INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST TWENTY-ONE

Path of Daleth, Venus

MEETING THE GODDESS ON THE PATH

     (Note: Somewhere along the line, the word "peace" in paragraph eight was changed to the word "peach," twice, which, in the first version,, made the whole paragraph sound absurd.  I almost decided to keep it that way....)

     Once, when I was in second grade, my class took a train ride through Los Angeles. I found a seat away from the other students, and while the train was rattling through a junky industrial section of LA, an adult male voice informed me that I was not coming back. The voice startled me because I knew that no male adults were in the compartment, and I realized with a shock that it had not originated from a human being. After rebounding from my initial fear, I found the premonition comforting even though I had no idea what it meant. I suspected that I would have to wait until I grew up to comprehend its significance, a situation with which I was only too familiar. As the train rushed onward toward its destination, a trance-like peace enveloped me, the sounds of the train gently lulling me and the other passengers, and I had an unexpected insight: The voice meant that I would not be coming back to live another life.

     I had never entertained the notion of reincarnation before, and I

knew that I would not be able to share it with anyone. I was seven years old, growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household. The idea was unfamiliar to me and more than a little unsettling, so I had a gut feeling that it would make everyone else I knew uncomfortable as well. Even so, I felt deep down that it was true. I sensed some higher being or aspect of myself had spoken. This, as you know if you have been following my blog, occurred several other times when I was growing up, and in all other cases, the predictions came true.

Path of Lamed, Libra

     I knew one thing: The voice did not mean that I was never going

to travel on a train through LA again. Sure enough, forty years later I rode on Amtrak through the same blighted region, which still looked as if bulldozers needed to push it into an abyss before any renewal could occur, and as the train was zipping along, I suddenly remembered the strange male voice, and I realized that it might have meant that I was free of the wheel of birth and death. The memory of the premonition, however, raised more questions than it answered.

     If, as my experiences seem to suggest, we each have a higher self, or daimon, that transcends space and time, surely my daimon would have known when I was seven that I would end up a deeply flawed adult who has encountered more than a fair share of challenges and who is easily distracted from spiritual pursuits, which suggests perhaps that the soul's completion of an evolution through the accumulation of experience, not the attainment of spiritual perfection, is the key to release from the wheel of birth and death, if indeed that is what the voice meant. Or perhaps the voice suggested that I would reach a point in this lifetime that would require the complete regeneration of my soul on some other plane. These were only the ramblings of a confused brain, I mused. Maybe the voice was simply wrong, and I hallucinated when I was seven and all the other times that I thought I heard the voice of my daimon, yet the voice was so clear, the feeling of peace so profound. Other spiritual experiences continue to place the premonition in perspective: As I grow older, more and more pieces keep fitting together, as if key moments in my life, interrupted by long periods of the mundane, form an association chain like symbols in a dream.

     After I found my spiritual path during meditation in my early forties, I also began to find myself more and more in circumstances where I recollected the predictions of my higher self in childhood. I have to admit that time remains a mystery to me, but based on my experiences, I believe that our conception of linear time is an illusion, and that we are not limited by the five senses. Something in each one of us can know things about other times and places that cannot be known through the processes of “normal” brain consciousness.

Path of Tau, Saturn

     During meditation recently I experienced traveling rapidly toward a great light. In my vision, I knew that I had the choice of plunging into the light or remaining outside of it. Once inside the light, I sensed the movement of majestic forces, and I heard a voice say, “This is the dance of the Gods.” I experienced a sense that these were great archetypal forces dancing through the cosmos and through each life, and that each human being can know them if he or she chooses. Then the light completely engulfed me, and I heard a reminder that I can contact these forces through the Earth Soul, which I interpreted to mean that we can know the archetypal forces, which have formed the basis for myths and religions and folklore from time immemorial, because their energies manifest on the physical plane. Communion with the Earth Soul for me has opened up an understanding of what archetypal forces are at work in my life. These forces, I've realized, have greatly influenced my life, if not controlled my destiny.

     When my family lived in LA, I never had the desire to venture beyond my street, but after we moved to Fresno, CA, in 1971, I developed a passion for bicycle riding. When I was eleven, I would ride my bike all the time, not through the neighborhood, but to the vacant lots and orchards near our house. We lived just a few blocks away from the north edge of town, and some of the fig orchards were like parks, with well-worn paths and mounds that I used as ramps. Instead of remaining with friends after school, I preferred riding my bicycle alone. I sensed the Earth Soul in these vacant lots and orchards, and I never felt alone even though I was rarely with another person.

     In vacant lots full of weeds and trash, where squirrels and rabbits scurried away from me in absolute terror, the Earth Soul drenched me with a peace beyond understanding even though I was usually near busy streets. Over the years, I have recovered this sense of peace within little weedy lots as well as within the vast Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Only recently have I come to realize that I have gained far more spiritually from a few hours in vacant lots and fig orchards and campgrounds than from years with the most learned professors—or from interminable sermons.

Tiger Lilies

     Thanks to weedy lots and pristine forests, like Plato, I feel an intrinsic connection within all living things on the planet: “This world is indeed a being endowed with a soul and an intelligence...a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related” (Timaeus, 29-30).

     In nature the experience of the anima mundi, or World Soul (also known as Earth Soul), often begins with a sudden, almost imperceptible shift from the “monkey mind” to a deep feeling of peace that grows more profound. This peace is often accompanied by a feeling of exaltation because the Earth is like a magnet for spiritual forces. Once in tune with the Earth Soul, my soul begins to sense archetypal forces, and I experience as well a sense of freedom from the petty distractions and illusions of my own life. This sense of freedom has helped release me from the destructive aspects of social conditioning while at the same time making it possible for me to feel a deep sense of harmony.

     As I was driving by a trashed vacant lot recently, I suddenly felt the same sense of regeneration that I experienced as a boy, and I understood the voice I heard so long ago on the train. The voice intimated the attainment of a profound archetypal state: the regeneration of the black Isis, the dead sleep from which one rises completely renewed. A soul that still clings to illusion hesitates to fall into this slumber of annihilation, but the soul sick to death of illusion falls easily into the Abyss where the personality vanishes and the spirit wakes to a sense of oneness and harmony, a condition, which, in its most radical state, is the ultimate spiritual attainment: union with the Source.

Path of Gimel, The Moon

     If my brother had not found the plastic toy camel in the garage (see previous post), I would not have remembered my train rides through LA or a vision that I experienced almost a decade ago. In the vision I was walking in a soft blue monk's habit on a stone path through an enclosed garden. From a distance I could see a stone statue, which I suspected was religious in nature. As I approached, I saw a statue of Jesus on the cross and knelt down, but when I looked up, to my surprise the statue changed into the Virgin Mary.

     This vision occurred while some friends and I were “chakra toning,” a New Age technique for opening the energy centers of the aura, which consists of singing the note associated with each primary chakra for an extended period in turn. In theory, this technique opens the chakras to spiritual vibrations. The toning session begins with the note associated with the lowest chakra and proceeds up the scale without interruption to the highest chakra. By the sixth note, after singing nonstop for about thirty minutes, I had achieved an altered state of consciousness through hyperventilation and experienced the vision.

     I was surprised by the vision for several reasons. First of all, I have never worshiped Christian icons, and before then I had mainly experienced visions of symbols associated with the Tree of Life, the sacred glyph of the mystical Qabalah. Even more surprising to me, in the vision I was a monk in a monastery garden. I had entertained the idea of becoming a pagan priest but never a Christian monk. Moreover, I was wearing a hooded robe of the purist soft blue, which both intrigued and confused me, because I thought that monks only wore black or brown or white robes. Before then, I had never imagined kneeling or humbling myself before the Virgin Mary, or an other feminine deity, an act which I interpreted as show of willingness to sacrifice myself in some way. The very act of becoming a monk, of course, requires sacrificing a worldly life for a spiritual one. Donning the robes proclaims detachment from the ornaments and distractions of the world.

     I told my friends about the vision but soon forgot it since the symbolism seemed boringly conventional. At the time, I did not know enough about the deep symbolism of the Tree of Life in the Western esoteric spiritual tradition. Finally, after many spiritual experiences and over ten years of study, the meaning of the vision, which is more Qabalistic than I had initially imagined, has grown much clearer.

Path of Teth, Leo

     Without even knowing it, for most of my life, I have manifested the archetypal energies of the Goddess, no matter the circumstances. In the vision, I was worshiping the celestial Goddess, the feminine principle of creation, revealing my devotion to Her. Though strange, the vision seemed appropriate to me because of my devotion to the arts and the natural world from childhood on, but the vision revealed a deeper level of meaning that can only be understood in the context of the Tree of Life.

     There is an old saying in the Mysteries: “All the Gods are one God, and all the Goddesses are one Goddess, and there is but one true initiator.” In terms of the Tree of Life, that means that the feminine principle shows up as different Goddesses on different levels, or “paths.”

     The Tree of Life reveals the evolution of the cosmos from the finest spiritual energy to the densest physical manifestation through ten primary states of being known as sephiroth (plural). Each sephira (singular) within the cosmos emerged from the previous state of being and eventually emanated the next. The first three states contain the basic principles of creation, for instance the duality of masculine and feminine and the existence of unity within multiplicity, but remain outside of manifestation. The Virgin Mary is symbolically associated with the third emanation, a supernal sephira on the Tree of Life known a Binah, in a dimension above the Abyss.

The celestial Virgin, the archetypal feminine principle outside of manifestation, therefore experiences immaculate conception, and gives birth to a savior God, the “Son” of the Trinity manifested on this plane. Binah, the sphere of the celestial Virgin, is the primal womb of manifestation from which all form originates, hence its association with Saturn, with stone, and with the sea. The third sephira, though outside creation, ushers in the lord of all terrors. The word Mary comes from the Hebrew word marah, “bitter” or “bitterness.” Binah, the great sea of evolving life, is bitter: Whatever is born must die.

Path of Tzaddi, Aquarius

     The feminine principle, as I mentioned, is associated with other Goddesses on different paths on the Tree, most notably with Netzach, the seventh sephira ruled by Venus—the sphere of nature, beauty and the arts. I was born under the sign of Aquarius, which on the Tree links the sephira of Yesod with the sephira of Netzach, each sephira representing different aspects of the Goddess. In my vision, though, I was worshiping the celestial Goddess. I had already manifested the energy of Venus through my art and adored Demeter through my love of nature. I had found the energy of Luna through meditation and had worked for Ma'at through my struggle for truth and justice. In terms of the Tree of Life, the vision made perfect sense: I have sacrificed my personality, not to manifest the Christ force, but to manifest the energies of the Goddess on different levels.

     Several connecting paths on the Tree of Life, including the Path of Gimel, the Path of Daleth, the Path of Teth, the Path of Lamed, and the Path of Tau, also reflect aspects of the Goddess, so the adventurer on the Tree of Life has the opportunity to meet the Goddess at many points on the journey. In the archetypal hero's journey, the meeting with the Goddess represents a stage in the adventure when a person experiences a relationship that has the power and significance of an all encompassing, unconditional love. Also known as the sacred marriage, the union of opposites, the “meeting” may take place on a purely psychological level, representing the unification of the self during which the hero begins to see himself in harmony with all creation.

Two of Wands

     A psychic, about a year before my vision, told me that my aura is soft blue, which may partially explain why in the vision the monk's habit is blue. Renditions of Mary portray the Queen of Heaven and Earth and the Great Sea in blue also. My monk's garb in the vision is, on one level, an emblem of my adoration for the Goddess. Pure, soft blue is also a symbol of the spiritual level in Chokmah, the sphere of dynamic, masculine energy opposite Binah, which connects the primarily masculine energy of the celestial God with the energy of the celestial Goddess.

     According to Dion Fortune, an authority on the modern Qabalah, the bible, which is essentially a Qabalistic book, contains God-names that pertain to the different sephiroth on the Tree of Life. For instance, all references to the Father concern the Source in Kether, the crown of creation; all references to the Son apply to Tiphareth, the Christ-center; and all references to the Holy Ghost, the feminine principle within the trinity, relate to Yesod, the Foundation, the state of being out of which the physical universe has evolved. The Holy Ghost, which I understand to be the Goddess, the Earth Soul, attracts archetypal spiritual forces like a magnet to the Kingdom, the physical world. The dance of the Gods, feminine and masculine, is the dance of the archetypal energies of one God through different dimensions of the cosmos, energies which ultimately manifest in the physical world.

     The paths of the Goddess bring peace and harmony and a sense of oneness with all creation. The energies of these paths counteract the exploitation and alienation and brutality of a left-brained, male-dominated world. Living in Fresno, CA, I have never received any reward for my art and have occasionally been kicked in the face for speaking truth to power, but I have always felt compelled to manifest the energies of the Goddess anyway due to a crying need for them in this community and this society as a whole. My lower personality, so woefully limited by my five senses, longs for the simple, powerful connection with the Earth Soul, despite any sacrifices or doubt. I don't know what the voice on the train meant exactly so many years ago, but I can't help but feel that it was telling me about regeneration through the Goddess, a renewal resulting in a radical sense of harmony and oneness with creation. At least I know now that all I need to do is find the Goddess again in a weedy lot or a pristine forest to get in touch with my core and with cosmic spiritual forces.

INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST TWENTY

Toy Camel

THE CAMEL IN THE CARPET

     My father spent much of his adult life gripped by the desire for a better life, so he kept getting slightly better jobs, and we kept moving every few years to a slightly larger tract house. When I was eleven, my family escaped the racial tensions that pervaded Los Angeles after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy by relocating to a small town in the San Joaquin Valley. The day after we moved in to our new home in Fresno, I was unpacking boxes on the plush orange carpet of our family room and discovered a zipper bag stuffed with miniature plastic toy figures, soldiers from different wars mixed with exotic people and animals from different continents. All were smaller than the average toy figure, which made me feel godlike as I positioned them on the furniture or the floor in some dramatic scene, such as an ambush or a battle.

     When I opened the bag, tempted to play with the toy figures again, I found a tiny camel, pale lemon yellow, which came with a flat plastic stand resembling a puddle of desert sand. As I searched through the bag, I experienced a premonition that the camel would have great significance for me in the distant future. Flustered, I searched the new house for someone to talk to about it, knowing that I might not be able to find the right words. I couldn't find my father or mother or grandparents but eventually discovered my brother in the garage.

Path 28

     “You're full of it,” he sneered after I told him. I wanted to explain that I was simply trying to understand a bizarre premonition but then realized that I was once again suffering the fate of a younger sibling, irritating my brother merely by my presence.

     Forty-four years later, my brother and I had to sell the house to pay for my mother's long-term care. While living alone in the house, she had experienced bouts of dizziness but didn't complain about them to anyone. She eventually fell face down on concrete and ended up undergoing a craniotomy for a subdural hematoma with a mid-line shift (in other words, serious bleeding in the brain). After the surgery, she lived with me and my wife for almost two years. Then she fell and broke her hip and spent two months in rehabilitation.

     Two weeks after she came back to live with us, she suffered a severe stomach flu, which led to dehydration and infection and a serious spike in blood pressure when she attempted to sit up. She could no longer get out of bed, and I, believing that she would recover like she always had before, hesitated to take her again to the emergency room. I soon realized that she needed someone more qualified to care for her. I had, despite my best intentions, made an error in judgment could have led to tragedy.

     While she was living with me and my wife, her house was, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. I checked on it every other day and did what I could to maintain it, taking care of termites and filing an insurance claim for mold and fungus. I also had to file several insurance claims for burglary and vandalism. Because burglars shattered a window pane in her front door as well as her back sliding glass door, she ended up with new carpet for the front room, family room and hallways, but enough was enough.

     When my brother and I were clearing out the house, getting it ready to sell, my brother found the tiny toy camel on a shelf in the garage and smiled as he handed it to me. For a second, I hoped that we would find the sack full of other toy figures, but then I recalled, as though suddenly recalling a vivid dream, the baffling premonition that this camel would at some point have great significance for me. I don't think that my brother remembered what I had told him, and I didn't want to remind him of it because I knew that I would probably just irritate him like I did forty-four years earlier.

     When I pulled the camel out of the bag so many years ago, I foresaw the future. I can recall at least four other times in childhood when this happened to me. In each case, I either heard a voice tell me about the future or felt a premonition—I didn't just suspect or imagine that something was going to happen, in other words—I knew with unshakable certainty. In each case, I only remembered when the event came to pass many years later, as if each premonition were meant to be forgotten and unexpectedly recalled so that I could place the experience in perspective. I doubt that anyone can provide an adequate scientific explanation for these experiences, but I suspect that in the physical dimension, the five senses limit us so much that we can only experience linear time, but in some other dimension all time exists at once, and a higher or deeper aspect of the self, a daimon that transcends space and time, can access knowledge about what we in our dimension can only know as the future. If true, this would make the already knotty issue of free will even harder to untangle.

     Since I foresaw the future at least five times while I was growing up, I must conclude that these premonitions are more than mere coincidence. These episodes of precognition tie the future and the past together for me in a way that most memories do not, suggesting that I am meant to place the experiences into a larger perspective.

Path 13, the Path of Gimel

     About fifteen years or so ago, I became obsessed with the modern Qabalah after a series of visions during meditation introduced me to the symbol system known as the Tree of Life, and I immediately associated the camel with the Path of Gimel, the thirteenth path on the Tree, which connects Tiphareth, the Christ center, with Kether, the Crown of creation. (See previous posts.) The Path of Gimel is the central path that travels across the Abyss between the planes of manifestation and the spiritual planes (from which comes intuition). This is the path of the mystic who escapes the wheel of birth and death to live in the spirit. The Hebrew letter Gimel means “camel,” suggesting that something other than intellect or conscious determination is necessary to travel across the Abyss, the way a camel, through sheer primal strength and willpower, crosses a desert.

     I stared at the camel for a few seconds, suspecting that some greater significance related to the Path of Gimel would soon unfold. The camel, I realized, was like a symbol in a dream. Coincidentally the Path of Gimel is associated with the moon and dreams. The reappearance of the toy camel suggested to me that sometimes symbols are embedded in events as they unfold in linear time to help us understand their significance the way that symbols are embedded within dreams.

     As I stared at the camel, I realized that I was as old as I had imagined I would be when I foresaw the future, my beard gray and my head bald, but I felt pretty much the same as I always have. Most of the people in the neighborhood had died or moved away while the camel had waited alone on that shelf. My mother was eighty-nine years old and getting frailer even as we emptied her house, but she seemed pretty much the same as she had been when I was a child. At that moment, I believed that people feel pretty much the same their whole life, which comforted me, but I was saddened by the inexorable black hole, never visible but always near, that kept sucking everything, like my other toys, into it.

     And at that moment, in the house that I had not lived in for thirty-seven years, the only thing that held much significance for me was the toy camel, as if the rest of my childhood was irrevocably lost due to a lack of anything tangible that I could touch, but oddly, at that moment, I was happy. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I sensed that the camel confirmed everything I secretly believed.

     I placed the toy camel on the dashboard of my car, and in the Valley heat three of the brittle plastic legs broke off one by one, leaving little stubs. If I were to speculate about the symbolic significance of the one-legged camel, I would interpret it to mean that on the spiritual journey across the Abyss, legs don't matter, only the spiritual will to continue, against all odds, on the journey.

Ithuriel's Spears

     It took me a few days to figure out why at that moment I was happy, but I wasn't always in an upbeat frame of mind during that time. I felt that I was slowly emptying all memories of my family from the house as items departed to the dumpster or storage or the Salvation Army. My grandparents and my uncle, my father and mother, and my brother and I had comprised the whole of the family that settled in Fresno in 1971. By the mid seventies, my grandparents had both passed away. Then, in 1977, three days before his fifty-sixth birthday, my father died of a heart attack. I moved out when I was eighteen and my brother moved to a different state soon after. My mother remained alone in the house. My brother and I became busy with college and jobs and families of our own and didn't stay in touch, and I didn't see my mother that often even though I lived down the street. By the time my uncle died in the early eighties, what was once a family unit seemed more like a mirage. 

     After a week of helping me clear out the house, my brother and his wife had to return home to resume their daily lives. During the process of dealing with my mother's house and belongings after they left, I dropped her car off at the repair shop and took a shuttle bus to my mother's house. I asked the driver to let me off at a corner so I could stroll through my old neighborhood, past the house near my mother's that I had rented for twelve years.

     Strolling by my neighbor's house, I remembered that several of my cats had disappeared. One cat showed up after a few days and came tearing through the house with a pellet from a gun lodged in his throat after we let him in. While my son and I were playing electric guitars one day, our neighbor, uninvited, barged into the house, dashed to the back bedroom and started screaming at us. His sister said he died a drunk, and he died alone, his body discovered several days later surrounded by cages, in which, I suspect, he imprisoned neighborhood cats and tortured them.

Six of Swords

     I ambled by the house of my daughter's friend, Jenny. At one point when Jenny had just turned eighteen, the police found her in suspicious circumstances. She had somehow suffered damage to the frontal lobe that would make it difficult for her to function the rest of her life. She woke up handcuffed to a bed in a hospital and could not remember what had happened—the police initially believed she had stolen a truck, only to discover that a man who owned the truck had drugged her and kidnapped her. A few years earlier, Jenny's brother had also suffered a similar type of brain damage in an automobile accident and had fallen victim to a child molester.

     Steve Watson had lived across the street for awhile. I was a year older that Steve. He had been in my fourth-fifth combination class when I first moved to Fresno. We were also on the same little league team during middle school, at a time when I was losing all interest in sports. He had turned into an amazing athlete who could throw the most mind-boggling pitches, one of which, I remember, always wove unpredictably past my bat. He ended up in the minor leagues on his way to a career in professional baseball, but health issues interfered. I had just recently encountered Steve on a gurney in the hospital around the corner from my mother during her bout with the stomach flu. He had driven a bright red corvette when he had lived across the street from me, but in the hospital he was shaggy and dirty as though he had been living on the street for quite some time. As I passed him on my way out of the hospital, he asked if I remembered him. Oddly, his name popped out of my mouth even though his face was almost unrecognizable under long gray hair and a beard, and we had a short chat.

Path 24

     I past the house of a portly man whom my wife and I had called “The Mayor.” He had retired many years before and often stood in his garage monitoring the neighborhood. Once he nailed yellow ribbons to all of the liquid ambers on the public easements along the street in support of the troops in the Persian Gulf. He died soon after we moved away.

     Many of the people of my parent's generation who had lived in that neighborhood had also died, and I recalled their names as I strolled by their old haunts.

     Two houses down from my mother's house a shy girl named Shayla grew up. After her father died and her mother was moved to the memory care unit of a nursing home, Shayla continued living in her parent's house. Shayla once had a crush on my brother, someone told me, and I had spread the rumor throughout the neighborhood. She later raised two children in that house and died in her early forties from breast cancer. I had no idea where my other neighborhood friends were now.

Seven of Cups

     When I reached my mother's house, I felt alone. Each of the people in the neighborhood who had passed away, I mused, had lived only a little while to clothe their dreams in flesh. When I stepped into the house, I pulled two heavy key chains out of my pocket to place them on the kitchen counter, and the toy camel fell out of my pocket onto the floor. The camel could only have great significance for me now: As a child I could not possibly have known such a heightened sense of flux and impermanence. I should just let go, I thought, as I gazed mournfully at the camel, just let go of all of it. Strangely I did not need to try: I felt no desire to keep the camel or anything else that was once in the house. 

     As I entered my mother's empty kitchen, I remembered my first day of school after our first night in Fresno. Early in the morning, my mother took my brother to sign him up at middle school and left me alone for at least a half an hour before she came back and drove me to my new elementary school. When they left, I was free, I realized; I had never been left alone in a house before. Strange noises terrified me though. Forty-four years later, I felt almost the same, aware that I am free, not lonely but alone, aware of all the pops and creaks in the house but not afraid. I had the strange feeling that I was eleven again even though I am now the same age my father was when he died of a heart attack.

Eight of Swords

     Her empty house made me unexpectedly happy because I felt free of anyone else's expectations, free of social conditioning. All of the relatives who had gathered with us over the years were gone or had lost touch. My eighty-nine year old mother now barely remembered any of those gatherings that were once so important to my father, who spent his life getting a better job every few years and buying a better house and bigger car, finally settling in a neighborhood at the northern edge of Fresno, CA, not far from one of the first malls in the Central Valley. Soon all the fields and orchards north of Shaw Ave. would be plowed under; the northern edge of town now is miles away, bordering the San Joaquin River. A town of one hundred thousand has grown to half a million since my father passed away thirty-eight years ago.

     The camel in the carpet, even more diminutive after the loss of its legs, was so small that I hardly noticed it as I surveyed the empty room even though I knew where it was. It would no doubt be overlooked by most of the people who came to view the house if I left it there. The camel, alone in a vast desert of brown carpet, was free.

     For many years, I lived my life as others expected, afraid that losing all sense of social conditioning through rebelliousness or cognitive dissonance or separation from the herd or trauma might lead to insanity or bestiality or dissolution or worse. I know several people who crossed that invisible line at some point in their lives; they kept up appearances while secretly plotting and carrying out heinous acts. (See previous posts.) It struck me as I stood in the empty room, rememberng the time I was eleven, that I have always had the spirit of the camel in me. I have had enough premonitions and intuitions to develop faith and enough challenges to understand the value of it. I have never been a great success at anything, but I at least developed a deep love of nature and the arts, experiencing an exaltation of consciousness that has led to the Vision of Harmony, associated in the Qabalah with the state of being known as Tiphareth, which instilled in me a sympathy for all things, a connection that some people would no doubt consider naive or insane. 

     The camel in the carpet was signifying that I could proceed now on the Path of Gimel. As I stared at the camel, I knew that I at some point had crossed a line and couldn't turn back. The Path of Gimel leads from Tiphareth across the Abyss to the first swirlings of the Source, the Crown of Creation. I must travel across the Abyss alone, with only my sense of adventure and exaltation and connection with divinity to goad me on despite everything.

     Instead of the dinner table under the small chandelier, where I had gathered so many times with aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and friends, there was only a tiny one-legged camel in the sand-colored carpet. I imagined it still plodding away on a journey into the unknown, drawn only by a powerful, invisible force. All desire to remove myself from divinity for the sake of appearances or to expend energy accumulating the stuff of the tribe had vanished, as though blown away by desert winds. I softly shut my mother's front door, and with only a faint moon path to guide me, stepped into my next adventure.

INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST NINETEEN

Tiger Lilies, Tamarack Creek

HOW ANGELS AND DEMONS ARE BORN

All photos, July 23, 2015

   
      Tamarack Creek helps weave the threads of my soul together. The hills are steep, and numerous troughs in the earth collect runoff, forming rivulets that provide water for meadows and trees. Stunning wildflowers bloom profusely in these meadows in July and August when the lower hills are brown and threatened by wildfire: Tiger lilies and columbine and larkspur flourish with tapestries of lupine, paintbrush and arrow-leaf tansy. Snow sometimes even covers these parts in mid to late June. When the snow melts away, wherever there is water, life springs forth, jewel-like and fresh. One sniff of a tiger lily, and my soul feels free again as rivulets feed roots and creeks, and creeks slide down into rivers, and rivers search for an ocean. Soon water will evaporate and return as snow and rain. As I sit next to the creek, feeling this cycle as though it were part of my own circulatory system, with new trees and branches strewn on the ground, I know why there has been so much cognitive dissonance in my life.
     When I sit on a rock in the sun at 7,500 feet, I feel like a renegade. Who I am or what I have accomplished doesn’t matter at all, very much like when I was a child. What matters is the energy of the sun inflaming my solar plexus and pounding through my veins, the source lighting and warming and feeding the cells of all the plants and trees around me. I am part of that huge, radiating fire, wild and sentient and intense. Without it, I wouldn’t exist. Nothing would.
     My soul is likewise a sun after all negativity has burned away; I can see it in my mind’s eye when I envision the subtle planes during meditation and ritual. At times, that is all I am, a conscious point of intense white light that resonates with the fiery life generated by the sun. As I sit by the creek, I can barely glimpse the source if I squint, but I know its light as it manifests the world around me.

Path 11

     I really am a fool. As I was growing up in Fresno, 7,000 feet below in the San Joaquin Valley, over the years I was taught to believe that other life forms such as plants and animals aren’t really alive the way humans are--they don’t have feelings or consciousness--and I believed it. Next to Tamarack Creek, I sense consciousness all around me, in the sunlight and the flowers and the towering trees, in the birds and the chipmunks, even in the water and the rocks. I cannot believe that the sun that gives life to everything on the planet is devoid of consciousness, that the earth providing a home for that life is also without consciousness, that the incredible plants and trees around me do not have their own forms of consciousness. 
     As I mentioned in the previous post, I was also conditioned to believe that I am right-handed when I am really left-handed. I was conditioned to believe that the vast majority of the foods that weigh down grocery shelves are good for me when most of them are actually killing me because I have celiac disease and other food intolerances. I don’t know why I am surprised that I have been lied to about nature: In a capitalistic system, considering nature lifeless makes it easier to kill it and exploit it without remorse.

Lupine and Paintbrush by Tamarack Creek

     I have also been conditioned to believe that anyone in this society who claims to see ghosts or sense subtle forces is highly suspect, possibly even insane, yet after going through a process of self-purification, I have grown more aware of a spiritual dimension, regularly sensing subtle energies, whether they are the feelings and thoughts of other people or the consciousness of plants and animals or the presence of supernatural entities. Either my reality is a lie, or what is generally considered reality in this society is so much of a twisted over-simplification that it ends up being a lie. Based on my experiences, I can no longer believe in a materialistic view of the cosmos. I officially declare that I have moved beyond my social conditioning: I am now a member of the fellowship of the sacred light.
     When I was a child, I was quite good at following directions. I smiled at the teacher a lot and gave one hundred percent in school and during sports activities. I had high hopes of doing great things. Then I became ill, and that is when I first started questioning authority and drawing negative subtle forces to me.

Growth

     Like attracts like. Without health, prolonged misery causes the psyche to break down like the body’s organs and immune system during the onslaught of disease. On the subtle levels of the psyche, if you are healthy, you draw positive, solar energies to you, but if you suffer physical distress for years or continuously have evil thoughts, you eventually become a magnet for dark, insidious forces. Depression and misery attract dark forces like a seabird with a broken wing attracts hordes of crabs. It’s as if the cosmos conspires both on the subtle and physical levels to eliminate anything no longer healthy enough for the world.  
     I have discovered that foods that cause allergic reactions affect me on a subtle level: I feel depression for no reason other than that I eat a piece of bread or something with corn syrup in it, and the ensuing psychological distress over time attracts harmful subtle forces. While I was meditating during the self-purification process, for example, my subconscious mind revealed hundreds of headless, black spiders attached to my aura as well as black blobs and polyps, all of which were feeding off of my energy and maintaining psychological distress. After clearing my mind of these entities, my depression wained; I stopped hearing critical voices in my head and unexpectedly began having visions of symbols that reveal spiritual principle, such as the lemniscate, the thousand-petaled lotus, the golden, equal-armed cross. Some higher aspect of myself began communicating with me.
      For me, evil forces are not like the demons presented in movies. They are invisible, but my subconscious mind presents an image of them in my mind’s eye. I am not clairvoyant like some psychics. I have only once actually glimpsed one spirit for a moment. I am, however, clair-audient and clair-sentient: I have heard them distinctly, and I have been shaken and nudged and touched and enveloped by them. Most of the time I simply sense their presence. Some seem to be discarnate humans, but demonic spirits for me include any entity that causes harm for its own benefit or delight. Some, of course, are probably no more intentionally vicious than a virus or a bacteria, but many of them, at least in the way that my subconscious presents them to me, appear alarmingly malicious. 
     During meditation, in other words, I discovered how demons and gods and angels are born: Those who are sensitive to subtle energies tune their mind to lower or higher energies, and symbolic images that personify them rise into the conscious mind. In other words, the subconscious mind gives form to the forces the way that it gives form to forces and ideas in dreams: through symbolism. The force is real, but the image that rises into the conscious mind is symbolic.

Columbine

      Celiac disease, an incurable, chronic physical illness, has attracted insidious forces to my psyche for the better part of four decades. I have never dabbled in the dark arts, but because of this disease dark spirits have attacked me and evil entities have latched onto my psyche. One night not long ago, for instance, just before I began manifesting the worst symptoms of the disease, a demonic spirit, cold, heavy, and invisible, enveloped me, paralyzing me for about fifteen minutes. I wasn’t afraid because this has happened to me several times before, and I knew that if my soul radiated light like the sun, I would mentally repulse it. The simplicity of that might sound absurd, but I have discovered that if a dark spirit cannot latch onto fear or negativity in the aura and instead encounters inner light, it is either repulsed or loses interest. Before it departed, however, it pressed down on my stomach, the part of the body that celiac disease ravages the most, for about a minute, as if to indicate that worse things were in store for me. Soon after that, I began having irregular heartbeats caused by the disease for as long as two hours at a time.
     In Fresno, people tend to question your sanity if you claim that you have experienced malicious or demonic spirits. Even claiming that you have a soul is enough to make some rational people flee in terror and never come back. So much of “rationality,” though, is about appearances and agreement about what is true. What can be perceived by the physical senses is “real” because a group of people or a device has provided some sort of verifiable proof. Then a larger group of people agree that the proof is real, which can lead to an even larger number of people accepting it without question.

Larkspur

     If your job or your future survival depends on agreeing with the prevailing beliefs of your community or society, fear becomes a factor in whether or not you will even entertain different ideas or experiences of reality. If a group of people have some investment in a particular reality, if they benefit from it, for instance, then other people are encouraged to conform to that belief. Anyone who does not conform risks being demeaned or vilified or worse by other members of the group. In a hierarchical society, those who are higher up on the ladder tend to ignore or dismiss anyone who challenges the reigning belief system. Those who are lower on the ladder often ridicule or attack the person who is challenging the system in order to gain favor with those who are higher up.
     When relying on the five senses, agreement about the reality of a rock or a tree seems fairly easy, but what a physical object really is on the subatomic level has become more and more difficult to determine. According to chem1.com, “Our intuitive view of the ‘real world’ is one in which objects have definite masses, sizes, locations and velocities. Once we get down to the atomic level, this simple view begins to break down. It becomes totally useless when we move down to the subatomic level and consider the lightest of all chemically-significant particles, the electron....The electronic structure of an atom can only be determined indirectly by observing the manner in which atoms absorb and emit light."  Whether light is made up of particles or waves depends on who or what is observing it. Agreement about a subjective state or a subtle force, of course, is even more difficult. 
     How did those in power benefit by conditioning me to believe that there is no spiritual dimension or that there is only one savior and one god and one devil to believe in? I remained oblivious to the god-like potentials within me. If I thought about it at all, I tended to believe that the spirit world does not exist or that it exists in a realm far beyond me where some god or savior is waiting to judge me for my mistakes, as if I were given a reliable guidebook for addressing each and every problem in this increasingly complex world. I did not know until I began having visions that I could tune my mind to the god-like potentials represented by the Tree of Life and develop them in myself. I did not know, while working at McDonald’s and Target and Home Depot, that I could move beyond social conditioning and learn to become more psychic and speak my truth effectively and create beauty and know the Christ force and become a courageous peaceful warrior and a magnificent king ruling the domain of my own mind. With that knowledge, it's a lot harder to remain merely a compliant unit of labor.

Rusty Oven, Tamarack Creek

     Once when I was in the boy scouts, a friend accidently lit my tent on fire in the middle of the night, and the back of my head burned while I was sleeping. The next day I was in excruciating pain, but I had no way of surveying the extent of the damage. I asked a small group of friends if anything was wrong with the back of my head, and they all said, no, nothing’s wrong--because they didn't want to get in trouble--and I believed them. When I got home, my mother noticed a large patch of red and black skin on the back of my head immediately. Despite my pain, I was easily duped because everyone in the group seemed to be in agreement. Denial of something subtle or invisible, such as an emotion or a force, is far easier.
     I now often perceive the world around me with a different set of senses, what I call my soul senses, which in my case means that I see, feel, or hear forces that others do not perceive. And I am well aware that when I say that I perceive subtle forces, I sound crazy, but this is my reality, which has stemmed from a chronic illness that has led to self-purification and greater psychic ability. 
     There is an old saying: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In Fresno, CA, however, the one-eyed man is insane. By claiming that I perceive forces that others cannot verify, I am no longer conforming to reigning beliefs about reality, and no doubt when people read this I will become forever unemployable, but I did not choose to break out of conformity: I couldn’t help it. I have been conditioned as much as the next guy to rely on appearances to make my way in the world. My father, for instance, would often declare that the world is ninety-five percent appearances (or some variation thereof). My father was well aware that we live in a culture where people tend to be judged quickly and decisively based on their worth as a unit of labor. My father used to say that if you focus on appearances, you’ll end up okay, you’ll find a job and be able to support a family. Because of my chronic illness, my compulsion to be creative, and my perception of subtle forces, I discovered that maintaining appearances while remaining true to myself has not been quite so easy. 
     In older cultures, many adepts, or “gurus,” believe people from Western societies are far too spiritually immature to take on as students. In Fresno, CA, I have had to deal with spiritual realities without assistance from a guru or anyone else. I had to break on through to the other side, so to speak, by myself. I would have preferred to live a life based on appearances; instead I have had to rely only on myself to weave together threads of experience to understand the truth about the forces behind appearances. I know that evil exists, just as I know that higher and more exalted forces exist than people in this society generally acknowledge, and they are not all associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Tree of Life

     I discovered, after envisioning spiritual symbols during meditation, that all forces symbolized by spiritual traditions over the centuries are represented by “paths” on the Tree of Life, a composite symbol that has been handed down from ancient times. All the symbolic representations of these forces, including Gods and Angels and Demons, fit on the Tree (the demons assigned to a state  of unbalanced force known as the Qlipoth). In other words, I discovered that I am not alone in my perception of spiritual dimensions.
     Each sphere, or state of being, on the Tree of Life contains a virtue--an ideal, balanced use of its energy--and a vice--a potentially damaging, unbalanced use of its energy. In the sphere of the intellect known as Hod, the virtue is truth and the vice is dishonesty. (Except in the highest spheres, energy exists within the law of polarity.) When striving to climb the Tree of Life, I discovered that it is extremely important to strive for the ideal in each sphere. If I was glamorized by appearances or caught up in illusion, I would not understand the virtue within each of the higher spheres. In fact I would not know the spiritual dimension at all because I wouldn’t be able to see beyond the physical plane to experience subtle forces and comprehend spiritual principle. The state of being “above” Hod is the sphere of nature and the arts known as Netzach, which means Beauty. If I did not live the truth, I would not be as affected by the beauty of nature or the great works of humanity and not as compelled to create beauty myself. I know that if I did not live the truth, I would have been unable to experience the Vision of Harmony and the Mysteries of Sacrifice in the state of being above Netzach known as Tiphareth, the Christ center.
      Living the truth, the virtue of Hod, is one of the most difficult things a person can do in any society. I have struggled over the years to know the truth about myself mainly because of the misery caused by chronic illness. During a long process of experimentation I figured out that I am allergic to eggs, milk, and corn and eliminated them from my diet, but I did not, until recently, realize that gluten was threatening my health. For far too long I remained ill and depressed, no matter how I experimented with my diet, emotionally and spiritually floating in a black pool, just barely keeping my head above water. After awhile I developed a heightened awareness of evil as I absorbed black subtle forces.

Tiger Lilies, Arrow Leaf Tansy, Angelica

     According to Beth Beurkens, M.A., a wake-up call “may come to us involuntarily, tearing the fabric of daily life. Accidents, illness, loss, and misfortune can all have a spiritual dimension to them. The loss of a career, a serious illness, a near-death experience or the death of someone close may all serve as turning points for rethinking the purpose and meaning of our lives. Feelings of disconnection, disorientation and suffering often accompany the inner call to a spiritual path.” She goes on to say that “emotionally challenging, sometimes life-threatening crises are similar to the calls that indigenous shamans receive. They may be the beginning of the initiatory process.” My illness and my visions were my wake up calls. As I mentioned, I managed to survive by purifying myself physically and mentally, with the added benefit that I became more psychic. It’s second nature for me now to perceive dark energies and spiritual taints with my subtle senses--in myself and other people.
      There are spiritual taints in places where you least expect them. I feel them, and I can see them in my mind’s eye, not because I want to or because I am biased against anyone in particular, but because they simply present themselves to me. For instance, I stepped into the office of a person at a local college one day and immediately sensed something was terribly awry despite all appearances to the contrary. The man, whom I had met only once before, was strikingly handsome and genial and did an excellent job revealing how to operate a computer program, but I could see in my mind’s eye that blackness was floating in currents throughout his office. He was nice enough to me, but I was in the awkward position of knowing that he had attracted an evil taint into his sphere of influence. I couldn’t ignore it, but I couldn’t say anything about it without sounding insane and unemployable.
     Sometimes I am physically affected by a person’s antagonistic thoughts. For instance, one of my wife’s friends appeared pleasant enough when around us both, but she kept hurling hateful subtle energy at me that literally felt like a large screw twisting with great force into my heart chakra. I had no idea at first what was happening until I realized that it only occurred when she was visiting us and when I was talking. I have rarely felt anything so damaging on a subtle level before or since.

Tiger Lilies

     I think it’s true that the best priests have known the worst evil. I can detect spiritual taints because I experienced the blackness of evil myself during my illness. Unfortunately this is something that I can’t discuss in most social situations, and so far I have not been able to help anyone understand what kind of psychic damage insidious forces can do, which is unfortunate because they can be as harmful as any physical disease. Certainly spiritual taints can be more long lasting. 
     I must confess that before I developed this sensitivity, I was often quick to demonize individuals or groups (Republicans and corporate CEO’s, for instance) but I often remained oblivious to the presence of the evil beneath appearances. Despite living in a country with a long history of genocide and slavery as well as mass shootings nearly every day, I used to downplay evil as merely a label that we place on aberrant behavior or as a form of insanity. Even if evil existed, I rationalized, a person could remain so morally superior that he would remain untouched by it. I’ve discovered, though, that with all the evil in the media, in corporations, in politics, and with all the taints in daily life, maintaining spiritual balance is a struggle that requires constant vigilance and dedication. For me, self-purification is the only effective way to keep evil at bay. The more negative energy I eliminate from my psyche, the more I can see beneath appearances. I am, for instance, often able to detect on a subtle level what a person is thinking or feeling, a skill that I sorely needed more than once.
     I suspect that thanks to the spiritual taint associated with my illness, I have also drawn several sociopaths into my life, including John Blackmore. (See previous posts.) Once, I drove with my wife to Blackmore’s house to feed his cats since my wife was afraid to go alone. While waiting for her to finish giving the cats their food and water, I sensed someone was hanging out in one of the back rooms of the house. Sure that I would find a transient squatting in the house while Blackmore was on vacation, I tiptoed toward the back bedroom. The closer I got, the more certain I was that some angry and hateful person was hiding in the house. I approached the doorway to his bedroom with some trepidation, but when I peaked into the room, to my surprise I didn’t see anyone. I searched the closets and under the bed without finding any evidence of another person, the whole time feeling like I was being watched. As I was leaving, I turned to take one last look and felt a kind of energy emanating from the corner of the room that can only be described as demonic. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but now I realize that Blackmore had attracted this evil through his own thoughts and feelings.

Paintbrush

     Tamarack Creek provides a sharp contrast to modern society. The San Joaquin Valley where I live, over 7,000 feet below, has some of the worst air pollution in the nation. Since I lived in L.A. until I was eleven, for most of my life my body has been contaminated by toxins in air and water and food. (No wonder my fifty year old body started going haywire.) I now have to eat organic produce and drink purified water or I get sick. Worst of all, my stomach lining has eroded due to my gluten intolerance so that I experience irregular heartbeats for long periods if I ingest even a smidgen of gluten. It has taken me fifteen years of experimentation with different foods and physical and mental purification to return to some semblance of balance, a process I began only after a life-threatening physical crisis. 
     Humanity is on the brink of a world-wide crisis due to overpopulation, global warming, economic meltdown, pollution, ecosystem loss, species extinction and weapons proliferation. I may be a fool, but I believe that large-scale crises will become humanity’s wake up call. After centuries of building to these crisis points, we will no doubt take many years to reestablish equilibrium. It took me over a decade to purify myself and overcome my illness, but only after I had reached a point where I had to change or die. We will no doubt as a species experience several agonizing periods where we have to move beyond social conditioning and break out of conformity in order to deal effectively on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level with large-scale problems.
     One day after purifying myself, I envisioned the color pink in my heart chakra. I was startled but remembered that pink is often a symbol of love, hence the prevalence of the color during Valentine’s Day. I checked the color code of the Tree of Life, which indicates different states of being, for the colors associated with the heart center and discovered that pink is the color that represents the highest form of spiritual love. That day, as I was walking by my wife, I saw the same color in her heart center as well. Perhaps once we have dealt with our crises and purified ourselves, we will be able to see that color in every human being.