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

Pounding Stone, bottom of Pine Flat Reservoir

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APT. 24

   In Apartment 24 you are told that you cannot leave due to some great danger to your health. Unfortunately, you lose your job and quickly run out of money to buy food and pay rent and so many other bills. The government sends you a check, which you use to pay rent for one month and utilities and a little food, but the danger lingers on and on. As you hang out in your apartment you discover that three people in your country own as much wealth as half of the population, and these oligarchs are able to find every loophole imaginable to avoid paying taxes. They control the politicians through campaign contributions. Over half of the government's discretionary spending funds the war machine, not on preparing for health emergencies. Since you no longer have a job, you don't have any health insurance, and you would go bankrupt if you had to go to the hospital. For your job, you spent years going to college, which has nearly bankrupted you. In Apartment 24, every night as you are falling asleep you dream that a huge monster is sucking the life out of you.

(You realize that you are still on the right path because in the corner of the room you find an old box containing Pendulum Dreams by Justin C....)

Pounding Stone, bottom of Millerton Lake

PENDULUM DREAMS:

Sociopathy 

   John, my son-in-law, and I stayed at a cheap hotel in San Francisco after my daughter experienced a stroke due to an AVM, or arteriovenous malformation. She was in the neurological intensive care unit (NICU) of the hospital for a long time. At one point, John and I strolled down a crowded street in downtown San Francisco looking for a restaurant, and an exotic street person rushed up to John and gave him a big bear hug, addressed John by his nickname, and blurted out, "It's okay. It's all love!" John anxiously pushed the strange man away, yelling, "You don't know me." The man then skipped away as if he were the happiest human being on earth. John confirmed that the man could not have possibly known him or his nickname. My daughter was at death's door seemingly every second of every day that she remained in the NICU, and by that point, she had nearly died numerous times from causes related to the stroke.
   To this day, I remain dumbfounded by the way the man comforted John, especially since at the time John and I had lived in Fresno, CA, for most of our lives, and we had never walked down that street in San Francisco before. At first I thought the man was a lunatic, but as far as I know no rational explanation exists for how the man knew John's unusual nickname or how he knew that John needed to hear that message.
   Fortunately, after many months, my daughter made a miraculous recovery. Strangely, even though I have witnessed evidence of the genocide of Native Americans all over the Sierra Nevada Mountains and I know that humanity could vanish from the earth due to climate disruption or nuclear annihilation or both, and even though I am keenly aware that a different John, last name Blackmore, has tried to murder me more that once, the exotic street person's inexplicable message still resonates with me.
   Before my daughter experienced her stroke, Blackmore had attempted to murder me a second time. My wife and daughter were again away on a trip, but this time I slept in my wife’s bedroom. That night I pushed a heavy chest against the door that accesses the patio and piled other heavy items, such as the TV, on top of the chest. I locked the hall door, and positioned empty beer bottles on the floor. Blackmore would not be able to enter without making a great deal of noise.
   His strategy the second time, in fact, was to make as much noise as possible to spur me into the hallway. He entered the house a different way the second time, through the back door into the laundry room, and from there he tiptoed through the kitchen and dining room, then loudly pulled open the door between the dining room and the hall. Within a matter of seconds, he pulled open the guest-room door and the door to my daughter’s bedroom. Then, I assume, he stood, gun drawn, waiting for me to appear.  Strangely, I knew the exact moment he realized that I was in my wife’s bedroom. An emotional current of homicidal rage, mingled with confusion and disappointment, flowed through the bedroom door.
   I waited to see what his next move was going to be since he had lost the element of surprise. He didn’t make another sound. He did not come around the outside of the house to my wife’s bedroom patio door. At some point he simply slipped out. Despite my efforts to be prepared, I had forgotten to charge the phone. The phone’s battery was dead before he entered the house. Once again I had no proof.
   The stakes had risen. At first he was determined to commit cold-blooded, premeditated murder while I slept. Blackmore, of course, would never attempt such a crime when my wife and daughter were home, but the second attempt revealed that he was now willing to resort to physical confrontation to achieve his ends, and the chance that others might learn of his maliciousness was no longer stopping him.
   Blackmore also probably had some reason to believe that I might suspect him. He no doubt went over every detail of his first attempt and at some point realized that I might have been sleeping in my daughter’s bedroom.
   I pretended to be oblivious to his nefarious intentions while striving to understand the mind of a sociopathic killer.
   He is obviously one of the most methodical and cold-blooded of killers, the kind who waits for years to let his plan unfold and lies in wait for his victim. He is willing to defer gratification to establish the most ideal conditions so that no one will ever suspect him.
   His first attempt to murder me in my sleep was partly stealth, partly the act of a predator who has weighed all the risks before attacking, and partly cowardice. The second noisy attempt revealed a hint of desperation, a willingness to risk confrontation while maintaining a distinct advantage. He is of course aware that I dislike the thought of owning weapons of any kind.
   At some point he committed himself irrevocably to deception. He must have realized that he might need to play a part for years while attempting to create greater intimacy with my wife, all the while never disclosing his real intentions. He dedicated himself to a total compartmentalization of feelings to accomplish his ends. He had to always, always present the kindest, most thoughtful side of himself even as in secret he was becoming more and more engrossed in carrying out his homicidal plan.
   I am no psychologist, but I believe I understand a sort of primal motivation. As someone who is well aware that nature is red in tooth and claw, Blackmore no doubt prides himself on being stealthier and more ferocious than his prey, and I mean prey, plural, because I believe that I’m not the only one.
   He owns seven rental houses, but one of them is full of his junk and several others are in disrepair. He is a hoarder, his own house a disaster-area overflowing with newspaper and styrofoam and cans and bottles and numerous odds and ends that he has collected over the years.  He no doubt in his own mind has a clear system of organization, but an insistence on this system long ago resulted in a horrific, unrelenting disorder. A great deal of junk ends up in his unrented houses as well, and I’m betting that bodies can also be found on some of those properties. You do not have to be a genius to figure out that his houses reflect a chaotic inner state. In various attempts to assert control he no doubt has murdered other people along the way.
   I must confess that at first I only tolerated him because he kept helping my wife and family, and unfortunately, since I have a chronic illness and never make enough money, I easily became duped by his phony generosity, especially since I considered him a comrade in our fight to protect the environment.
   Signs of his deviousness should have alerted me. Blackmore is married--yet my wife has become the object of his devotion. He apparently has acted the perfect gentleman around my wife, in all but two instances. He once commented about how my wife’s blouse revealed too much cleavage, a comment that my wife vehemently objected to. He also asked my wife to act as a surrogate mother for him since he and his own wife remained childless. He proposed using a turkey baster to make my wife pregnant. My wife and I of course found the idea totally absurd.
   In retrospect, I should have decked him and demanded that he never show his face around my house again. But Blackmore had at other times seemed so rational and had done so many things for us--for my wife--over the years, and he had also accomplished so many positive things for the community through his activism that I felt sorry for him. His “turkey-baster" proposal remained an embarrassment for him that no doubt became the trigger for a homicidal rage. He did not like to feel embarrassed around a man he considered inferior. Embarrassment no doubt also made him feel inadequate and out of control.
   The first time Blackmore tried to murder me, one of the most chilling sounds was a sigh: He sighed immediately after he cocked the gun and stepped into the guest room, just before he discovered I wasn’t there. The sigh revealed excitement, satisfaction, relief, as if a pressure valve had opened for a moment: the almost sexual excitement of total domination, the ego satisfaction of proven superiority, the relief of successfully realizing his obsessive homicidal goals.
   I have searched the mountains for Native American village sites for almost twenty years, but I never contemplated the motivation for genocide before Blackmore attempted to murder me. From what I’ve experienced, I now believe that the motivation for the systematic extermination of an entire race is similar to the motivation of the sociopath who kills in a calculated, methodical manner.
   Several weeks after Blackmore’s first attempt, I explored the bottom of a reservoir at the confluence of a river and a creek.  Cockle burrs blanketed the otherwise denuded slopes. A faint dirt road snaked through a Native American village site, close to the pounding stones, between the dark skeletons of oaks and sycamores, all of which had remained under water for over sixty years. At one point Blackmore and I at different times had fought the cultural and environmental devastation caused by dams, yet that had not created any real basis for comradeship. Instead he viewed me as a threatening rival, similar to the way the early settlers of European descent must have viewed the Native Americans.
   The early settlers must have felt afraid of the unknown surroundings and the Native Americans who were far more knowledgeable about the environment. A sense of vulnerability must have at times overwhelmed those early settlers. Unfortunately for the Native Americans, the settlers had better weapons and enough fear to fuel their undeclared war day after day, year after year, until they finally cleared the region of the Native American presence.
   Unlike other species, which use violence as a means of survival, killing in self defense or when hungry, humans often exhibit a twisted type of maliciousness, providing an array of meanings to justify violence, usually for emotional, social, religious, economic or political reasons, a self-justifying behavior which is almost as common for social groups, political institutions, and religious organizations as it is for individuals. The overwhelming fear of being out of control sometimes leads to a vicious cycle; in recent times, for instance, governments have stock-piled weapons of mass destruction that can destroy the world many times over. The more destructive the technology, the greater the fear, and the more terrifying the weapons become.
   Serial killers are often physically, emotionally or sexually abused as children and grow vengeful against a particular group, such as African-Americans, Native Americans, women, gays, or Hispanics, and they often target members of a group indiscriminately. Individual sociopaths and sociopathic groups tend to target others who are different, blaming them for causing negative feelings or circumstances. Some sociopaths have a predisposition for calculated, “instrumental” violence, which they direct at an individual with characteristics that trigger feelings of inadequacy or fear.
   One of the most common causes of hoarding is obsessive-compulsive personality disorder--whose sufferers exhibit traits such as trouble finishing projects, difficulty throwing things away, exaggerated conscientiousness, and perfectionism. They constantly experience the sense of being out of control, so they hoard to address every possible material contingency.
   Blackmore is articulate, intelligent, and interesting. The sociopath often has an abundance of charm and wit and may also appear friendly and considerate, attributes that are superficial. These personal qualities blind people to a personal agenda stemming from a profound feeling of inadequacy.
   My wife once told me that Blackmore had been deeply scarred by a cruel father and had remained powerless to protect a vulnerable mother--so it was logical for him to feel a subconscious desire to destroy men and protect women. Blackmore’s cruel father left him feeling vulnerable: He could neither protect his mother nor himself. He must have often felt inadequate in the eyes of his mother. Any man who triggered that feeling of inadequacy could easily become the target of a hidden, homicidal fury.
   At one point Blackmore might have experienced the excitement of an assault where he was completely in control, an experience that propelled him over the edge to commit an act that would give him the ultimate sense of control: murder. The sociopath understands a crime’s seriousness but nevertheless experiences such a rush that he risks the consequences. If he has gotten away with murder, he continues to develop confidence, which motivates him to continue to seek the same excitement and sense of control.
   As an activist, Blackmore has often undermined men who have gotten in his way, but he has earned the trust of my wife through seemingly limitless generosity. His unflagging kindness could not make my wife feel romantic love for him, however, which only made him resent me even more. Whenever we had problems with the car or around the house, my wife called Blackmore, and he would come running, but she would never offer to pay him back--in any way. This no doubt satisfied his unconscious need to be the hero for the female and to belittle the male in his own mind--without of course ever openly expressing his disdain.
   Over the years, he developed a persona that makes him appear to be the most rational of human beings as a way to hide the fear and chaos in his soul, for he has proven to be one of the most calculating and treacherous and deceitful of men.
   At one point, my wife and I experienced a rough patch and separated for several months. Blackmore must have considered my absence his chance to fill the void in my wife’s heart, but being married himself, he had to be delicate about it, and because he is calculating and methodical, he took too long. My sudden return must have unbalanced him, triggering old feelings of inadequacy. At that point, no doubt, I became his enemy for life.
   The spiritual path is not for pussies. On one hand, you see the best in people. You know the magnificence, abundance, and harmony of the human spirit because you have experienced it in yourself.  And you know that everything is profoundly and inextricably connected. On the other hand, you know the fear, guilt, shame, or sense of inadequacy that can make a person or group or society turn on you. Because of your sympathy and understanding, you have no desire to harm another person. Because of your heightened awareness, you know when someone is harboring a hatred for you that is motivating him or her to find every means imaginable to destroy you without being detected. Because of our fear and our deadly technology, as a race we are a few seconds from midnight. Even so, as a spiritual person, you can do nothing but establish and maintain harmony in your own sphere.
   Truly a force to reckon with on the mental level, Blackmore attacks every problem, from fixing a toilet to influencing the political system, in a methodical manner. When it comes to matters of the heart, Blackmore has used the same method, calculating every move. Consequently it had taken him years to set up the circumstances that would lead to the perfect murder, using a business method perfected by Howard Hughes, first treating his adversary like a friend to gain trust and then destroying him. I’m guessing that at least five years have passed since Blackmore first began developing his plan, and in the process, his heart has simply continued to grow blacker. By focusing on committing the perfect murder, he has been channeling pure evil into his heart, transforming himself into a deceitful, cold-blooded killer, not a lover. Even if he succeeds in getting rid of me and winning my wife’s affections, the wheel has been spinning in the direction of evil for years; it would, at this point, be impossible to make it suddenly stop and spin the other way. Blackmore has destroyed his own ability to love. He has undermined himself, which of course is little consolation to me.

Go on a different adventure.

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

Goldfields and Baby Blue Eyes

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APT. 23

   The door opens on tules bordering a lake, and you remember dragonflies and red-winged blackbirds, which suddenly appear--the memory, perhaps, surfacing because of the faintest rustling of transparent wings and a burbling call far off in the distance. You hear an echo from a large rock outcropping, but instead of someone emerging from the grove, a woodpecker glides to a nearby tree and forages in the bark, knocking again without any rhythm you can follow. The woodpecker flies away. Suddenly the knocking sound resembles footsteps, and you find yourself waiting for people who brought you here to appear at the edge of the woods. Off in the distance, the sound of footsteps, more and more indistinct, continues. Sitting quietly in the breeze as dragonfly wings rustle in the tules, you gaze beyond the deep blue water to the mountains covered in snow.

(You realize that you are still on the right path because in the corner of the room you find an old box containing Pendulum Dreams by Justin C....)

Goldfields near Native American Village Site

PENDULUM DREAMS:

Silly Act Disease

   As I stepped into my bedroom, I sensed the presence of a fierce, menacing spirit. After a moment, I recognized who it was because each soul has a unique energy, an invisible signature written on the world, both in life and in death. I was surprised because I had not encountered the man in many years, and even though I knew he was extremely old, I was unaware that he had passed away. I try to avoid purposely insulting people, but a few years ago I had gone out of my way to offend the man because he had pretended to stand up for the powerless but had abused the little power that he had managed to command. He was a megalomaniac, a hypocrite, and I had publicly let him know my opinion of him.
   The sensation of being attacked by a spirit is unmistakable. A malicious spirit will sometimes engulf a living person with a freezing, dense energy. Since the energy is so heavy, a sense of paralysis often occurs whether or not the living person is petrified by fear. At the mercy of an invisible spirit, a living person will usually emanate sheer terror, upon which the malicious or demonic spirit feeds, the way the legendary vampire feeds upon blood. Without any social constraints, a bully in life often becomes malicious in death (at least for awhile).
   I have been attacked by spirits before, so fortunately I knew how to handle it. After I stepped into the room, the spirit did not immediately jump me, possibly because he was new at the game or waiting for me to get into bed. Since at first he didn't seem intent on attacking me, I ignored him. He soon overcame his hesitancy and made his move, engulfing me with his dense, freezing energy. I could tell that he soon regretted it, however, because he quickly lost his zeal when my soul started radiating light like the sun. When he experienced the intense light and realized that he was not scaring me in the least, he loosened his grip on me, and his energy dissipated and eventually vanished.
   The morning after my encounter with his spirit, I found out in the paper that he had died of cancer. His soul, I surmised, might have left his body before the doctors had officially declared him dead.
   His spirit came back to visit a few days later. He was at that point profoundly despondent because, I believe, without the distractions of the physical world, he could see himself clearly, which might have been quite a challenge for him. I don’t know if he wanted anything from me, but during the second visit he made no attempt to attack me. I mentally acknowledged his presence without hindering his progress in any way, and soon he disappeared again.
   I have made myself sensitive to the spirit world through physical, mental, and spiritual purification. I usually do not see spirits with my physical eyes. My subconscious senses the energy and an image of the entity is cast upon the screen of my mind. I see it, in other words, with my “third eye.” I have only seen a spirit with my physical eyes once. Faintly effervescent, the spirit was transparent and seemed to slant in and out of this dimension. That spirit, extremely powerful and malicious, was the first I ever consciously encountered, and I could tell that it wished to do me harm the moment I glimpsed it. One night--invisible the whole time--it shook me so hard I thought I was going to fly into pieces, revealing that it could easily kill me. Then it nudged me hard in the ribs four times as I was falling asleep. A few days later, it made farting noises right behind me. That was when I started to learn how to deal with malicious spirits.
   For the past few years, after I cleansed my aura and began having visions of spiritual archetypes, while totally awake I have been touched lightly on the head and face numerous times, tapped on the shoulder, caressed, and enveloped by beings that I cannot see. I have heard a capella singing and strange noises even though no other person is even remotely in the vicinity. To some extent, I have become clair-sentient and clair-audient and clair-voyant, experiencing spiritual vibrations with the subtle senses of the aura, the “soul senses.”
   I ignored paranormal experiences for most of my life because society forces us to live within a very narrow range of vibration, conditioning us to block the pathways to the soul--that essential aspect of each one of us connected to vast, scary, powerful cosmic forces. Human beings, however, are comprised of these cosmic vibrations. (One symbol system, known as the Tree of Life, reveals the different types of energy in the cosmos and how they correspond to the individual human being.)
   These powerful, subtle forces can make people feel small and without much control. Our social system, on the other hand, strives to create the illusion that humans are in control of the world. We become afraid of any forces that challenge our limited perceptions of the cosmos.  How many years did it take before we accepted that the Earth is not the center of the universe? It will no doubt take at least as long for humanity to accept that the physical universe is only a small aspect of the cosmos as a whole.
   As a teenager, I struggled with a chronic physical illness and depression. I didn’t know then that I was suffering from celiac disease and food allergies, which, in my case, cause debilitating stomach problems, irritating joint pain, and even severe depression. Those problems have continued to grow worse until now I experience heart palpitations if I eat a miniscule amount of gluten. Doctors, one of whom noted in his records that I am a hypochondriac, have misdiagnosed me for over forty years.
   (Look, I know you don’t believe that food can cause heart palpitations and depression any more than you believe that I have encountered spiritual entities. In fact you probably won’t believe ninety-five percent of what I am saying even if it’s ninety-five percent true: The other five percent I'm just not sure about. I will forever remain a fiction that you will either find entertaining or ignore.)
   The first time I made the connection between heart palpitations and food was a few years ago, right after I ate a leftover slice of chocolate cake from Rosine’s Restaurant in Monterey, CA. A few minutes after I finished the cake, my heart began beating wildly and continued to beat irregularly for over an hour. I managed to take a nap and woke up to a regular heartbeat. My digestive system had become so damaged over the years that a piece of cake loaded with gluten made my heart go haywire. Soon after that, if I ate even a little bit of gluten, in a cheerio or a crust of bread, for instance, my heart would beat irregularly.
   Your heart has no doubt at some point skipped a beat, and you may have wondered for a moment if you were dying from a heart attack. Imagine that your heart keeps skipping a beat every few seconds, for hours at a time--just keeps fluttering, unable to find a regular rhythm. This is what happens to me after I eat a tiny amount of gluten.
   The gluten protein is hidden in almost every product on grocery store shelves. Even quinoa contains a protein that mimics gluten. To those who are truly sensitive, many of the products labeled “gluten-free” cause a reaction. The industry standard for that label is not adequate to protect a person with full-blown celiac disease.
   For those with the disease, stimulants such as coffee can also trigger heart palpitations. Arrhythmia is the most frightening symptom, but the worst effects occur in the digestive tract. A piece of bread feels like acid as it slides down the esophagus--a precursor to what happens in the rest of the digestive system: nausea, severe cramping, excessive gas, diarrhea or the opposite, extended periods of constipation. I have spent hours on the toilet in so much agony that I thought I was going to pass out or die.
   I am not noticeably crippled by the disease. In other words, I’m not in a wheelchair or using crutches or wearing a respirator, so people generally do not understand or even believe that I have a physical debility. Instead, most people jump to the conclusion that my symptoms are psychological--or that I am lying. One of my few friends keeps--consciously or not--pronouncing the word “celiac” as “silly act." Failures in society are often chronically ill, artistic, spiritual, antisocial, politically aware, or unlucky. I, unfortunately, happen to be all of these at once, and no doubt because of that a homicidal maniac has repeatedly attempted to kill me--but no one believes that either.
   One night, a thud woke me up. The cat would sometimes leap to the floor or knock things over, so I wasn’t concerned at first, but then I remembered that I had rigged an “alarm" by positioning the ironing board, with the iron at its edge, next to my wife’s bedroom door, so that when the door was pushed inward from the patio, the iron would tip over and plunge to the floor. As my eyes adjusted in the darkness I remembered that I was in my daughter’s bedroom. I stayed alert, telling myself that I was being silly, when suddenly I heard, right in front of the door to the guest room across the hall--my “bedroom"--the sound of someone cocking a gun.
   I held my breath. For a long time, silence dominated the house until I distinctly heard the click of someone unlocking the bathroom window.
   Besides the family, only one other person knew that I slept in the guest room because of my snoring. Only one other person knew that my wife and daughter were away. One other person had a key to the house. One other person never caused the dog to bark. That person was probably lying in wait outside my door with a gun.
   Suddenly I heard the clicking of claws on the wooden floor and my dog sniffing under the door. At that moment I realized that my friend had no doubt rehearsed this intrusion while everyone was away during the day, no doubt several times, so that he would know exactly how and where to step on the wooden floor without causing creaking noises.
   This was his window of opportunity.
   I listened carefully again. No one was stealing anything. I quietly lifted the shade and noticed the cat sleeping outside on a rug. Then I recalled that John, who had a reputation as a perfectionist, would never hire anyone else to do jobs around the house even though often he would start something and never finish it, overwhelmed by so many odd jobs that refused to be done just right....
   One day, my daughter had noticed what looked suspiciously like blood splatters on the ceiling of her closet. Maybe there was another reason Blackmore never let any "professionals" into his houses....It would be just like John to paint over the wall perfectly and not notice the ceiling. When he was done painting the walls, he’d probably smiled, admired his work, and then with a sigh remembered all the other jobs he had to finish.
   That afternoon, as I pulled into the driveway, I had discovered Blackmore, our new landlord, hard at work on the sprinkler system, which made me a little uncomfortable since my wife and daughter had already left on their trip, and no one had told me that John had planned to work in the backyard. He was on his hands and knees scooping dirt from a shallow trench with a large spoon. He had already used a narrow shovel to dig a trench, placing slabs of earth in a row on the sidewalk. John was methodically making the sides and bottom of the trench even, something that apparently was necessary before he could confront the leaky pipes. John practiced the art of maintenance better than anyone I have known. Most of the solutions that he found for practical problems remained a mystery to me, but I also respected the fact that he rarely did anything unless it was absolutely necessary.
   "I hear Bush signed the bill for the feasibility study for Temperance Flat Dam," I mumbled.
   "They just keep throwing money at that project, hoping something will actually happen."
   "You don’t think anything will?"
   "Everyone knows that the era of dam building is over. I doubt that the federal government is going to build another dam when the budget is hemorrhaging due to the war."
   "But if the Interior Department finds the dam feasible, it is automatically authorized."
   "That is probably the bigger problem, the way Bush keeps gutting environmental laws, but I think the project will probably be tied up in court for years, hopefully long enough at least to get another administration into the White House."
   Since John is twenty-five years older than I am, I occasionally feel like a child in his presence, especially when discussing politics or practical matters. But I also suddenly began feeling a little uneasy again as I gazed at the dirt piled up in the flowerbed next to the garage.
   John and I had shoveled the dirt out of the bed of his pickup awhile back because John had claimed that he was going to use it to “even out” the lawn. At the time I was living in another house, and I was simply helping him with one of his “rentals." To me, the lawn already appeared level. Over time, a small trench had formed at the top of the dirt pile where rainwater had fallen from the eaves, and Bermuda was taking over the flowerbed.
   "So what sort of project have you got going here?" I asked.
   "The sprinkler system is hemorrhaging. It’s clogged in one place and leaks in another. I’ll be at this for a few days."
   "Well, thanks," I muttered. I again felt uncomfortable because I hadn’t even noticed the problem. At that moment I felt like the debt we owed John could never possibly be repaid, especially since I am chronically ill and can barely hold down two part-time jobs. I focus what little energy I have left on being an artist, writer, composer and activist, activities that generally don't make a person rich. I confess that I am not much of a provider for my family, and I’m certainly not as practical as I could be. I would rather look at flowers than kill myself making a buck.
   I went inside and stared at John through the window. I suddenly imagined a human body in the flowerbed and blinked to rid the image from my mind.
   My wife and daughter were visiting a friend for the weekend, so that evening I binged on a six pack of beer. Just as I was finishing beer number six at around ten-thirty that night, I had an overwhelming feeling that I was in danger. I usually sleep in the guest room because I snore and my wife is a light sleeper. Since the door to my room does not have a lock, and since my wife’s bedroom features a door opening onto the patio that doesn’t always latch well, I decided to sleep in my daughter’s bedroom, which no one could enter without breaking down the door.
   The house was built in the early forties with solid doors and plaster walls. A previous owner had cut one bedroom in two to create a hall and a guest room and added on the back bedroom, where my wife sleeps. My daughter’s room, the only bedroom left untouched during the restructuring process, is still virtually impenetrable except through the windows, both of which are visible to the neighbors.
   After awhile, as I stretched out in the darkness, I started drifting off to sleep, telling myself that I would have enough time to react if I heard someone trying to break into the room. He would have to break down a door in his own house, one of the most solid doors I have ever encountered, and in the process he would lose the element of surprise. He might have to engage in physical combat. The thought that he might lose the fight even though he had a gun no doubt caused him to hesitate. If he did lose, he would be exposed as a sociopath, which would destroy his reputation--and land him in prison.
   When I woke up the next morning after staying awake for most of the night, I inspected the house carefully to make sure no one remained hidden there and nothing was stolen. For a moment, I started to believe that I had imagined the intrusion, but then I remembered the most chilling sound of all: the unlocking of the bathroom window. I was the intended victim of a premeditated murder.
   I have never told anyone except my wife, and she refuses to believe me. The first time, after several hours of straining to hear the intruder, I fell asleep and found no evidence of a break in.  If I had accused Blackmore, he no doubt would have evicted me and my family from his house, and my wife would have lost a generous patron. You see, Blackmore was letting us live rent-free in his house and paying for her classes while she worked for a teaching credential. Since the house belongs to him, fingerprints would prove nothing.
   John has remained an effective activist for many years and has “touched” the sphere of Mars in his battles for environmental quality. He has, therefore, unlocked both the virtue and vice of that sphere. He has courage and strength, in the form of mental acuity, but he also experiences the potential for great cruelty and destructiveness.
   Descriptions abound of hauntings and demonic possessions.  Has it ever occurred to anyone to ask why people aren’t visited by angels just as often? Despite our so-called rationality and all our laws and social conditioning, we remain in a highly unevolved state where our lack of balance attracts dark, horrific forces. I suspect that angels can hardly tolerate the unbalanced minds of human beings.

Go on a different adventure.

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

Buckeyes near a Native American Village Site

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APT. 22

  Apartment 22 contains a scale model revealing a section of the foothills during the drought, with large rocks and even most of the trees--oaks, gray pines, sycamores, buckeyes, red-buds--accurately positioned. The reservoir is so low that the river resembles its former self. The slopes of the canyon, however, are stripped of life, except for a rusty crop of cockle-burs, which has flourished underwater, the seeds brought in by the first herds of cattle. If you examine the terrain carefully with a magnifying glass, you can even see ancient Native American trails stretching from one abandoned village site to another, where moss-covered pestles still protrude from the mortars of a few pounding stones. You can also still see in the floodplain an old road used before the dam was built, as well as abutments where bridges spanned the river and its tributaries.
   Buried under water for sixty years, a stone chimney still stands erect near pounding stones. Preserved by the cold water, dead trees still tower, stripped bare, almost black. Overgrown mining and logging roads, sometimes built over ancient trails, wind around the hillsides above the denuded slopes, and in some places the collapsed mines can be still be found, often near Native American village sites. Below the dam are canals and ditches that spurred one of the first water wars in the valley, but no obvious signs of conflict remain. Not far from the river is a creek whose water irrigated the first bumper crop of wheat that attracted the railroad. Around the tracks, the city continues to grow. Not far away from the creek new houses are popping up, the city slowly leapfrogging into the foothills.

(You realize that you are still on the right path because near the model you find an old box containing Pendulum Dreams by Justin C....)

Ithuriel's Spears and Lupine

PENDULUM DREAMS:

Beyond Existentialism

   If your child is dying, you don't sit by them and think that life is absurd and meaningless. With every ounce of your being, you want your child to survive and to experience all the joys and, yes, even all the horrors and tragedies of existence. If your child is dying, you feel broken. But through brokenness we know God.

   The greatest mountains break down into sand and dirt. Through our brokenness we develop empathy and know God in the stones and the flowers and grasses and bushes and trees and the animals and in every human being. Through empathy we know love and learn how to transmute negativity into harmony, and we learn how to neutralize dark forces to create balance. Through our brokenness, through our sense of absurdity and meaninglessness and mortality and through all of our losses, we come to know God in all things. We come to know that the personality and the ego are transitory but the soul is eternal.

   Several weeks before we were scheduled to move into John Blackmore’s rental house, I peeked through the garage door at empty shelves, smelling the familiar scent of dust and wood and turpentine and oil. At first I sensed the potential within the perpetually rough, unfinished space reserved traditionally for vehicles, junk, and men. Since women tend to avoid the garage, fearing plump black widows and roaches and rats, for a moment I imagined that I could turn the empty space into a man cave, a work space full of tools, or a modest gym with weights, or a music studio--each of which would require more effort than I am normally willing or able to expend. At that moment I also felt that I was not alone--even though nobody else was in the garage. My attention suddenly turned toward the ceiling. Long boards of different lengths--even what appeared to be a painted door--stretched across the rafters.
   When I was five or six my brother coaxed me up a ladder to a similar makeshift ceiling in the rafters of the garage. After we climbed up the ladder, we searched the dim, fusty space, then stretched out, remaining silent when our mother called us. I felt oddly comfortable in that secluded space and closed my eyes. Apparently I fell asleep, and as I was snoozing, my brother sneaked down and moved the ladder. When I opened my eyes, I realized I was all alone. After a moment of panic, I again began to enjoy the sense of solitude, and I stayed in the same spot, furious that my brother had left me stranded, until my father pulled the car into the garage a few minutes later. After my Dad closed the door to the garage and went inside, I hung from one of the rafters, then dropped several feet onto the roof of the car. I was so small that I barely made a dent.
   Curious about the rafters in Blackmore’s otherwise empty garage, I found a ladder and climbed high enough to peer over the large planks of wood. After my eyes adjusted, I could tell that water had seeped through a hole in the roof. I was about to step down but noticed a lumpy shape that resembled an old canvas bag in a corner. I moved the ladder as close as I could, curious but without much hope that anyone would have left any items of value.
   The former tenant had died on the property. There was a remote chance that the item had been overlooked or ignored, so I strained to reach the bag, barely brushing it with my fingertips. I would have to move a heavy plank to get closer. Instead I strained to reach it one more time and pressed down with my fingertips on the edge of the bag, dragging it with great effort a fraction of an inch. Encountering success, I tried again, and eventually inched the bag close enough to pull towards me.
   As soon as I got it down to the ground, I unzipped the bag, which was stuffed full of old clothes. Disappointed but still determined, I dug to the bottom and felt a hard item wrapped in linen. I unwound the cloth and discovered ten gemstones hanging like earrings from a strange matrix, each gem a different color. Not being a jeweler, I couldn’t tell whether the gems were authentic. I do not know much about jewels in general, but out of the ten gems, I recognized a diamond, a sapphire, a ruby, an emerald, an opal, and an amethyst. Purple is my favorite color, so I was immediately attracted to the amethyst.
   As I touched the gem I felt a door open between my eyes. I don’t know how else to describe it. Suddenly I sensed that I could see into another dimension. I let go of the amethyst and blinked my eyes, and the sensation vanished. I have always been a little psychic, but right after I touched the amethyst, I thought that I glimpsed a ghost in the corner--which vanished as soon as I became aware of it. The experience was so fleeting that I ignored it.
   I stared at the matrix on which the jewels were positioned. Each jewel hung inside a circle. I counted three pillars, the middle pillar with four circles and each outer pillar with three circles, for a total of ten circles. I then noticed also that the matrix could be viewed as three triangles positioned on three pillars. The top triangle pointed upward, and the middle and bottom triangles pointed downwards. One circle, which was not part of any triangle, stood alone at the bottom.
   I needed to do more research to understand the significance of the matrix. I carefully wrapped the structure back up in the linen, then carried it to my car, unsure about whether I should share the treasure with John Blackmore or anyone else.
   When I got home, I stretched out on the couch to contemplate my treasure and perhaps catch a quick nap. I soon drifted off. When I woke up, I was still fatigued, so I closed my eyes again and let my mind drift in a timeless state. I don’t know how long I remained in the void--perhaps over an hour--but suddenly I beheld a horizontal gray figure-eight floating above my head. I also saw the walls of my room so clearly that I thought I had opened my eyes, so I blinked. The figure-eight disappeared.
   That vision, I now believe, was stimulated by the energies in the amethyst.  I also realize now that when touching the amethyst, I experienced the energy of the ninth Sephira of the Tree of Life known as Yesod, an energy that opens up the psychic centers of the aura. Someone must have charged each gem on the matrix with the energy of each respective sphere on the Tree.
   Only an idiot would deny the existence of germs because he doesn’t see them, yet most rational people still don’t believe in spirits--because they have never “seen” one. Instruments for revealing spiritual entities in a scientifically verifiable manner do not yet exist, so people tend not to believe in ghosts or demons or angels until they have encountered one. All the while, a person might unknowingly become more and more unbalanced because of a subtle evil influence. Blackmore has attempted to kill me more than once--how many times I can only guess. I believe he has become obsessed with the notion. It’s possible that his mind has become unhinged by a dark force, what many call a demon, the way that the body can be sickened by germs.
   A few days after the vision of the gray figure-eight, I visited the bookstore. While there, I had an unexpected and totally uncharacteristic desire to buy a pack of Tarot cards. Normally I would hang out exclusively in the literature section of the bookstore, but that day I searched through the New Age section. I was immediately attracted to a book on the Tarot and continued browsing until I discovered the Universal Waite Tarot deck.
   As the cashier was ringing up the items, he confided that he had been thinking about "getting back into" the Tarot himself. Not knowing quite how to respond, I paused, and suddenly the word "synchronicity" popped out of my mouth. I confess that at the time I wasn't even totally sure what the word meant. The cashier smiled and handed me my purchase. I then drove to another store on a different errand.
   Before I got out of the car, I flipped through the book and stopped at a page that featured a striking photo of a man named Carl Jung. I glanced at the text below and immediately discovered that Carl Jung had coined the term synchronicity to suggest how events in the external world can significantly mirror the symbolic world of the subconscious mind; in other words, just as events are connected by causality, they are also connected by meaning. I then opened the pack of Tarot cards. The second card I encountered, known as “The Magician,” shows a figure with a horizontal gray figure-eight floating above his head. I flipped through the book to a description of "The Magician" and discovered that the gray figure-eight, called an infinity symbol or lemniscate, is a symbol of eternity. In the card, the lemniscate suggests the knowledge of the infinitude within.
   I continued reading the book and decided that in my vision I had tapped into another dimension and had encountered a symbol, which a few days later surfaced in my conscious "real" life, and as I read on I discovered that the symbol system of the Tarot dove-tails in every way with the mystic symbol system known as the Tree of Life, which is an expanded version of the primary chakra system.
   I usually avoid telling people about the other "coincidence": Before I envisioned the lemniscate, I had discovered a version of the matrix of the Tree of Life in the garage with gems hanging within the ten circles that represent the spheres known as the Sephiroth.
   When I experienced the vision of the infinity symbol, I had been mentally purifying my chakras. As I continued meditating, I envisioned pearls in the joints of my fingers and I could clearly see the rainbow of wheels spinning in front of me along my spinal cord. I could clearly see impurities in the vortices, and I mentally wiped them clean with a damp white cloth.
   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 the primary chakras in my aura.
   I also repeatedly experienced a vision of a golden equal-armed cross with an indistinct angel at each end. I did some research and discovered that the symbol revealed the basis for an extremely powerful ritual known as “The Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram.” Nevertheless, despite my visions, I still doubted the existence of a spiritual realm. So I began to perform “The Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram,” which invokes the Archangels of the four “Elements of the wise.” 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 and power that I cannot even begin to comprehend. My personality vanished, but I knew that my soul is eternal.

   The next day at the end of the ritual I glimpsed a vague presence from a different dimension. It seemed to to be slanting into our dimension. 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 was experiencing 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 would go away.
   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.
   When you contact other spiritual dimensions, beings on the other side notice you. If you are unbalanced in any way, some beings from the other side will try to unhinge you. The people around you become vulnerable, especially if the evil or malicious spirits cannot immediately unbalance you.
   An evil spirit began tormenting my daughter. According to her, as she was falling asleep, she heard a voice that sounded like her mother’s voice whispering, “Don’t turn around.” This terrified her but piqued her curiosity. She slowly turned her head and saw a figure that resembled black smoke in the shape of a human being next to her bed. Suddenly the figure jumped on the wall, then started crawling across the ceiling. My daughter tore off her blankets and dashed to her mother’s room. On another night, my daughter could hear a man weeping and begging for mercy in her closet--a closet which I discovered later had blood splatters on the ceiling.
   My wife began having nightmares. Several times, she stood up, sound asleep, yelling and swinging her arms. When she woke up, she had no recollection of fighting for her life.
   I had no idea, when I first touched the amethyst on the Tree of Life, that each circle on the matrix represents a state of being, and each state contains both a balanced and an unbalanced aspect. Since someone charged each gem on the Tree of Life matrix with the energy from its respective sphere, anyone touching a gem on this matrix also touches the energy of that state of being and opens himself to both the unbalanced and balanced aspects of the energy, a virtue and a vice, so to speak.
   The second gem I touched, the emerald, represents the sphere of Venus: the sphere of nature and the arts and the beauty of the life force. The virtue of the sphere of Venus is unselfishness and the vice is unchastity--a chronic state of lust.
   Right after I touched the emerald, I had the urge to drive out to the Kings River. While lounging on a rock, surrounded by oaks and sycamores, I sensed an overarching consciousness, as if all the plants and trees and even rocks in that place had tuned to one frequency, a peace beyond understanding, and I too had effortlessly tuned my mind to that vibration. My mind had tuned to the Over-soul. I was on the path between Yesod, the ninth sphere of psychism represented by the amethyst, and Netzach, the seventh sphere of nature represented by the emerald. In other words, I had become psychic enough to experience the spirits behind the “outer robe of concealment" of the natural world.
   After I got home, however, I began compulsively surfing through internet porn until I recognized that I had to deal with the influx of energy from the state of Netzach (Venus) in a more balanced manner. I was only able to return to a sense of harmony after I cleansed myself and the house with the banishing ritual for several days.
   I am afraid--and I should emphasize that I am not entirely sure about this--that the demonic spirit that showed up might have followed John Blackmore and edged him even farther into a state of homicidal rage. Whatever actually happened on the spiritual level, I know that I achieved a low point in my own karmic career, considering the circumstances. I could blame my failings on chronic illness and the way society crushes artists and activists and free thinkers, but I intuited that I needed to change radically in order to resolve the karmic debt. Unfortunately, I do not know exactly what I have done to deserve my fate, though I am pretty sure that it is warranted for one reason or another. Perhaps I had committed a heinous crime against John Blackmore in a previous life, or maybe all the negative energy that I had subconsciously projected at other people was boomeranging back to me. I continued meditating to heal my mind and heart to become more balanced--to attract harmony instead of the dark, destructive energies that attracted John Blackmore into my life.

   As I continued meditating and performing The Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram, I began to experience black energies flowing into me, and I released them into the fires below the surface of the earth, just as I had released many of the dark energies within my chakras. I soon recognized that I was releasing and purifying the negative energies within the collective consciousness of humanity, and Gaia, our beloved Mother Earth, was burning them up and transmuting them into harmony, for the dark energies at a certain point in each ritual transformed into light. This of course was an act of sacred reciprocity, for humanity is destroying the earth and itself due in large part to the negativity in our collective consciousness....

Go on another adventure.

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

Pestles on a Pounding Stone

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APT. 21

    Sure that truth and morality and the arts don't mean much to people anymore, you fill the hot air balloons connected to your room and gently lift away from the other rooms in the apartment complex. Exhilarated by the view, you glide over the valley, a vast quilt of farms with packing sheds and processing plants and towns that develop outward around nuclei of malls, fast food restaurants, box stores, and gas stations. You notice that the small towns in the valley resemble serfdoms, with a few extravagant mansions and a few run-down middle-class homes and numerous tawdry shacks surrounding the inner core of affluence. You glide over to the foothills, some regions of which still seem pristine. You glimpse a network of trails and amuse yourself by trying to map the paths, realizing that they must form an ancient web connecting Native American village sites all over the range, but the trails keep vanishing in the grass. You go higher above the smog and glimpse all the cultivated and urbanized land where wetlands and lakes used to be, the dams on every river; beyond that are strip mines and patches of clear-cut forests. You go even higher where the oxygen grows thin and view a huge fault and the opening of a volcano, the ocean in the distance. Every now and then you hear jets and explosions, and you wonder how high you need to go to escape the wars and disasters as, breathing through an oxygen mask, you approach the cold blanket of outer space.

History

PENDULUM DREAMS: 

REGRESSION

   Ninety seconds before midnight, I was simply trying to figure out a reasonable way of avoiding more ecocide and genocide and the total annihilation of the planet, so I did something I wouldn’t normally do.
   I had become more and more excited about the possibility of reincarnation, and even though I had always considered myself a rational man, I decided to go to a hypnotist for a past life regression. The experience of being hypnotized at first struck me as more than a little awkward and perhaps even a little dangerous since I would be giving another person control over my psyche, but I couldn't resist seeking out the truth, so I made an appointment with a hypnotist, a Dr. Browning, who had a reputation for helping people quit smoking.
   I drove to a house surrounded by tall pine trees, the natural setting as inviting as a forest. I was ushered into the house by a woman in her late fifties, who stared at me coldly for a moment and then led me upstairs to a loft above the garage with window that contained a view of the midsection of a pine tree.
   "Have a seat on the couch," she commanded. "My husband will be here shortly."
   I wondered if making the client wait was standard procedure. In my case it wasn't working; I had the urge to fly back down the stairs and out the door. Instead, I looked around the office. It was clean, decorated in a Southwestern style with paintings of Native Americans curled up next to big clay pots, a room devoid of any paraphernalia intended to mesmerize, as far as I could tell. Suddenly Dr. Browning rushed in, apologizing for being late.
   He was an older gentleman, with protruding white eyebrows. "I just have a couple of questions before we get started," he said. "Have you ever been hypnotized before?"
   "No," I replied.
   "What do you expect to learn from this experience?"
   "You'll probably think this is silly, or maybe not--I don't know. Recently, I've had feelings that I've lived before, and I was hoping that you might be able to regress me back to that time, if that's possible."
   "Do you believe in reincarnation?"
   "I'm not sure."
   "Are you religious?"
   "I'm not sure what that means."
   "Do you consider yourself a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim?"
   "No. Really, I don't believe in any particular religion. Usually, I find my spiritual strength in the 'church of nature,' so to speak. In fact, that's where I first had these feelings. I was near a creek and I felt like I'd been there before. I felt like a Native American woman who had lost someone she deeply loved. And I have never wanted to be a woman, if that's what you're thinking," I smiled.
   "I appreciate your frankness. What you're asking is not easy, and if we are successful you might not like what you find. Every life contains a certain amount of brokenness and pain, as I'm sure you know."
   "I'm willing to risk it."
   "As long as you understand that there is an element of risk, or at least the possibility of some unpleasantness, I'm going to go ahead and start the process. You realize that I'm going to record this session. Is that all right?"
   "Yes."
   Apparently, I am a receptive subject. I remembered everything that had transpired during the session. After regressing me back to my birth experience, the hypnotist asked me to walk on the trail next to the creek again, but this time in my previous life. He asked me to describe what I saw. I described the huts on the ridge and women at the pounding stone gossiping and laughing. One man was making a spear, another a trap, while others appeared to be playing some game, possibly gambling.
   "Tell me what happened to you," the hypnotist said.
   I saw the village on the ridge, noticing a hut near a small pounding stone by a trail. A few people were huddled around fires but almost everyone else in the village was still asleep. I gazed far off into the valley, where herds of animals were stirring. Rain was beginning to fall. I had the feeling that something terrible was about to happen, but I was thirsty, so I decided to walk down the hillside to the creek for a drink of water. When I crouched down to cup water in my hands, I looked up to the hillside and saw white settlers attacking the village. I screamed, realizing at that moment that I was the woman in that past life.
   Then I remembered what had happened to the woman. After she had been knocked unconscious by the rifle butt, the white settlers, most in uniform, had burned the village and the winter stores. When she came to her senses, she discovered that her hands were tied tightly behind her back. A few members of the tribe were wailing over the dead strewn across the ridge. They dragged her over to a group of men who were being whipped into line. A white man with a long beard and dressed in skins was arguing with a man in uniform and pointing at her angrily. Suddenly the bearded man stomped over to her and pulled her aside, just before a line of soldiers marched in front of the prisoners, lifted their rifles on command and shot them dead.
   The white man tied a leather strap around her waist and dragged her along behind him with her hands still tied behind her back. She could see her aunt wailing over the body of her uncle. She wanted to scream but could only grimace and weep, falling to her knees as she was dragged along and then pulled face down onto the ground. The white man turned around and whipped her hard across the neck and back until she got on her feet again. After that, every time she slowed, the white man whipped her until she moved at a pace more to his liking as they hiked up a trail that led to her old village, finally making camp on a ridge overlooking the great valley in the west and the foothill valley in the east where her tribe was still encamped.
   The white man used her like a wife that evening and then tied her up tightly to an oak tree. She sat with her back to the tree, gazing at the constellations, seeing fires like tiny stars in the valley on land that no longer belonged to her people, as though part of the great sky had also been taken from them. In the morning, she stared, unable to move, as men in uniform marched past her over the ridge into the foothill valley. Later that morning, she heard gunshots far off in the distance.
   They remained camped on the ridge several days, occasionally hearing gunfire.
   After a few days she heard only birds and squirrels and frogs and crickets. The white man dragged her behind him on the trail into the foothill valley down to the creek near her village. They hiked along the hill above the creek, but even hundreds of yards above the village, she could smell smoke. The white man whipped her when she paused, so she trudged along behind him with tears streaming silently down her cheeks.
   They finally made camp close to a place where some of her tribe had settled long ago, east of the creek where she had grown up. He used her practically every night whether or not she cried and then tied her to a tree. At times she could hear animals trampling through the brush, and one night woke to a bear sniffing her. She remained perfectly still until the bear grunted and wandered off. The next day the white man dragged her down to the creek, untying her hands, and then tied a string around her finger and slapped a bush with his whip to let her know what would happen if she tried to escape. He showed her large flat rocks and where to carry them, above the river bed in the clearing where he began stacking them as evenly as possible on top of each other. By the end of the day they had four walls, all several feet high. In a few days they had built a solid house with planks and branches for a roof.
   Soon other white men made camp nearby in the clearing. They all had large pans and shovels and picks and spent most of the day by the creek. Her companion also spent a lot of time by the creek, showing the nuggets of gold that he occasionally found, but he would usually go hunting in the hills, leaving her untied but whipping the bush before he left. All the while, he had fed her well, deer and rabbit and squirrel and quail. After a while, she realized she was pregnant. She had nowhere else to go, so she spent her days gathering acorns and making mush at the pounding stones by the creek just like her people had done for countless years. He refrained from whipping her, and they began to work more like partners.
   After she had the baby, she spent most of her time near the house while her companion went off hunting, sometimes for days. He even had a mule that he had bought from one of the other miners. He would sell some of the meat he brought back for gold to the other miners if he had any left over. She took care of the baby and did what her companion wanted.
   She was always the first one to rise, just before dawn. The baby was usually asleep at that time, which gave her a little time to prepare herself for the day. One morning while she was at the creek at sunrise, the camp was attacked by several men from her tribe, who shot the sleeping miners in their tents and then either crushed their skulls with clubs or slit their throats. She started running toward her house just as her companion was coming out. A gun went off close by, and he looked at her, surprised and pained, before he fell flat on his face. As she screamed, one of the attackers crushed his skull. Her baby, who had been screaming, suddenly stopped, and one of the men stepped out of the house with blood covering his knife. She tried to run into the house but was stopped by one of the men. She fell to her knees, wailing.
   The men took all the mules and the gold and whatever else they decided they could use and left her alone with the dead. First, she buried her baby under the house and then tore down the stones from the walls, one by one, to lay on top of her companion's shallow grave, the way she had seen the other miners bury an old man who had died of fever. She buried them all the same way, six in all, before she headed back up the creek to her old village. She found two more bodies near a stone house by the creek and buried them as well, side by side.
   Her companion had once shown her how to load and shoot a rifle, so she took a rifle and powder and bullets that the others had missed in the raid and made camp where her old village had once stood. She built a small hut on the ridge and survived by hunting and grinding acorns. (I understood then why I had found only one pestle in the mortar under the oak tree on the ridge.)
   All of this passed before my eyes fairly quickly. Some parts seemed to move in fast forward. I saw clearly only what seemed the most significant aspects of the experience.
   The hypnotist woke me gently from my trance. "Do you remember what you just told me?" he asked.
   "Yes, I do," I replied. "I can't believe it. This is incredible. Why don't more people know about this?"
   "'This' meaning reincarnation?" the hypnotist asked.
   "Yeah. Imagine if everyone knew they had lived before and would live again. Wouldn't that knowledge eliminate a lot of horrible social problems?"
   "I doubt that everyone is ready for this. You weren't ready until now, and how old are you?"
   "Forty-one."
   "I doubt that we could force anyone to do this. They have to be ready for it, like you. Anyway, realizing that you have an eternal soul doesn't necessarily mean that you will be a good person."
   "Yes, but look at the power you have to do good! The white racist would realize that he could have once been black. The sexist would realize that he was probably at least once a woman. The homophobic would realize that he might once have been gay, or might be in a future life."
   "Yes, but prejudice is a type of power that very few people are willing to give up."
   "But what if this became an accepted practice. Children could be regressed before they could become prejudiced!"
   "You mean they would go to their hypnotist like they go to their dentist?" he laughed.
   "Why not?"
   "You are not only a receptive subject but extremely brave! Unfortunately I don't have time to change the entire world right now. I do have another appointment," he said with a warm smile.
   I thanked him and left the office, pondering the significance of reincarnation for many days afterward, without telling anyone.
   I suspected that I was tapping into something huge, something that connected me to everything else in the world. All of experience must be imprinted in the subconscious mind, I thought, or maybe the subconscious can somehow tap into a record of experience somewhere in the "mind" of the cosmos. That was the only way I could view the woman’s experiences at times from her perspective and other times from a different perspective. That raised a question: What is identity? Was I the woman in a past life or was I simply reliving someone else’s experiences? If the latter, does that mean that I am one pair of eyes for the collective mind, even though for most of my life I have believed that I am a unique, separate individual?
   Insanity is the denial of reality. If I, for instance, were to deny that I have celiac disease, foods with gluten that everyone else can eat would poison me until I eventually died. Why should having visions and intuitions and reliving a past life be any more or less insane? I have at key points in my life ended up adjusting my thinking and changing radically for unexpected, even strange reasons. Why should I do anything differently now?

Go on a different adventure.

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

Pestles on a Pounding Stone

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APT. 20

   In Apt. 20 one memory plays over and over: the day that you climbed over the barbed wire, careful not to hook your clothes, following a trail to the creek, wading through a turpentine scent exhaled from blue curl--tough stalks with tiny purple steer's skulls--the silence heightened by squirrels and lizards scurrying over cinnamon-colored leaves curled into boat shapes as you touched the silver puzzle of the bark, knowing you could never fit it back together as you pulled it apart, noting the bones like huge drum-sticks scattered on the slope just before you turned to discover the pounding stone for the first time--all this keeps replaying to the exclusion of everything else, as if something were about to fit together, thousands of years flooding the hillsides, yet there was no time, the far-off howl of a coyote joined by another howl, children in the distance or the faint cries and laughter of some tribe, somehow near and yet far away, reaching you in the stillness.

(You realize that you are still on the right path because in a corner of the room you find an old box containing Pendulum Dreams by Justin C....)

Wind Poppies and Chinese Houses near Native American Village Site

PENDULUM DREAMS: 

SIGHT

"Our lives are destroyed so that we have the empathy and courage to lift and carry the cross for the crucified of this world."  

   Justin C.

   I stood peering beyond the clouds, glimpsing the shadow of a surfacing turtle, then turned and reached into the cracks between rocks sprouting star moss, the pounding stone always at the center, the mortars filling with leaves and bugs and creek water and pounded only by rain for over a century, the smooth cups in the stone my only evidence. A slightly haunted satisfaction washed over me even though I found nothing but dirt or slime under my fingernails, even though merely sitting by the creek as the breeze stirred my hair, the leaves, the languid water.
   I have experienced, in this life and another, the two signs of the final terror while ravished by the flowers and trees, the purling water, the breath of all the species flowing around me.
   Once, I had driven toward the obscured mountains, straight on an avenue past orchards where a snow of blossoms revealed budding leaves, the road suddenly straying from the grid and veering northeast into the grasslands at the base of the foothills, across a canal that contained in concrete most of the San Joaquin River heading south now instead of north in its natural course to the delta, the road winding over a ridge into a small foothill valley. I knew they would pursue me until I paid, but I kept accelerating into the curves, suddenly noticing a slightly opened gate.
   I felt an uncharacteristic desire to trespass, so I turned around, parked the car, opened the loosely chained gate, and dashed down a short trail, over a berm with large boulders meant to hide a once-oiled road, now cracked, eroded, and quilted by cow droppings that sprouted red maids and miniature lupine. After hiking down the hill about half a mile, I wandered off the road onto a path next to the creek. At dusk alone in the foothills, the woods breathing peacefully as the air darkened and cooled, the bats looping soundlessly overhead and crickets chirping in the still-warm grass, I saw a flock of wild turkeys, resembling small dinosaurs, scurrying along the bank about fifty feet away. In the quiet, my chest heaved slightly from an inexplicable rage.
   It wasn't just that I was trespassing, which I was considering an act of civil disobedience, or that I was six months out of work. I had walked straight to a pounding stone, the mortars in the rock black with slime and decaying leaves. I suddenly knew without a doubt that I would find a path leading to another pounding stone. I stumbled a few feet and found the path right away and followed it. Soon I found another pounding stone about two hundred yards away on a ridge overlooking the creek.
   The two pounding stones were close but blocked from view by a slope on the north side where the creek bends. I went back to the first pounding stone I had encountered and sat near a shallow mortar, which someone had not had time to deepen. Feeling the coolness of the rock and trying to empty my mind, I closed my eyes and felt the breeze and in spite of myself heard the laughter of women. I opened my eyes to the stone that had not changed in over a century, only now there were no people.
   Picking up an oak branch to use as a walking stick, I was suddenly seeing through the eyes of someone else who was bent and dizzy and deeply troubled, ready to lie down forever. The walking stick was in my hand which was also someone else's hand. I had someone else's face or no face at all. I held the stick away from my body, imagining myself stretching out on the earth many years before as the trees turned, everything passing away except the stone and the sun, and then my arrival.
   Listening to long, almost human groans of utter despair, possibly from a bullfrog being swallowed by an eight-foot garter snake that ruled the evaporating creek, I returned to the pounding stone with the feeling that I was on the verge of remembering something. All that surfaced was the overwhelming urge to find my way to the top of the opposite ridge. I hopped over the rocks without getting my feet wet and climbed up the slope, avoiding poison oak, seeing nothing at first but dry grass and gray pines and a few bare spots with a little rosinweed. I strolled back and forth on the ridge several times, sure I was missing something, until, sweaty and tired, I surrendered to the shade.
   I looked first to my right at a large stone under an old oak tree, and then to my left, seeing poison oak near a stone that the earth had nearly submerged. Looking down I realized that I was practically sitting on a shallow mortar. Suddenly drawn to the oak tree, I discovered in the stone beneath it that a large pestle was plugging a mortar. With oak leaves needling my fingers, I cleared the pounding stone, finding ten other mortars. Looking back, I decided to check out the other stone and discovered that it also contained mortars, filled with earth and grass. I was in the middle of another ancient village site, the round hollows of the house pits still faintly etched in the earth.
   I suddenly felt like a woman. Before I could begin to cope with that feeling, a terrible sorrow overcame me, as if I had lost someone I had deeply loved. Even though I had suffered many times from loss, this grief was different, right on the surface. I felt the emotional surges of a teenager coupled with the maturity of an adult. Then I found a trail down to the creek, and suddenly imagined that I was in some procession, and that I was about to say goodbye to someone for the last time. The grief was different from any I had experienced, nearly unbearable, impossible to suppress. I felt compelled to go on, as though it were out of the question to stop, crossing the dry creek and snaking up a trail to a level stretch of land where I found more round hollows in the earth.
   I knew right away that the round hollows were house pits, which confused me at first, until I remembered that the Yokuts often buried the dead under their houses. I felt an absurd desire to keep anyone from being buried there. The woman in that other time must have fought with all her strength to stop the burial. I imagined that others, overcome by their own grief, did what they could to comfort her. Somehow I knew that she had remained inconsolable, and I had no rational explanation for how I knew this or why I had found my way to those house pits.

Go on a different adventure.