ROOM 10: THE TEMPLE

Blazing Star

ROOM 10: THE TEMPLE OF THE TREE OF LIFE

     Apartment 10 appears nondescript on the outside, but when you step through the door, you smell incense and see paintings on the walls of gods and angels. 

                                                    Open a different door.

The apartment is deeper than you thought, with ten rooms, each with a different color scheme, and each displaying different archetypal symbols. 

                                        Take a different path.

You wander into a room that has a blue color scheme, a painting of an opulent king on a golden throne, and a table with a brilliant white tablecloth, on which is set out a golden plate and chalice, with a golden, equal-armed cross standing in the center. 

                             Open a closet door.

You suddenly feel magnificent, full of harmony and abundance, but then you also begin to develop a sense of superiority. You move to the room across from it and discover a red color scheme, with a painting of a fierce warrior king in a chariot and weapons everywhere, a fire raging in a pit in the center of the room. 

                Open a window.

Suddenly you feel strong, unafraid, full of energy, ready to take on any problem, any foe, but then you become overpowered by cruel, destructive thoughts. 

                                       Take a different path.

Each room, you discover, contains a different subtle energy represented by the images and symbols, and each subtle energy has a positive and negative pole. The longer you stay in a room, the more the subtle forces influence you, and the more you feel the need to discipline your mind. 

                                                        Open a different door.

The key is remaining balanced. Once you have achieved balance in all of the rooms, you finally reach the inner sanctum, where you are impressed by an overwhelming sense of power and eternity. Your personality vanishes: You become a point of pure consciousness, blazing with the invisible light of negative existence.

LOSING MEMORIES IN ROOM 111

Tiger Lily

ROOM 111

     When you step into the room, you notice a poster of a flower, but you can’t remember the flower’s name.  People who have known each other for years are playing cards at the kitchen table, but they don’t remember anything about each other. 

                                               Open a door.

Suddenly one of them blurts out that her husband had affairs with other women, but she can’t provide any proof. Another woman keeps offering you some ice cream even though you keep telling her that you are allergic to milk.  

                                                          Open a window.

One of them keeps saying that she is waiting for her husband--who died ten years ago. Another claims that the pain in his knee is from a work injury, but you know that he has had arthritis in his knee for at least twenty years. 

                              Open a different door.

Suddenly you are having trouble remembering the names of their children and their children’s children, your memories beginning to slide into oblivion along with all the beliefs and feelings and desires that you once considered so important, yet as gaze at your cards, beginning to panic, you notice the others are mumbling or humming or chirping happily as if something remains even when memory is gone.