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

Mangled Bridge Caught on Stone

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APT. 25

   In Apartment 25 you don't really exist, or to be more precise, people around you don't believe that the most important facets of your being exist. They don't believe that you have a chronic illness caused by gluten; they think you're faking it. They don't believe that you have had COVID at least five times. They don't believe that at one point someone was trying to murder you. They don't believe or don't care that you have discovered genocide memorials all over the Sierra Nevada Mountains: abandoned Native American village sites. They don't believe that you have healed yourself of serious illnesses with your own mind during meditation. They certainly don't believe that you regularly invoke Archangels or that for a period of time you were relentlessly assaulted by demonic forces. They don't believe that during your daily ritual you feel a profound sense of eternity that makes your personality vanish, which also causes all of your regrets and all of your negativity to disappear. In Apartment 25, you might as well be invisible.

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

Tiger Lilies, before the Creek Fire

PENDULUM DREAMS:

Cleansing Rain

   Rain out of nowhere suddenly smacked the windshield. After I switched from low beams to brights, the drops seemed to shoot out from an invisible shower nozzle floating about five feet above my improperly angled left headlight. No matter how fast I sped down the rural highway--sixty, seventy, eighty--the nozzle remained suspended in front of my car. All the while I could also see myriad drops exploding on the asphalt, the black orchards sliding into shadows of vineyards or voids of pastureland.

   Suddenly I glimpsed in the headlights a massive bullfrog that resembled a malformed infant crawling across the wet pavement, its right foreleg stretching out to drag the rest of its bulky form directly into the path of my car. I swerved a little to the right; I will never know whether or not my car crushed it, whether or not other tires would soon be squashing it into a ratty, quickly graying mush.

   Suspended in the eternal moment, able, within limits, to choose the quality of that moment, you might decide in complete innocence to explore a road and suddenly become a bloody mush on the asphalt. I shuddered a little but refused to imagine my own body lying mangled in the black rain because I have come to believe that thought forms infused with emotion tend to manifest. Instead I imagined the ritual that I would perform when I got home. I usually worked with the great Archangels Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, and Auriel in a ritual known as the Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram. With the Archangels, I would heal and cleanse myself and my spiritual friends and sometimes even my enemies. Recently, after I had felt completely healed and cleansed, I began to realize that I was also healing and cleansing the collective consciousness of humanity. With each of the four great Archangels, I would find myself being crucified and then dropping into the fires beneath the earth's surface, where I, along with a great deal of dark energy, would burn up completely, transformed into white light. At one point, this just began happening during the ritual even though I have never considered myself a Christian. With each Archangel I feel a profound sense of eternity, and my personality disappears along with all the negativity in my aura.

   Tonight, though, I imagined that I would put on a CD of the music that I’d composed and recorded, and after clearing my ritual space, I would send energy into my symbolic offerings to Thoth, Osiris, and Isis, each hieroglyphic symbol turning golden on the alter in the energy of my aura. Then I would send the energy into my paintings of the Gods. The Gods would ensoul those forms on the astral plane, sending their potent energy back into my energy field that would then be strengthened in ways that would only become apparent later--perhaps even years later.

   Over five years ago, for several days in a row, I had asked Thoth, Isis, and Osiris to look favorably upon my longing to live in my higher self, and finally in the middle of the night, I had awakened. After an hour of painfully mulling over in my mind all of my points of vulnerability, I suddenly realized that I had to peer beyond appearances to the divine spark, the part of myself that recognizes the divinity within all things. The next day, the idea of "the divine spark" resonated in whatever I was doing. Even when I was washing dishes or taking out the trash, I sensed a divine intelligence permeating everything, a unity underlying all consciousness. During my next ritual, I envisioned an invisible sun that I immediately associated with Osiris and the crown chakra, Osiris torn into pieces and restored by Isis and Thoth, Osiris slain and risen into the higher life, a spiritual sun. I was surprised by joy and peace as if Osiris had somehow touched my soul.

   As I drove, I envisioned The Magician, the Tarot card representing the path on the Tree of Life between Kether, the Crown of Creation, and Binah, the sphere of the celestial Mother, the root of form. I pictured a man in a robe holding up a wand with his right hand, his left hand pointing to the ground. The magician stands behind a table upon which rests a sword, a wand, a cup, and a pentacle, symbols of the astrological triplicities and the four elements of the wise, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth respectively. The magician uses all of the cosmic energies for the highest possible good, and above his head floats a horizontal gray figure eight, symbol of the knowledge of the infinitude within, a symbol that I, in the first of many synchronicities, had seen in a vision during meditation two days before I purchased a pack of Tarot cards. The Hebrew letter Beth, the first letter of the bible (but the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet), is associated with the card. Thoth also is associated with the archetype of the Magician in his Roman form as Mercury, “Thoth, the heart of Ra, the Logos who speaks the Word that manifests the meaning within the underlying patterns of existence” I thought as I swerved a little to avoid crushing another frog. I planned to place that card on the altar in front of my painting of Thoth for my ritual.

   Rays of water kept shooting out from the invisible shower nozzle above my car, and as I swerved again to avoid smashing another lump on the road, I realized that just as the hearts of a great many people do not resonate with the beauty of nature, or with the concepts of truth and justice or with music or poetry or paintings, their hearts would not resonate with the concept of the higher self. In fact, I would be even more separated from the herd because of my desire to live in the higher self and even more vulnerable because of the ferocity of the group mind, which had the uncanny ability to identify and vilify anyone who is different, like the aliens in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

   A jackrabbit suddenly shot in front of my car. I heard a sharp crack followed quickly by a thud in the undercarriage. I winced, remembering when my wife and daughter had left me alone for a weekend. I remembered hearing, late at night, a thud somewhere in the house. Soon after, I heard what sounded like the cocking of a gun in front of my tiny room where my wife had banished me due to my snoring. A few minutes later I heard a window being unlocked in another room.

   I shuddered as I gazed at the rays of water; if it hadn't been for my intuition that something terrible might happen that night, I wouldn't have slept in a locked room, and my wife would have found me the next day, a lifeless, bloody lump on the couch. 

   Suddenly I felt the car wobble a little. Please, God, not now in this rain, I thought, as I pulled over next to an orchard. I flicked the hood of my jacket over my head, grabbed a flashlight from the trunk, and inspected the tire. The head of a nail glinted in a vulnerable slit between the treads. Slow leak. At that instant, a white Ford pickup truck flew by, splashing water from a large puddle all the way over the roof of my car and onto my face and jacket.

   John Blackmore owned a white Ford pickup truck. Every man with any money in the San Joaquin Valley owned a white Ford pickup truck. The truck in the distance appeared to be turning around; I thought I glimpsed the headlights far off sliding over trees and then slowly growing larger on the wet pavement. Blackmore might have his gun. Blackmore could kill me and bury me deep in one of these orchards, and nobody would ever know. In a panic, I clicked off my flashlight and hustled over to the first row of trees, hiding behind a thin trunk. Sure enough, the white Ford pickup swung around and parked behind my car.

   A man with a large flashlight, about Blackmore's height--it was hard to tell due to the hood of the raincoat--bent over to inspect the tire. Then the man stood up and gazed down the road. Soon the shadow turned the flashlight on the orchard, and I dropped down to the roots of an almond tree. The man got back in his truck and drove off slowly down the road. Shaking slightly, I swore bitterly to myself as I watched the red tail lights growing smaller. But then the truck, far off in the distance, turned around again.

   Only three people would have done that: my wife, a landowner searching for trespassers, or John Blackmore. My wife had no reason to suspect that I was having car problems, and a landowner would be crazy to search for trespassers on such a dreary night, unless of course he were totally insane about protecting his private property rights. The man got out of the pickup and began walking directly over to the orchard without a light to guide him. I panicked again, but knew that if I ran, I would probably make too much noise, so I tiptoed three rows deeper into the orchard before the shadow reached the trees. Suddenly light flowed slowly over the trunks, casting eerie shadows, and I slumped down as close to the roots as possible. The shadow carrying the flashlight suddenly stopped and waited.

   A veteran trespasser, I knew that I would have to remain completely still until the man became distracted or wandered away; remaining calm, I decided that I would then move as quietly away from my adversary as possible. I would sit quietly like the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree, I thought with more than a little bitterness. I could not escape in my car, obviously, due to the flat tire, but I might circle around and try to see the license plate number of the pickup, to prove once and for all to my wife that Blackmore was a homicidal maniac who would stick a nail in one of my tires and then follow me to work on a wet, dreary night. I decided instead to disappear farther into the orchard and wait until the truck left for good.

   I leaned against the tree, suddenly remembering a moment which had occurred over twenty years before. I, my girlfriend Karen, and my eight year old son from a previous marriage were all standing in the badly lit kitchen of our apartment. Karen, who for five years had rarely gotten along with my son, out of nowhere called the boy a “bastard and a mother f--ker.” She had attacked me vociferously many times before in front of the boy, often without what I would consider provocation, but she had never before, to my knowledge, verbally assaulted him in such a damaging way. Karen would sometimes harangue me for hours, becoming more and more furious as I tried to smooth things over or end the argument by going into another room; she would follow me wherever I went, still shouting. I remembered the moment clearly, possibly because it became clear then that I was living with a sociopath, and it was the beginning of the end of the relationship: she had carefully enunciated the words and then simply stepped back, waiting with a smirk on her face, as if she had just dropped a grenade between me and my son. Suddenly I stood up and my hand shot out, slapping her hard across the cheek. Furious, I then stomped into the bedroom, shoved open her closet door, grabbed as much of her clothing as I could and ran to the door, throwing the clothes in a heap on the front steps.

   I had already imbibed several beers. I sat down on the couch, watched TV and finished off the six-pack as Karen made a phone call. Soon, my former lover, Anne, showed up on the doorstep where my wife's clothing still remained in a heap. That I suppose was meant to make me cringe: I had met Karen after she had become Anne's roommate in college, and since Anne had decided to marry another man, I decided to pursue other interests, in other words, Karen, her roommate.

   Blackmore might have heard me splashing through the orchard, and might still be waiting for me, so I decided not to try to find my way back for a while. I realized also at that moment that, to be a spiritual master, I would have to remain focused even in the worst circumstances, to control the cosmic energies within myself even if my lover was about to poke my eye out with a red-hot wire or my friend was attempting to blow my head off.    Before my spiritual awakening, I had been an atheist. I had started meditating, however, and during meditation and ritual I had touched the hem of eternity, envisioning archetypes and sensing intelligences that transcend anything humans could consciously understand. A human was little more than an amoeba compared to them. Those great intelligences remain ineffable due to the limited brain capacity of the species. Oddly, however, their presence could be felt if one exalted consciousness, and for some reason, the Archangels and Gods would elevate the human soul--as if the evolution of humanity were somehow significant to them. Their energy exalted me and made me stronger emotionally and mentally than I ever before believed possible.

   I tried to clear everything out of my mind and, failing that, I focused on the image of Thoth. In my painting, the figure of Thoth stood against a yellow background and contained flashing colors--in other words, complementary colors of purple and yellow that vibrated if one stared at them long enough, the intense colors helping the mind tune to a higher vibration, so that the worshipper could more easily tune to the higher energies of the spiritual plane. I tried to hold the image in my mind, but instead, I remembered the argument that had occurred decades before.

   As the rain dropped from the branches like tiny liquid fruit in the darkness, I cringed again. Why did sociopaths find their way into my life? Did I attract them? Are they unavoidable because of the way we are all socially conditioned? I have suffered demonic attacks ever since my spiritual awakening, but because of my spiritual practices they cannot harm me: Did demons target the people around me and stimulate their sociopathic tendencies? Maybe demons were trying to destroy me through other people instead since they couldn't harm me. When Karen left the apartment with Anne the day of the argument, I had been so angry, not to mention drunk, that I couldn't think of a thing to say as they left. I didn't even ask where they were going. Karen was gone three days before she phoned me to let me know that she was staying at the battered women's shelter. I begged her, in front of my son, to come home. "Oh," she stated. "They told me you might say that." She also mentioned that she felt foolish when she saw the other women at the shelter, some of whom, unlike her, had been brutally beaten, but she still refused to come home.

   Stop tormenting yourself, I thought. Since then, I have purified myself over and over, physically and emotionally and mentally and spiritually, forgiving everyone who has harmed me. I have not seen or talked to Karen or Anne in two decades. The torment, nevertheless, continued. Karen, through her fiction writing in college, had become the darling of a popular feminist writer, and I was not rehired as a teaching assistant or as a tutor at the English Writing Lab the following semester. I wrote a shrill letter of complaint to the feminist professor, who asked me over the phone if I was going to sue her for sexual misconduct. Nonplussed once again, I could only give a weak reply in the negative, sensing that my eight years of grueling work at the university was all for naught. After that, if I ever submitted a resume mentioning that I had worked as a TA or a tutor at the university, I wouldn't get hired.

   Old wounds were opening, and I suddenly knew why. When I had graduated from college, I had become an environmental activist instead of going into a doctoral program or becoming a teacher, and I encountered John Blackmore at numerous political meetings. Suddenly I shivered. I was getting soaked as big drops plopped from the branches onto my jacket and pants. When I closed my eyes, I imagined how Blackmore, after completing the perfect murder, would take my wife out on a date.

   I suddenly envisioned Blackmore's heart center enveloped in blackness from which the snarling heads of wolves protruded. Blackmore was clever enough to hide his homicidal tendencies, but those wolves in his black heart kept anyone from getting close to him. At some point in his life, Blackmore had chosen to channel dark, ferocious energy, which presented itself to my psychic vision as snarling astral wolves out for blood.

   In my imagination, I released all of the blackness, all of the negativity, into the fires below the earth's surface, where it burned up completely. The soul, or higher self, thought of simplistically as the conscience, can transmute negativity into light and harmony. My higher self does not care about social status or money or what kind of job I have or even if I am harmed by following its dictates. I had never regretted sending the letter to the feminist professor or working as an environmental activist because I was speaking truth to power. The higher self magically neutralizes dark forces to create balance, I thought--and life would be intolerable without magic, without a belief in something higher.

   The rain and wind were dying down. I closed my eyes again and imagined the ritual that I had planned earlier. Even though Isis, Osiris, and Thoth were on my alter, I could only imagine Osiris clearly at that moment. In my imagination, I sent out golden energy from my heart to the hieroglyphic symbol of the Eye of Horus, which at home was positioned in front of the painting of Osiris. Suddenly, in my mind's eye, the symbol was no longer in black ink on paper but was the purest gold. I imagined then that the golden energy from my aura was infusing the astral form of Osiris until the form glowed. I felt the energy flow back into my heart and the intense circuit of energy brought tears to my eyes. "Osiris, slain and risen, perfected by suffering, thank you. I am resurrected," I whispered, imagining green, torn apart pieces of my soul put back together again. At that moment, I saw the spiritual sun at my crown. Whoever was trying to destroy me was so far away now, in some other part of the galaxy. Nothing could harm my essence.

   Suddenly I heard coyotes howling in the distance. I opened my eyes. I could see the trees more clearly now. Perhaps the moon had broken through the clouds. I slowly stood up, groaning, and tip-toed down a row of trees, careful to avoid startling any wild animals. After what seemed like an hour, to my great relief, I found the parked car in the distance, and I trotted along in the mud, howling, in my mind, for joy.

   I quickly changed the tire and brushed my hands off as I stood up with a groan. A smudge of gold glinted just above far-away mountain peaks as one light on the road suddenly split into two, far off in the distance, rapidly growing larger.

Go on a different adventure.