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Graffitied Pounding Stone by the Kings River

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ROOMS THAT DREAM:

APT. 26

   In Apartment 26, you experience a feeling of vulnerability. You have a highly contagious skin infection, a relentless case of scabies--in other words, tiny spiders crawling around in your skin. You contract COVID every time a new variant surfaces, and you sometimes experience heavy brain fog and terrible bouts of insomnia. For decades you have suffered from a chronic illness that causes fatigue and makes it nearly impossible to operate at a socially acceptable level of energy. Inflation and higher interest rates are pounding everyone. You are an empath, which is mainly a curse because of all the suffering, all the trauma, abuse, betrayal, upheaval, abandonment, poverty and loss that people suffer. You feel the dark energies of genocide and ecocide both in the valley and the nearby mountains, and you have an overwhelming feeling that you must do something to end the brutality and exploitation and destruction that threatens the existence of the planet and all of humanity. You continually release dark energies from your aura into the fires below the earth's surface to cleanse yourself and discover that you are taking on the negativity of the collective consciousness of humanity: every day in your imagination during your ritual you are totally vulnerable--you are crucified, and on your cross you fall into the fires below the earth's surface and your personality dissolves, along with layers of black negativity, but when cleansed you feel the unity underlying all consciousness and know the holiness of all energy and the divinity within each person.

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

Five-spot and Baby Blue Eyes (April 4, 2023)

PENDULUM DREAMS:

THE POUNDING STONE AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE

   I returned to Sycamore Creek to see if I could experience more memories of a past life.  After I parked the car on the edge of the hill, I scrambled down the slope through Chinese purple houses and Ithuriel's spears and baby blue eyes and fiddleneck, the unseasonably warm temperatures stimulating a few of the late spring flowers to bloom with the early spring flowers. As I stood enveloped by the breath of the plants and trees, I felt revived, the sun heating my skin even as the breeze chilled me. I had spent most of the past three weeks house bound, so the contrast felt almost shocking. As I paused to catch my breath, I sensed the life-force flowing into my aura until it penetrated my core.  Everything was energy: the plants, the trees, the clouds, the purling air. Every part of me was pure energy: body, emotions, intellect, and spirit. In my third eye, each invisible form of energy in my mind seemed to have a position in space, as if my feelings and thoughts were things made of some subtle substance. At the same time, I sensed that if those vibrations suddenly dissolved, I would experience my essence in some dimension beyond space and time.
   A dream I had just before I woke up suddenly made sense. The dream, which resembled the many symbolic visions I have had associated with the Tree of Life, contained three pure white flowers, resembling lilies, against a pure black background. Every part of these flowers was white, even the stamen and the stems, and the petals formed a perfect circle at the apex of each flower. They seemed, as I stood on the slope feeling the life-force penetrating my essence, to represent the three supernal centers of my core, a unified triad containing the primal polarity.  The supernal spheres of the Tree of Life exist beyond manifestation, on the other side of what the Qabalists call the Abyss. The flowers were white to suggest the unity of all the colors and the underlying unity of all consciousness as well as the purity of remaining untouched by the influences of the manifested cosmos.
   I, of course, have been preoccupied by thoughts of death due to Blackmore’s attempts to murder me and my struggles with celiac disease. My subconscious mind was revealing a symbol of my essence beyond death. Did this symbol mean that everything besides my essence would at some point fall away into pure blackness? Was the transient material universe like my body at some point also headed for the abyss, leaving only the supernal essence of the Universal Consciousness? If so, did that mean that everything I was experiencing in this place and time, including the flowers and trees and memories of a past life, would slip into oblivion, leaving only the supernal essence? Or is the material universe the abyss itself? On the Tree of Life, black is the color symbolically associated with the physical universe.
   As I pondered these questions, I realized that I had become hyper-sensitive to the life-force, not just due to being housebound, but also because of a long process of mental and spiritual self-purification. In Western societies, the idea of a “life-force" remains in limbo even though every culture I know has developed some concept of it. My experience therefore remains in the realm of fiction as well--even though the life-force is tangible to me. I can feel it flowing into the deepest part of every living thing open to it. Western science cannot explain how or why consciousness exists, but here we are, I thought, as I followed an ancient path down to the creek and found the ancient Native American village site once again.
   At that point I wondered whether I was a Jewish or Christian mystic. When I was an atheist both Judaism and Christianity had repulsed me, but I decided that now after my mystical experiences, I was a little of both since of course Christianity grew out of Judaism. I was focusing mainly on purification, and I recognized four main types of negativity that needed cleansing: personal negativity, of which there is at least half a ton in just about every person alive these days; the negativity of the soul-group, family and friends and ancestors; the negativity of the culture and society in general; and the negativity of the collective consciousness of humanity, and these types of negativity tend to overlap. Based on personal experience, I know that when you are in the process of mental purification and you reach stage four, the purification of the collective consciousness of humanity, you can become seriously ill and lose everything like Job and then get crucified like Jesus on the emotional, mental, and spiritual levels, and of course you feel vulnerable, oh, so vulnerable. In the process, you develop empathy for all of humanity, for whom you take on, not "sin," but the negativity of the collective consciousness, and then you transmute the negativity into harmony. This, I now believe, is something that many of the saints have done in the past. Nowadays, though, there is so much negative energy because over seven billion people exist on this earth, many of whom are so damaged that their hearts would keep turning in the direction of evil even after being purified by a saint.
   As I lounged on a pounding stone, I heard something crashing through the brush in the distance. When I turned, I glimpsed someone pushing through the branches of a fallen tree, the shoulder strap of his rifle caught on a twig. Since I was near the unfenced and therefore ambiguous border between public and private land, and he had a rifle, I dropped immediately to the ground. No predator in the wild terrifies me more than a human being with a weapon, so I peered at him through a crack in the stone. He was far enough away that I could not make out his features. I could see that he wore a stocking cap and long-sleeved shirt, both black, which seemed strange in the warm weather. Most hunters would be wearing some type of camouflage.
   Blackmore, I thought to myself. As he approached, I scrambled down a steep slope and crouched behind a buckeye tree whose roots were breaking a rock in two. Suddenly I remembered the map of my location that I had drawn and pinned to the frig, against my better judgment. After I had left on my excursion, Blackmore must have visited my wife and noticed the map. He wouldn’t be able to resist hunting me down. After examining the map, he had no doubt made some excuses to my wife, jumped into his white truck, and drove like a cowboy out to Sycamore Creek. It wasn’t like him to make noise, but everyone in the woods sooner or later ends up struggling through the brush.
   Hunting is normally a social enterprise, I thought, with two or more people involved. In fact, I have rarely encountered a hunter alone in the wilderness, nor have I encountered any hunters dressed in black. Blackmore wears a black t-shirt and black blue jeans all the time. As I hid in the tree roots, I began to wonder if I was just being paranoid. Could I be experiencing some form of PTSD due to Blackmore’s previous attempts on my life?
   In the most tranquil of places, I have found pounding stones. Near the creek, graves covered by stones and deserted Native American village sites reveal that some tragic drama once occurred there--a tragedy that just might be about to replay itself, I thought, as if places steeped in violence continue to attract it.
   I wasn’t even sure Blackmore was the hunter. Why was I afraid? Was the survival instinct kicking in? When I have met people in the wild, I’ve always instinctively distrusted them, as though for them and me it is understood that the rules of civilization no longer apply. Then, I thought, there is always also the general fear that weapons of mass destruction might wipe out the planet at any moment, a collective fear that we project onto other peoples and nations. Had I lived in denial of the horrors of the modern world so long that I was instinctively personifying my subconscious fear, personal and collective, in the form of one person, John Blackmore, the way someone might personify his repressed fear in the form of a monster or a demon?
   I didn’t plan to hang around long enough to find out. I watched the hunter in black hurry down an ancient path toward the creek, so I headed in the other direction. Despite my fear, I still felt the tranquility of the life-force in the sycamores and oaks and buckeyes and manzanitas next to the gurgling stream. Even though I always feel at peace in the wild, I am also always alert, feeling a slight tension at the back of my mind, because I know that any second I might encounter a snake or a mountain lion and end up slipping into the blackness.
   Again, I found myself near the confluence of Sycamore Creek and Dry Creek, where before I had experienced an inexplicable rage. That day I had felt like I had stepped into a current of cold air floating by the creek that contained an intense emotion, a subtle emanated substance.
   I was not experiencing the cold current of energy again, but I suddenly experienced impressions of the past as though the very air were charged with information. I don't know how else to explain it, and I of course have no way of proving what I suddenly knew. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned a meeting place on the ridge above me. With rocks that formed a natural semi-circle where people could sit, the meeting place had often instilled fear in the tribe members because terrible judgments were made there, often at night when the fire gave an unearthly glow to the faces of the elders.
   After climbing the slope on the other side of the creek, I found the stone semicircle and experienced another impression: The tribe was discussing some woman, judging her, deciding what to do with her. Suddenly shifting consciousness, I became part of the scene, and I gathered that her young husband had been killed by white settlers as he was attempting to steal horses from a farm that had once been part of the tribe's hunting grounds, and she had not been able to overcome her grief, avoiding or becoming angry at the other members of the tribe who tried to help her. She refused to believe that her husband was gone. She was slowly starving, weeping if she ate anything, and wandering off into the woods for days by herself, which was terribly risky because of predators. It was problematic for the tribe to keep sending men out looking for her.
   She refused to speak when the elders talked to her. She just stood with her head down, tears welling in her eyes. They talked to her sympathetically, and in the end decided that she should be taken to the clan nearby so that she could recover in different surroundings, away from her husband's grave where she had spent so many hours, completely inconsolable. Relatives in that clan would take care of her as long as she didn't run away. If she disappeared again, they would have to let her go.
   As if time could be fast-forwarded, I could see that she followed her brothers down the trail toward the valley to a large village at the base of a hill, next to a stream. Her brothers left her with two kindly old people who made her feel at home. At first she worked away from the tribe at a pounding stone with one mortar on a ridge overlooking the village. Soon, however, she was grinding acorns with the other women.
   As though I was recalling a dream, I saw on the screen of my mind how she got up early to get water from the creek one morning and noticed a white militia crawling up the ridge. Her screams awakened the village just before white men began firing their guns into the huts. A few members of the tribe were able to arm themselves and attack from hiding places in outcroppings of rock on the hillside. She ran toward the battle and grabbed the rifle of a fallen white man and shot another one in the face before she was hit with a rifle butt and lost consciousness.
   Suddenly I couldn’t see any more; the impressions of the past vanished. I didn’t know whether or not the woman had been killed. The strange vision had left me only with more questions.
   I suddenly felt uncomfortable. I had not heard the hunter dressed in black firing his weapon in the distance, or had I? What if he had returned to the road and was waiting near my car to ambush me? I instantly regretted not rushing immediately back to my car and heading home the second I had first glimpsed the hunter in black. I decided to take a less-traveled path and soon found myself surrounded by poison oak. Taking a detour, I came upon a rivulet cutting a small ravine in the slope and followed a faint path that led to a waterfall, the small pond below it surrounded by flowers. I paused, unable to move, as though I had stumbled upon a small Eden. Suddenly I no longer cared about the hunter in black. He could lie in wait by my car all day if he wanted to. I remembered an old saying: When trapped on a cliffside with a mountain lion above and a bear below, reach for the blackberry in the brambles. I decided to hang out by the waterfall for the rest of the day, pondering my essence, my visions, the flowers.

Go on a different adventure.