Shekinah: The Tribe of Light

By J. L. Fitzharris

It is exactly ten years after graduation. It is 1978. Still full of idealism, two best friends reunite in a local U.C. Berkeley tavern. Still not too far of a walk for Dr. William Argent. He remained and became a professor. Simon did the complete opposite and blazed a wanderlust trail around the world since 1968. Both still had the dreamer’s disease and want to change the world.

They dreamt of one day finding the ‘’Axis Mundi’’. In ancient traditional Hindu teachings, it is the spiritual bellybutton of the world. It is said that if one were to make the pilgrimage, the reward would be enlightenment. A chance to meet the first mind, to meet God. Suffering would end.

Simon returns and invites Argent to a final quest. He believes he has found the Axis Mundi. Argent’s reoccurring childhood dream has recently revisited him, just prior to Simon’s arrival. He is also very much in love and engaged to Jordan, his garden goddess.

If one has a one-of-a-kind invitation to live an extraordinary life, and chooses to not, is this a sin? Sin means to miss your perfect mark. So does Argent stay, or does he go and meet God?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: May 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982268770

J. L. Fitzharris

Called from an early age to paint, J.L. Fitzharris arrived in 1970. Originally from Pittsburgh PA, he was raised on the south side of the city. He grew up in a very traditional Irish Catholic family. Artists are all born empaths by nature and understand things beyond face value. There was much love in the home. There were also clear examples of human nature. Faith and the ability to grow it, is a gift we are all born with. Painting soon called him naturally to spirituality and the desire to learn the truth of reality’s divine order. For the past 36 years he would paint and listen to books while creating on canvas. The cover of this book is the vision of the one wise shaman that would approach the main character in his reoccurring childhood dream. From reading many books and known ancient spiritual teachings, Fitzharris arrived upon the truth that love is indeed the highest law and universal language of all things alive. Love is the answer that is currently in the process of uniting us all, as we truly are, one human race. Love is the beginning and the end of true faith. ‘’The world is not going to the devil. It is going to God. It is wonderful becoming.’’ Wallace D. Wattles / 1911

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-6876-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-6878-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-6877-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021909571

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TXu 1-831-975 / Sept 4, 2012

©2012, Jeffrey L. Fitzharris

For it is only through a woman that all of us

pass through and into this reality.

This book is dedicated to all mothers. Without

them, none of us would be here.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1     The First Shall Be Last

Chapter 2     Outside Deichen’s Tavern

Chapter 3     Everything Gone Orange

Chapter 4     Awake Back at Enterprise’s

Chapter 5     Disappearances

Chapter 6     Patrice Leaves Us

Chapter 7     Back at Argent’s Office

Chapter 8     Family in Savannah

Chapter 9     An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Chapter 10   Back at Deichen’s

Chapter 11   Leading with Joy, Ease, and Lightness

Chapter 12   After the Fire

Chapter 13   The Helicopter

Chapter 14   Boom

Chapter 15   Contact

Chapter 16   Scramble at Corporate

Chapter 17   Back to Brazil

Chapter 18   Maddy Knows

Chapter 19   Repressurizing the Pressure Cooker

Chapter 20   Entering the Jungle

Chapter 21   Ego in a Five-Button

Chapter 22   Environed Organism

Chapter 23   Archie at the Landing Site

Chapter 24   The Night before the Precipice

Chapter 25   Calm Rage

Chapter 26   Forum Corporate Dinner Party

Chapter 27   Campfire

Chapter 28   Entering Ego

Chapter 29   Saint Francis

Chapter 30   Drop the Gun

Chapter 31   Stay or Go

Chapter 32   The Field of Green

Chapter 33   Walking to Deichen’s

Introduction

Some believe real life begins after this one. The definition of enlightenment is, quite simply, the end of suffering. Suffering is the perspective most individuals unconsciously choose. This is the human experience today on earth. The experience defined as suffering ends when we awaken to the new life. Some believe it can occur only when we pass on.

I will now take you through the pages of my previous life’s unconscious perspective. As with everyone, it was a perspective unconscious by default, and at the time, I was unaware that I could make a conscious effort in shifting my thinking. Some call this practice prayer, and others call it meditation. I will guide you through the events in my life leading up to what is now my conscious knowing of light and truth. As for everyone born, my personal arrival organically unfolded. One’s introspective journey of truth begins with a burning desire to end suffering. I want suffering to end for all who read this book and breathe now.

We all arrive here in this life fresh from consciousness and enter a reality of unconsciousness. The United States was in a great state of flux in 1971, a year of great growing pains for the country. Europe must have perceived America as its lost child throwing a temper tantrum in the early stages of American pubescence.

It actually started in 1957 with James Dean in the movie Rebel without a Cause. This movie planted a seed of change, foreshadowing the new-age luxury of time—time to think and time for teenagers to ask, Why? It took ten years for this seed to take root. In the late 1960s came The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman. The illusion of the happy American family was dying, though the Eisenhower generation remained on course. The big question in the late 1960s among the kids was Why not?

Once again, history was repeating itself. A like-mindedness of independent thinking resurfaced. Some things never change. My hope was that by prayer and conscious arrival, not force, the illusion of human nature would be revealed. It was an itch that needed to be scratched. We celebrated our aliveness.

America was created under Judeo-Christian values. Sadly, religion had no solution for human nature. There was a new freshness in our generational perspective. There was a new sense of idealism. We had the freedom, for the first time, to choose not to follow in our fathers’ footsteps. We had opportunities our parents had worked hard for us to have. A time of freedom to choose what we wanted to do with our lives had arrived.

My father always told me, My generation stood on the shoulders of giants. Only time will tell if we, as a collective, have the maturity to honorably rise to this occasion and awaken to humankind’s next level of love and world unity as one. At that time, just as the candle that burns brightest burns fastest, we all proved to be what we were: spoiled children of a certain privileged demographic. At least we served to spark a dream of unity.

We questioned why things were the way they were, and everyone remained asleep. We should have asked how we could take spirit- and faith-filled action to end racism, make equal rights happen, and leave a war America never should have gotten into. From its inception, the new luxury of having time to think was taken for granted. Before World War II, we all pounded salt, and survival was our only thought.

As the old saying goes, Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will feed himself and his family for the rest of his life. A large demographic of our generation were well educated in the art of fishing, but thinking all on our own was a new freedom we arrived upon. We read about fishing and never caught a fish. To think on one’s own, to this day, is still not taught. Why? Because group thinking can always be regulated.

The individuals in history who were change agents always began by questioning authority and the current system, as when Ralph Waldo Emerson, like my generation’s Tim Leary, got kicked out of Harvard. My generation embraced the words of the great poet Emerson. We can be change agents united as one in love. No barriers, no boundaries, said Miles Davis. We, as an independent collective at least, launched an idea.

UC Berkeley had a glowing electricity traveling through the atmosphere on campus during my sophomore year, 1965. You could almost move the air with your hand, as it was so thick with optimism. There was a 528 Hz thrum behind the collective vibrations of that place in time. We felt we really could change the world. That was the idea.

Sadly, now looking back on all the collective efforts, I see that amid all that innocent idealism, ego once again prevailed. The world was, as it is now, asleep.

The powers that be is a loaded term. My generation wanted to set on the table of humankind the brightly lit lamp of free will, free thinking, and the divine human spirit for all to see. The movement found itself swept up in a media frenzy and deemed an antiestablishment counterculture. Strangely, illegal hallucinogenic substances were easily acquired and often overlooked in plain sight of the authorities. It was as if they wanted us to lose our minds so our voices would no longer be a threat to the powers that be.

The fever broke within two years’ time. The summer of love in 1967 was like the premature birth of a perfect idea. It was over before it started. America, to this day, still suffers from a spiritual deficit. We prided ourselves on being proud students of science and reason. Sadly, this pursuit left us as we are now in America. We are orphans with no spiritual home. We live out daily life unconsciously disconnected from the divine human spirit, and suffering continues. Truth is truth. The truth is, we are hardwired for love, unity, and one humankind, for being together as one. Separation is death. Through unity, we all truly experience this amazing gift called life.

God designed us all to grow in time in all ways for the betterment of ourselves and others. Our minds are also to grow by the exercise of independent thinking. Levels of maturity are then arrived upon naturally. Maturity was not present when our idea arrived. Because of the children we were, it became important for us to find ourselves printed in the daily newspaper the next day. That was more exciting than the actual peaceful protest. The reason for the protest, the meaning of the idea, got lost in the sandbox. What happened?

By 1970, the flowers had totally lost their power. If the main character in the movie The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock, were real, he could have been a wealthy man by now. In the film, Benjamin picks love over a business opportunity in plastics. I have watched our whole culture become plastic, including people’s personalities and actual faces.

Dr. Timothy Leary began the big drop. He claimed to have found the new sacred first communion. As with the fourteenth colony that supposedly existed, Leary’s pranks only added to America’s spiritual deficit. He lost his mind. Escapism is not a friend to true world change. In ancient South American Toltec traditions, the Toltecs selected, through prayer, one individual in the tribe to be given the honor of the tribal shaman. In America, it was not the destiny of every midwestern teenager to become a divine oracle. A lot of kids went nuts.

Say no to drugs. Drug use is escapism. Get real with your thoughts, and take ownership of your life.

Not everyone is ready to acknowledge Jesus, let alone to actually be Jesus. Leary’s dying words were Why not? and Beautiful. He went mad. In the end, he was like a child again.

Even now, we all stay busy so we do not have to think about how much we miss home. Where is home? Where is the love?

CHAPTER 1

The First Shall Be Last

Summer, sand, and Scotch Irish red locks. I closed my eyes and opened them again. The world was bright and full of life. Sand was in my eyes from her hair. She got up again, and then I was blinded by the sun. She threw her shirt at me and ran, laughing, into the surf. Most of the time, Jordan did not use a beach towel.

We were both Gemini in the second house, one day and three years apart. Some would have said, Wow! That’s four crazy people. We both had been damned independent prior to meeting each other. In surrendering to each other, we had begun our mad dance. I loved how affectionate she always was with me.

Jordan, one of many new self-proclaimed feminists, ironically, deemed us the Inseparables. I first saw her during my sophomore year at UC Berkeley. She would take her sandals off and dip her feet into the fountain around a quarter to one every day, before our sociology class. She was born an earth-bound goddess, and botany was Jordan’s life calling. Wildly charismatic, she had more than a firm persuasion. There was a magical quality about her—she was like an Alphonse Mucha painting, perhaps one of his four seasons. Or maybe it was just a combination of primal desire and my die-hard romantic fixation on her pure female perfection. I was mesmerized by my Jordan, and she could tell how I saw her: as my goddess.

I loved the way she would dig out in the garden all day and her earthy smell. I loved her madly. Whether it was a matter of personal perspective or love, I knew my life would be forever different if we ever parted ways. I would never let go. She was my one. I was captivated by her.

Others would have seen her skin as covered in freckles. To me, she had at least a thousand constellations on her arms alone. I had a knowing—not a belief—that life had presented to me my soul mate, my twin flame. I realized this was what it felt like to genuinely care, and I realized I never really had cared at all about anyone before Jordan. That kind of stuff never had entered my mind before. Having Jordan in my life began my real understanding of a call to creation or, rather, the idea that love, or being in love, is an actual experience.

Originally from Southern California, Jordan’s parents met each other on the RMS Queen Elizabeth’s voyage to America. Jordan’s father, Louis, was French and a huge fan of the Old West and John Wayne, and her mother, Aila, was Scotch Irish.

On April 22, 1949, they celebrated their engagement and spent the evening at the lovely Formosa Café at 7156 Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a busy evening with lots of people, and through the shoulders and bodies of waiters and waitresses, Aila saw her husband-to-be in the hallway as he was leaving the men’s room. As a few other people passed by, she saw none other than John Wayne in conversation with her Louis. Jordan got her genetic disposition of firm persuasion from her parents.

That unplanned and serendipitous event presented itself one week before Aila and Louis’s wedding date. Where they would live after their wedding was a big question, but because Louis had seen John Wayne, there was truly no decision to make: they had to say yes to the Golden State of sunny California.

They purchased twelve acres from Mr. Wayne far outside the Los Angeles city limits, in a place called White Oak, California. Mr. Wayne seemed to have graced their lives with this chance encounter. Louis always said, It just is and always has been. God knows the silken road is in my heart and in life. Louis and Aila shared an understanding of this charmed way, and when the opportunity happened, they said yes and accepted it without question. Their hearts were filled gratitude. The couple always marveled at how kind the universe could be.

In the early 1950s, Jordan’s parents did the authentic ’60s thing: they got off the grid. They lived simply and worked the land. Louis was a family practitioner, treating skinned knees and sniffles. A Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post French doctor, he was a quiet, introverted man and engaged in conversation only when he truly felt moved. He also painted on occasion, in sort of a personal abstract style. He was the calm spirit of the family. He treated more patients with conscious care and averaged less. Louis was a pure example of a leading servant not only for his family but also for his extended family, which included all his patients.

Aila was a licensed clinical psychologist, which, at that time, was unheard of, and was revolutionary in America. Late-night fireside chats religiously ran for hours on Sunday evenings. Aldous Huxley occasionally visited the house to deliver fresh organic milk and to see Louis’s latest paintings. He rode on a Vespa scooter. Ayn Rand and Aila were close. Ayn’s husband, Frank, was also an artist. Sunday nights always ran late with conversation and wine. From a young age, Jordan was present and free to engage her mind and realize and express her own personal opinions.

In 1978, I was known to others as Dr. William Argent, distinguished clinical psychotherapist and full-time professor at UC Berkeley. It was always kind of a quiet personal joke to me, as I did not perceive myself that way, but my job was to assist in guiding others. The self-help section of the library was just beginning. I, devoid of