INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST EIGHT

Poppies, Miniature Lupine, Fiddleneck

THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE 

AND THE POUNDING STONE

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

     I returned to Sycamore Creek to see if I could experience more memories of a past life.  After I parked the car on the edge of the hill, I scrambled down the slope through Chinese purple houses and Ithuriel's spears and baby blue eyes and fiddleneck, the unseasonably warm temperatures stimulating a few of the late flowers to bloom with the early spring flowers. As I stood enveloped by the breath of the plants and trees, I felt revived, the sun heating my skin even as the breeze chilled me. I had spent most of the past three weeks house bound, so the contrast was almost shocking. As I paused to catch my breath, I sensed the life-force flowing into my aura until it penetrated my core.  Everything was energy: the plants, the trees, the clouds, the purling air. Every part of me was pure energy: body, emotions, intellect, and spirit. In my mind’s eye, each invisible form of energy seemed to have a position in space, as if my feelings and thoughts were things made of some of subtle substance. At the same time, I sensed that if those vibrations suddenly dissolved, I would experience my essence in some dimension beyond space and time.

Ithuriel's Spears and Fiddleneck

     A dream I had just before I woke up suddenly made sense. The dream, which resembled the many symbolic visions I have had associated with the Tree of Life, contained three pure white flowers, resembling lilies, against a pure black background.  Every part of these flowers was white, even the stamen and the stems, and the petals formed a perfect circle at the apex of each flower. They seemed, as I stood on the slope feeling the life-force penetrating my essence, to represent the three supernal centers of my core, a unified triad containing the primal polarity containing the potential for manifestation.  The supernal spheres of the Tree of Life exist beyond manifestation, on the other side of what the Qabalists call the Abyss. The flowers were white to suggest the unity of all the colors and the purity of remaining untouched by the influences of the manifested cosmos. 
     I, of course, have been preoccupied by the thought of death due to Blackmore’s attempts to murder me and my struggles with celiac disease. My subconscious mind was revealing a symbol of my essence beyond death. Did this symbol mean that everything besides my essence would at some point fall away into pure blackness? Was the transient material universe like my body also headed for the abyss, leaving only the supernal essence? If so, did that mean that everything I was experiencing in this place and time, including the flowers and trees and memories of a past life, would slip into oblivion, leaving only the supernal essence? Or is the material universe the abyss itself? On the Tree of Life, the dominant color associated with the physical universe is black.
     As I pondered these questions, I realized that I had become hyper-sensitive to the life-force, not just due to being housebound, but also because of a long process of spiritual self-purification. In Western societies, the idea of a “life-force" remains in limbo even though every culture I know of has developed some concept of it, which means that my experience remains in the realm of fiction as well--even though the life-force is tangible to me. I can feel it flowing into the deepest part of every living thing open to it. Western science cannot explain how or why consciousness exists either, but here we are, I thought, as I followed an ancient path down to the creek and found the ancient Native American village site once again. 

Pounding Stone on Ridge

      As I lounged on a pounding stone, I heard something crashing through the brush in the distance. When I turned, I glimpsed someone pushing through the branches of a fallen tree, the shoulder strap of his rifle caught on a twig. Since I was near the unfenced and therefore ambiguous border between public and private land, and he had a gun, I dropped immediately to the ground. No predator in the wild terrifies me more than a human being with a weapon, so I peered at him through a crack in the stone. He was far enough away that I could not make out his features. I could see that he wore a stocking cap and long-sleeved shirt, both black, which seemed strange in the warm weather. Most hunters would be wearing some type of camouflage. 
     Blackmore, I thought to myself. As he approached, I scrambled down a steep slope and crouched behind a buckeye tree whose roots were breaking a rock in two. Suddenly I remembered the map of my location that I had drawn and pinned to the frig, against my better judgment. After I had left on my excursion, Blackmore must have visited my wife and noticed the map. He wouldn’t be able to resist hunting me down. After examining the map, he had no doubt made some excuses to my wife, jumped into his white truck, and drove like a cowboy out to Sycamore Creek. It wasn’t like him to make noise, but everyone in the woods sooner or later ends up struggling through the brush. 
     Hunting is normally a social enterprise, I thought, with two or more people involved. In fact, I have never encountered a hunter alone in the wilderness, nor have I encountered any hunters dressed in black. Blackmore wears a black t-shirt and black blue jeans all the time. As I hid in the tree roots, I began to wonder if I was just being paranoid. Could I be experiencing some form of PTSD due to Blackmore’s attempts on my life?  

Pounding Stone with  View of Another Village Site across the Creek

     In the most tranquil of places, I have found pounding stones. Near the creek, graves covered by stones and deserted Native American village sites reveal that some tragic drama once occurred there--a tragedy that just might be about to replay itself, I thought, as if places steeped in violence continue to attract it.  

Nine of Swords

     I wasn’t even sure Blackmore was the hunter. Why was I afraid? Was the survival instinct kicking in? When I have met people in the wild, I’ve always instinctively distrusted them, as though for them and me it is understood that the rules of civilization no longer apply. Then, I thought, there is always the general fear that weapons of mass destruction might wipe out the planet at any moment, a collective fear that we project onto other peoples and nations. Had I lived in denial of the horrors of the modern world so long that I was instinctively personifying my subconscious fear, personal and collective, in the form of one person, John Blackmore, the way someone might personify his repressed fear in the form of a monster or a demon? 
     I didn’t plan to hang around long enough to find out. I watched the hunter in black hurry down an ancient path toward the creek, so I headed in the other direction. Despite my fear, I felt the tranquility of the life-force in the sycamores and oaks and buckeyes and manzanitas next to the gurgling stream. Even though I always feel at peace in the wild, I am also always alert, feeling a slight tension at the back of my mind, because I know that any second I might encounter a snake or a mountain lion and end up slipping into the blackness. 

Ithuriel's Spears, Fiesta Flowers

     Again, I found myself near the confluence of Sycamore Creek and Dry Creek, where before I had experienced an inexplicable rage. That day I had felt like I had stepped into a current of cold air floating by the creek that contained an intense emotion, a subtle emanated substance.
     I was not experiencing the cold current of energy again, but I suddenly experienced impressions of the past as though the very air were charged with information. I don't know how else to explain it, and I of course have no way of proving what I suddenly knew. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned a meeting place on the ridge above me. With rocks that formed a natural semi-circle where people could sit, the meeting place had often instilled fear in the tribe members because terrible judgments were made there, often at night when the fire gave an unearthly glow to the faces of the elders.

Poppies by the Creek

     After climbing the slope on the other side of the creek, I found the stone semicircle and experienced another impression: The tribe was discussing some woman, judging her, deciding what to do with her. Suddenly shifting consciousness, I became part of the scene, and I gathered that her young husband had been killed by white settlers as he was attempting to steal horses from a farm that had once been part of the tribe's hunting grounds, and she had not been able to overcome her grief, avoiding or becoming angry at the other members of the tribe who tried to help her. She refused to believe that her husband was gone. She was slowly starving, weeping if she ate anything, and wandering off into the woods for days by herself, which was terribly risky because of predators. It was problematic for the tribe to keep sending men out looking for her.
     She refused to speak when the elders talked to her. She just stood with her head down, tears welling in her eyes. They talked to her sympathetically, and in the end decided that she should be taken to the clan nearby so that she could recover in different surroundings, away from her husband's grave where she had spent so many hours, completely inconsolable. Relatives in that clan would take care of her as long as she didn't run away. If she disappeared again, they would have to let her go.

Redbud

     As if time could be fast-forwarded, I could see that she followed her brothers down the trail toward the valley to a large village at the base of a hill, next to a stream. Her brothers left her with two kindly old people who made her feel at home. At first she worked away from the tribe at a pounding stone with one mortar on a ridge overlooking the village. Soon, however, she was grinding acorns with the other women. 
     As though I was recalling a dream, I saw on the screen of my mind how she got up early to get water from the creek one morning and noticed white settlers crawling up the ridge. Her screams awakened the village just before white men began firing their guns into the huts. A few members of the tribe were able to arm themselves and attack from hiding places in outcroppings of rock on the hillside. She ran toward the battle and grabbed the rifle of a fallen white man and shot another one in the face before she was hit with a rifle butt and lost consciousness.

Shooting Stars

     Suddenly I couldn’t see any more; the impressions of the past had vanished. I didn’t know whether or not the woman had been killed. The strange vision had left me only with more questions.
     I suddenly felt uncomfortable. I had not heard the black hunter firing his weapon in the distance, or had I? What if he had returned to the road and was waiting near my car to ambush me? I instantly regretted not rushing immediately back to my car and heading home the second I had first glimpsed the black hunter. I decided to take a less-traveled path and soon found myself surrounded by poison oak. Taking a detour, I came upon a rivulet cutting a small ravine in the slope and followed a faint path that led to a waterfall, the small pond below it surrounded by flowers. I paused, unable to move, as though I had discovered a small Eden. Suddenly I no longer cared about the black hunter. He could lie in wait by my car all day if he wanted to. I remembered an old saying: When trapped on a cliffside with  a mountain lion above and a bear below, reach for the blackberry in the brambles. I was going to hang out by the waterfall for the rest of the day, pondering my essence, my visions, the flowers.