inevitably creates a blinding sense of separateness and disconnection, which I believe, and mystics claim, is ultimately the illusion. However, the experience of unity and universal harmony is, at this stage of evolution at any rate, not normally a shared experience; the mystic finds him or herself in the uncomfortable position of not believing in the shared reality of his or her culture.
Due to my self-purification, something higher and deeper than my conscious mind suddenly communicated with me through symbols. I did some research and discovered that the figure-eight on its side, called a lemniscate, is a symbol of eternity and of the infinitude within. The thousand-petalled lotus associated with the crown chakra is a symbol of spiritual enlightenment. And the equal-armed cross, besides being a symbol of psychological integration, divides the magic circle in esoteric ceremonies that include invocations of the archangels stationed at the end of each arm of the cross; the "Magician" conducting the ritual constructs a three dimensional magic circle in his imagination in order to project his mind into a fourth dimension: the spirit realm.
Despite all of my visions, I still doubted the existence of a spirit realm, so I began to do rituals to see what would happen, such as "The Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram," which invoked the Archangels of the four "Elements of the Wise." Once, even though I felt clumsy while conducting the ritual, I was touched by the energy of an intelligence so far above my own that I felt like an amoeba in comparison--I was suddenly immersed in a thought-bubble of mind-boggling complexity, which impressed me with a sense of eternity and a level of knowledge that I cannot begin to comprehend.
The next day at the end of the ritual I glimpsed a vague presence from a different dimension for a moment. Unfortunately, I neglected to do the banishing ritual of the pentagram, partly, I realized later, because I wanted to know for sure whether or not I had invoked a spiritual entity. That night, as I was falling asleep, something shook me so violently that I felt like every cell in my body was vibrating. I didn't know what to do, so I just continued to lie there, hoping that it wouldn't shake me anymore.
But just as I was falling asleep again, something nudged me hard four times. I felt around for my dog and turned on the light, discovering that my dog was sound asleep on the other side of the room, and no one else that I could see was in the room with me. Later that week, something made a farting noise right behind me while I was alone, working on the computer. After that, I performed the banishing ritual in every room of my house and was no longer disturbed.
I continued meditating and noticed in my mind's eye a patch of black in my etheric body under my right arm. I mentally drained the black energy from my body and filled the area with blue, yellow and brilliant white energy. Several days later I pressed a round ball of white flesh, the size of a musket ball, painlessly through a slit under my arm. Weeks later I envisioned another black streak, this time under my left arm. After doing the same visualization, mentally draining the negative energy and filling the underarm with positive energy, a large round boil surfaced under my arm. Several days later another round ball of flesh, along with a teaspoon of puss, painfully oozed out. The same process occurred two more times over the period of a year, my left underarm forming a boil and white growths oozing out--after I had drained the black energy from my aura.
From then on whenever I envisioned a streak of black anywhere in my aura, I mentally drained it away into magma and engulfed my aura with blue, yellow and white energy, and soon I began to feel healthier than I have ever felt before even though I was almost fifty years old. The black energy continued to appear in my heart, which caused me concern not only for my physical and spiritual well-being since the heart, I realized, is where the spiritual and physical energies of the self meet, but for the well-being of society, which is deluged by negative energies. I continued to drain the black energy from my heart whenever I envisioned it there and slowly felt more and more joyful, experiencing a radical innocence that I have not experienced since childhood, and rarely even then.
On my weekly hikes in the foothills, I have found many undisturbed Native American village sites, and I have experienced a uniquely human enchantment in those ancient, abandoned encampments. After envisioning archetypal symbols in my mind's eye while hiking in the forest, I began to sense the presence of Gods and Goddesses in those village sites. The formless spiritual forces behind nature stimulate the subconscious mind, which projects symbols, the primal language of form, to the conscious mind, much like a dream, if the channel is open. Over thousands of years, shamans at those encampments, I believe, had personified the spiritual forces behind nature as Gods and Goddesses in human and animal form for the collective imagination of the tribe; those forces stirred my subconscious mind, causing the astral images built up over millennia to rise into my consciousness, so I began to sense the presence of male and female spirits. Those village sites felt enchanted to me because the spiritual forces ensouled the forms of human archetypes rather than archetypal symbols, which may explain why I almost always sensed that I was nearing village sites, some of which had been buried under humus for years.
Deities surround us, but Western cultures have all but lost the ability to know them, especially since the vast majority of people no longer have regular contact with nature. Because comparatively few have had the opportunity to experience the sentient, invisible forces behind manifestation, and science has no devices to detect them, the Gods are treated as the phantasms of primitive, superstitious minds. To a few, the archetypal figures of the Gods shed some light on the mindset of ancient cultures, but the Gods typically remain oddities for the modern, rational individual, who has never mused over their bones nor gawked at them like so many giraffes and elephants in the zoo. The spiritual significance of the Gods eludes the average person, who often only encounters them in brief retellings of myths.
Science has never adequately explained consciousness, let alone created a device that measures all aspects of the psyche. Science, on the other hand, has revealed that the five senses can only perceive a small fraction of the measurable frequencies of energy in the known universe. Mounting evidence also suggests that human beings have a "sixth sense" that is sensitive to subtle currents of energy, resulting in experiences that cannot be explained nor explained away: clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, telepathy, retro-cognition, precognition, and other types of extra sensory perception. And there has always throughout history been faith in a spiritual dimension, a faith which develops after repeated experiences that cannot be measured but which have an immeasurable effect. All of this is not proof, of course, that subtle deities exist; however, the most advanced cultures in the history of civilization have had their pantheons of Gods or Angels, the great Shining Ones who influence human evolution. Were those cultures simply primitive, or is modern, monotheistic humanity missing something?
Based on its needs in different times and places, the human mind has created the forms of deities as a way to connect with the invisible natural forces. Spiritual traditions have operated from time immemorial as if these natural forces are intelligent and willing to ensoul the symbolic forms created by the human imagination, the spiritual forces channeling their energy into the human mind. To those with the powers of sympathetic imagination, the Gods aid circumstances and stimulate evolution. If one is reverent enough, sensitive enough, and fervent enough, the Gods return, the form a symbolic fabrication of appropriate correspondences, the subtle force real. If one successfully invokes a God, one can feel that humans are like amoebas in comparison; humans notice the Gods because we are made of the same soul stuff, only much less developed: "As above, so below." Fashioning symbolic human and animal figures simply makes the invisible forces more accessible to the human imagination.
The mystic glyph of The Tree of Life factors out these forces, revealing the correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Nobody knows the origin of the fantastic symbol system known as the Tree of Life, but legend has it that a Shining One gave it to humanity. Based on my experiences, I cannot imagine that any human being could have created it. On the surface, the basic structure appears simple. As many have pointed out, the Tree on one level is like a filing system that enables one to classify the various energies within the cosmos and the human being--the macrocosm and the microcosm. Because the human being contains the energies of the macrocosm, energetic correspondences exist at subtle levels perceived by the soul.
The Tree of Life is a map, not the terrain itself, and ultimately, every true experience of a path on the Tree is deeply personal. In order to follow the map, however, one needs to have at least a basic summary of the most important aspects of the Tree, which can be structured several ways. The conventional (and perhaps most helpful) way presents the Sephiroth, or objective states of being, as spheres in three columns. The right column, known as the Pillar of Mercy, represents types of expansive force, and the left column, known as the Pillar of Severity, represents types of restricting energy. The central column, known as the Pillar of Mildness or Middle Pillar, balances the energies of the right and left columns. In the process of involution, creative energy flows from spirit to matter in a zigzag from the first sphere in a lightning flash, known as the Way of the Lightning, from the heavens to the earth, from Emanation one to ten in order down the Tree, each Emanation, or "Sephira," (singular for "Sephiroth") emanating the next, until creation reaches its culmination in Malkuth, the Kingdom.
In the process of spiritual evolution from the Kingdom, the energy rises up from the earth toward the heavens, but follows a different route known as the Way of the Serpent, which snakes along the paths connecting the Sephiroth. The individual works up the Tree, following paths thirty-two through eleven in The Way of the Serpent.
The highest spiritual vibration flows like a river from the Source down to the densest physical manifestation. Moreover, the Tree spatially represents the three-fold division of the human psyche, from the incarnated, lower personality, to the evolutionary personality, known as the soul or higher self, to the transpersonal core Self, or divine spark. Connected to the Source, the core Self links to the soul, which in turn connects with the conscious mind of the incarnated individual. In many cultures, unfortunately, the divine spark and the soul are buried deep in the subconscious mind, the conscious mind being overwhelmed by the demands and distractions of physical reality and social expectations. The conscious mind from childhood develops an identity, or ego, based on social conditioning and personal inclinations and abilities, to deal with the exigencies of reality, and gradually loses touch with the higher and deeper dimensions of the psyche.
Buried in the subconscious, the higher self, which contains spiritual knowledge not connected to the physical senses, can communicate with the conscious mind through visions of symbols and archetypes or through pure knowledge not linked to the perceptions of the physical senses. This communication usually occurs during crises or when the mind is calm, undisturbed by negative emotions and social pressures and personal dramas. The subconscious, if it is clear and calm, can reflect the higher self, something which does not occur often in a society that is brimming with negative thought forms and distractions. The mind for many people grows shallow and stagnant, cut off from the spiritual life force, so people come to fear or ignore or forget the higher and deeper dimensions of the psyche. There are many challenges in the journey to the Source, the two most difficult being, first, the passing through the veil from the lower, incarnated personality to the higher self, and, second, the crossing of the abyss from the higher self to the transpersonal core Self. Very few people have done the latter, and no one has returned to talk about it. Clearing a channel to the higher self is one of the great challenges for the individual in most cultures in the modern world, and it requires breaking out of the conformity demanded by family, friends, and society--and one must not only cleanse the subconscious but balance and integrate the aspects of the personality so that the soul can communicate clearly with the conscious mind.
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All stories, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
