FORGIVE MY TRESPASSES
 

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Watt’s Valley Road crosses a canal that diverts
almost every drop from one of the most
abused rivers in these United States, and not far
from the canal, the road then curves through

 

 

a Native village site. No doubt years ago,
construction workers didn’t think twice about blasting
and bulldozing burial sites and pounding stones as they built
this road through former Native American lands.
 

I park the car and roll under barbed wire,
and soon I know peace beyond understanding, freedom
from negativity, compassion for all life,
for I feel one with Universal Consciousness
 

as I immerse myself in a timelessness owned now
by a few ranchers and corporations. All the rivers
die in the valley below, the wetlands like lost
puzzle pieces, the diverted water in canals
 

heading for crops that have no business
being cultivated in a desert. Suddenly I see
in the distance cowboys on horses riding straight toward me.
Surely capitalism can solve this little problem.
 

Can I just rent the trail for a few hours?
I feel as vulnerable as a Native American
as they gallop toward me on their horses.
I only wanted to search for Native village sites
 

that have been here for thousands of years.
Would they sympathize if I told them that I
just want to feel one with the Source of all Creation?
They’ve stopped on a ledge, waiting
 

for me to run through the open field
but I am crawling instead
behind rocks up a steep slope where they
cannot follow on their horses.

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The Sun  (The Higher Self Awakening)

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PENDULUM DREAMS: PART THIRTEEN

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   Before I knew anything about Native American trails and village sites, I hiked all over the foothills searching for birds, a hobby that requires a heightened sensitivity to the foliage and the terrain. A flitter here or a hop there would make me whip out the binoculars in search of a rare or colorful flower of the air. Sometimes a stunning bird such as a bunting or a tanager or an oriole would wing right in front of me, unbidden, like grace. Other times I pushed through dense foliage, up steep mountain slopes, just to catch a glimpse of a bird I had already sighted a hundred times. But even then the experience was memorable because I had never witnessed the bird in those surroundings before or at that particular time of day. As I was searching for yet another bird, I came to know the flowers and where they grow, and over time I noticed that the plants are, from one spring to another, migrating a little every year over the land.
  I have followed numerous trails, whirling around now and then with binoculars in hand. Only after I became knowledgeable about the birds and flowers did I become sensitive to the human history in the foothills. Coincidentally, around the same time I was becoming more sensitive to the spiritual side of my own nature through meditation, which helps to explain an unusual experience that I had one day.
  When I first started bird watching, I never wondered about who or what had made the trails. I just always assumed that cattle had etched the paths into the earth.
  One spring day, I followed a creek where three different types of swallows wove invisible loops around me, and orioles scolded me, and male tanagers scouted out suitable nesting habitat in the canopy above me. I was having a spectacular bird watching day, so I kept trudging along even though my feet were starting to ache, and I had very little water left. I finally plopped down next to a creek and noticed smooth mortars in a Native American pounding stone. Lounging quietly in a cool breeze, I felt like my mind was part of an ocean of consciousness, and suddenly I heard the laughter of young women right next to me. I looked all around but could see no one anywhere in the vicinity.
  Even though I had never been there before, at that moment I knew without a doubt that a trail was nearby that would lead me to another pounding stone.
  I scrambled up the slope and quickly found a distinct trail that led up the hillside. Without a second thought, I followed the trail and discovered a pounding stone about several hundred yards away on a ridge overlooking the creek. That pounding stone seemed familiar even though I had never been there before in this life, and for or the first time I suspected that cattle had not made any of the trails.
  Because the sun was setting, I headed back to the floodplain of the creek and rested on the pounding stone again before heading back. Feeling excited but uneasy, I waited a while for something to happen, but nothing did, so I stood up and began the long trek back to my car. Suddenly I stepped into a current of freezing cold air and experienced an intense rage as if something precious had been stolen from me. Up until that moment, I had been feeling only fatigue and tranquility. I have since realized that I might have stepped directly into the cold energy field of a ghost.
  Perplexed, I whirled around to see if anybody else was in the vicinity. I had not encountered another soul all day, but I had an eerie feeling that a powerful drama had at some point occurred by that stream. I then had an overpowering urge to cross the creek and climb up to the ridge on the other side. As crickets chirped in the cool air, I hopped across unstable stones without getting my boots wet, and, vexed by the feeling that some buried knowledge or memory was about to surface, I followed a faint path up the hill on the other side of the creek.
  When I reached the top, I found only a few oaks and dried cow patties. After I stepped into a clearing, I could see across the creek to the ridge with the pounding stone. Then I peered into the floodplain below and noticed the pounding stone that I had first encountered that day. Exhausted, I paused in a shallow indentation in the ground, absolutely certain that I had discovered another Native American village site, but I could not find any evidence of it. By that point I could no longer postpone the journey back.
  After that day, I searched for pounding stones as I hiked the trails, and I found them about everywhere I wandered in the foothills. I also began to find shallow indentations in the ground just about wherever I found pounding stones, and eventually I realized that they were house pits where the Native Americans had set up their huts.
  I eventually returned to the ridge where I had stood at dusk in a shallow indentation, where I had felt a Native American presence, and realized that at the time I had been standing in a house pit. I then carefully searched the ridge again and discovered several pounding stones blanketed by oak leaves, one of which still contained a pestle in a mortar.
  If past is prologue, the same cultural and natural devastation will no doubt occur in the mountains. More dams, more development, more exhaustion of resources. I would like to believe that as a species we have moved beyond genocide, but the current perpetuation of ecocide suggests that our rapaciousness does not yet end with the exploitation of nature.
  I have known a handful of activists who were unrelenting in their efforts to protect human and natural communities, no matter the personal cost. You could not find people more unlike each other in terms of background and lifestyle and philosophy, yet despite their differences, each activist was driven to carry out his or her own personal mission. A few of them spoke truth to power and used the system so effectively that they ended up blackballed or ruined financially by the powers that be--and that did not stop them. They cared little or nothing about power or status or money. Malcontents or misfits perhaps in the eyes of many, some were poor and getting poorer, but nothing, it seemed, could stop them. None of them ever talked about what motivated them, but I believe that I might understand at least some of them now after my experiences in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
  Our culture remains in a limbo of the perpetual present, with very little sense of history or natural diversity, stuck in the “surface mind” that values status and glitz and excitement over spiritual connection. I mention this only because I believe that each of the die-hard activists I once worked with at some point in their life stimulated a higher aspect of the self that enabled them to feel a bond of sympathy for all things, which continued to motivate them despite the beatings they received in the political arena. Most of them, I suspect, would never view their own motivations as spiritual in nature, yet this spark, I believe, is undeniably Christian in nature, from an esoteric point of view. A social critic such as Chris Hedges might consider the persistence of these die-hard activists as a symptom of "sublime madness," but I would instead consider it the result of the awakening of the higher self.
  As I was returning to the Native American village site recently, I felt ravished by the flowers that are flourishing despite the drought that our local newspaper and politicians have claimed will end civilization as we know it if we don’t build more dams, and I realized that this stream could just as easily be buried under hundreds of feet of water or bulldozed into a nucleus of urban growth. As I stood again in the house pit in the clearing, gazing at the ridge across the creek, I began to fear that only a core group of adults, each of whom remain in contact with their higher self to some degree, would fight to save this place, perhaps at great personal cost—and I remembered all the activists that I haven’t seen in years.
  I haven’t attended a Christian church regularly since the fourth grade. I confess that for many years I suffered from a serious “Jesus allergy,” and I have never made any effort to be “saved.” For the majority of my adult life, Christianity has seemed authoritarian, rigid and intolerant. After my experience with my activist friends, however, I believe that a form of Christianity is crucial to our society—but not the Evangelical Christianity that so many know and love. 
  From the mystical perspective of the Qabalah, the Christ is a cosmic force that manifests as harmonizing love, spiritual inebriation, and sacrifice--not as one man who will come either to save or condemn us. The principle of cosmic harmony has been personified throughout history as different Gods and Goddesses, not just as Jesus, and has had many names, such as “Ma’at” and "Ra" in Egypt. Gods of exultation and sacrifice have also surfaced in different cultures. For instance, Apollo and Dionysus, sons of Zeus, together symbolically personify the harmony and spiritual inebriation and sacrifice associated with the Christ force.
  Because the Christ is a cosmic force, any man or woman can manifest it, not just a savior or a priest. This force, I believe, will not “save” anyone from a hell in the afterlife or ensure that a person enters a heaven. No one needs to be "saved." We each have the archetypal energies already within us, unfortunately too often veiled or dormant. Instead, a person can awaken and manifest the cosmic force in the here and now to establish and maintain harmony within his or her own personal sphere of influence, just as a worshiper in Greece might have manifested harmony through a mystical connection with Apollo, who is, like Jesus, a symbolic representation of an invisible but very real force of harmony. Just as importantly, a person can experience the spiritual exultation of the Christ force, which provides a permanent expansion of the personality, a stimulation of the ethical faculties, a sympathy for all life and a greater desire for harmony--a greater desire for the righteousness of beauty and the beauty of righteousness.
  I am basing my understanding of the cosmic Christ on the glyph, or composite symbol, known as the Tree of Life. On the mystical Tree of Life, the Sephira ("Emanation" in English) of the cosmic Christ is the Emanation of the Sun, the source of life, the sixth Emanation known as “Tiphareth,” or “Beauty.” The spiritual experiences assigned to this sphere are “The Vision of Harmony” and “The Mysteries of the Crucifixion.”
  The Vision of Harmony includes an understanding that each life is a field of conscious energy within fields upon fields of interconnected energy throughout the cosmos. The mysteries of the crucifixion include creating balance and harmony within the self and the community through sacrifice. Some people, such as my activist friends, for instance, have the courage to experience ongoing personal sacrifice for the highest possible good of the the earth and society as a whole.
  An extremely important concept relating to this state of balance and sacrifice is the concept of the higher self, the aspect of the soul in touch with the principle of cosmic harmony and divinity. This higher aspect of the self, open to powerful forces, sometimes inexplicably knows things in a way that transcends the five senses. This connection, commonly known as intuition, is often associated with a guardian angel or a “daimon" or a "genius" and is one basis of faith.
  Through exultation and the expansion of the mind, aesthetically, ethically, and spiritually, the higher self is activated. Since this expansion of consciousness normally takes years, especially in this society, it is extremely unlikely that a child would be able to see the world from the perspective of the higher self. A society’s obsession with youthfulness suggests either an ignorance or a rejection of the higher self, or both.
  The higher self, in tune with the Christ force, strives for the highest good, even though this might require great personal sacrifice. Due to the profound vision of harmony, the individual understands that all energy is connected, part of one underlying Universal Consciousness. Through this recognition, the individual develops sympathy for all life and embraces the physical world, with all of its harshness and suffering, instead of rejecting it as evil, and turns to the natural world, and the spiritual forces behind it, as to a friend.

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​Pounding Stone and House Pit on High Ridge

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   The paths on the Tree reflect the primary forces within both the cosmos and the human being, and each force contains extremes at each end of a spectrum. The virtue of the Emanation of Beauty is "Devotion to the Great Work" (of union with the Source), but its vice is pride, which can wreak havoc in so many different ways in the world. But as a sphere of equilibrium and the higher self, the Christ center on the Tree helps place the extremes of all the forces into balance. Without the perspective of the higher self, in other words, an activist, like anyone else, can get out of balance, becoming merely combative, vengeful, biased, or egotistical. (None of my activist friends ever displayed those characteristics, however.) Through the perspective of the higher self, an activist can move by degrees to a state of balance, remaining focused on the highest good for the self and the earth and society.
  An activist might not realize that he or she is motivated by the higher self, but from an esoteric spiritual perspective, a selfless striving for justice, equality and harmony, despite the great personal sacrifice involved, is one indication. The Sun in esoteric symbolism represents the higher self, and the Moon, which reflects the light of the Sun, reveals on one level how that light over time changes in the lower personality. Few human beings can stand fully in that light all of the time. Once the personality has expanded to a certain degree, however, the desire for the harmony of the Christ force—in aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality—never entirely retracts.

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All poems, stories, essays, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.​