INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST NINE

Cattle Chute

THE LOADING CHUTE
(All photos April 12, 2015)

     The loading chute always for some reason catches my attention as I zoom by it on my way to the North Fork of the Kings River, perhaps because it resembles a door to nowhere, or perhaps because I can imagine for a second that it is an invisible door that opens upon some dream-like, legendary land in the realm of childhood or the spirit. I might have witnessed its last use over forty years ago on a trip to the Kings River when I was eleven or twelve--Now, if it is a doorway, it is only a doorway to a few nearly forgotten childhood memories. Even forty years ago the chute looked like it would collapse if a cow weighed a little too much or stomped on it a little too hard. 

Ithuriel's Spears

     Last weekend, I finally stopped the car by the side of the road and ambled over to see if it would fall over if I mercifully gave it a little push. Even though the posts are slanting and slowly rotting, and humus and moss have gathered on top of the ramp, I was surprised to find that the chute didn’t wobble at all when I shook it. The chute, which no doubt was built decades before I was born, would in all likelihood outlast me even though it long ago outlasted its own purpose. 
     For me, the chute hints at freedom. It resembles a door frame without a door with a ramp that leads away from the road into the natural world where nothing has ever been expected of me, where I can remember a time when I had no expectations. The ramp provides a way into a world where I don’t have to fit in, where I am forever free of shame, a route to freedom from all but my most basic needs.        
     I could make up a story about how the loading chute is a mysterious portal to some fantastic realm, I suppose, but I would have to ignore that it was used in the process of rounding up cattle for slaughter. I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, the chute reminds me of those nightmares I had as a child of dying in a jungle during some inscrutable global conflict. Like my father and his brothers, I was no doubt  meant to fight in some distant war, but for some reason, American wars in distant lands remained “covert” and there was no draft when my turn came to serve, so unlike the cattle, I avoided the slaughter. 

Indian Pinks, Pretty Face

     If you don’t mind, I’m going to pretend for a little while that you, gentle reader, are my psychiatrist because the loading chute obviously brings up strange, conflicting thoughts. 
     I was not conscious then, as my brother and I were scrambling up and down those hills, that our parents had expectations of us. They, for instance, expected us to serve our country if we were to be called during some future conflict. Their expectations for us remained nebulous, but as I grew older I realized that they imagined us succeeding in some significant way. In truth, I don’t think my father wanted anything spectacular from us, but he showed by example that he at least hoped that both of us would be upwardly mobile, by hook or by crook, getting a better job and moving into a better house every few years. More and more as I grew older, I felt that my mother tacitly demanded something spectacular of us, such as making tons of money, dying heroically for our country, or revealing to the world some kind of remarkable genius. I just knew as a teenager that I would need to make Herculean efforts and huge sacrifices to succeed gloriously in some noteworthy way. I knew even then that I would never be able to live up to their expectations because of chronic illness and because I am artistically and spiritually inclined.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

     In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, my father focused on needs one and two and indulged in three whenever possible. After having fought in the great war and struggling for years to make a living, my father knew that satisfying biological and safety needs was about all you can realistically ask of a person. A person who satisfies needs one and two might be lucky enough to satisfy need number three. He did his best in his own way to teach me this lesson.
     For all their faults, I don’t blame my parents. They were just as screwed up by their parents.  Because I am facing my own mortality due to celiac disease, I am simply trying to figure out why Blackmore continues to try to murder me, why the settlers of European descent continued to murder the Native Americans, and why in this country we spend trillions of dollars every year to ensure that we can destroy the planet hundreds of times over at a moment’s notice.  

Chinese Purple Houses

     My inability to fit in has given me a unique perspective on the above topics. I am not claiming to be an expert or even totally right. (At this point I believe that any insistence on being right is dangerous.)
     As my father knew, and as most of us soon realize, we are motivated to a large extent by the fear that we will not be able to satisfy basic physiological and safety needs.  In order to fit in, we need to think and act like those in power. This applies as much to a young cowboy who must learn to round up cattle and take them to the slaughterhouse, a guard at a concentration camp, a teacher, a politician, or a corporate manager. The kind of groupthink orthodoxy that my father had to accept during his lifetime in order to succeed, which he tried to pass on to me by example and through impromptu lectures, went something like this:

• White men are superior to men and women of color.
• White men are superior to white women.
• Heterosexual white men are superior to gay white men.
• White men with power, property and money are superior to anyone without power, property and money.
• A white man succeeds in a democratic, capitalistic society. Anyone who doesn’t believe in capitalism or democracy is a threat to society.
• A white man succeeds in a Christian society. Anyone who doesn’t believe in Christianity is potentially a threat.
• Bohemians, artists, psychics, and philosophers are basically wacko and are like anyone above who doesn’t believe in democracy, capitalism, or Christianity.

     My father, in order to teach me and my brother these unwritten rules, lectured us on several occasions. Blacks and Native Americans were “mud people,” not real people. Communists, socialists, and anarchists were always trying to destroy the American way of life and the world in general and had to be fought on every front. Women should stay home and take care of children. People who could not make a decent living were weak or lazy, even if they had psychological or physical problems.
     I developed a love for art at an early age. At age twelve, I started painting pictures with acrylics and watercolors. One time, when I was sixteen, my father brought out several of my paintings to show the neighbors. Several of them were nudes and the rest were surreal. They all had a good laugh. When he was done, my father gave me the dirtiest look I’ve ever experienced, before or since. In retrospect, I understand that he was just trying to help me fit in so that I would succeed in satisfying needs one, two, and three.
     After working as a supply sergeant during World War Two, my father survived as a used car salesman, a foreman at a chemical plant, and an investigator for the ATF, among other things. My father succeeded by finding his niche, acknowledging and following the unwritten rules of his group. Even though he was only a high school graduate, he climbed the ladder of success until he was able to buy a good car and a house in the suburbs and could provide a comfortable life for himself and a wife and two children. He died at age fifty-six from a heart attack.

Fiesta Flowers, Ithuriel Spears

     Many social movements have become popular during the course of my lifetime, and I have discovered that groupthink is pretty much the same whether a person is a democrat, a republican, a green, a feminist, a capitalist, a communist, an anarchist, a neo-Nazi, a Christian, a Muslim, a Druid, or a Religious Scientist. In order to succeed in a group, you have to accept the core beliefs. If you question the beliefs or the practices, you are a potential threat, whether or not the others in the group publicly complain about you. 
    As someone who has never fit in for long in any social situation, I know that the shame of not fitting in can be extremely difficult to bear. Worse, the inability to fit in affects whether or not you are able to satisfy basic needs. My father, no matter what you think about his beliefs, was trying to help me by telling me and showing me the unwritten rules so that I could fit in. 
     But fear and shame can make a person do horrible things on behalf of a group or a society, such as killing people for their religious beliefs, their culture, their skin color. A sense of inadequacy or shame can make one person secretly target another for characteristics they possess or don’t possess.
     If I were to write a story about the loading chute, I would make it a doorway to a world without social fear or shame, which is what I find in nature, where all things are fields of energy that are no better or worse than any other.
     A few seconds before midnight, I am simply trying to figure out a reasonable way of avoiding more ecocide and genocide and the total annihilation of the planet, so I did something I wouldn’t normally do. 
     I had become more and more excited about the possibility of reincarnation, and even though I had always considered myself a rational man, priding myself on my levelheadedness, I decided to go to a hypnotist for a past life regression. The experience of being hypnotized at first struck me as more than a little awkward and perhaps even a little dangerous since I would be giving another person absolute control over my psyche, but I couldn't resist seeking out the truth, so I made an appointment with a hypnotist, a Dr. Browning, who had a reputation for helping people quit smoking. 

Fairy Lanterns, Chinese Houses

     I drove to a house surrounded by tall pine trees, the natural setting as inviting as a forest. I was ushered into the house by a woman in her late fifties, who stared at me coldly for a moment and then led me upstairs to a loft above the garage with a view of the midsection of a pine tree. 
     "Have a seat on the couch," she commanded. "My husband will be here shortly."
     I wondered if making the client wait was standard procedure. In my case it wasn't working; I had the urge to fly back down the stairs and out the door. Instead, I looked around the office. It was clean, decorated in a Southwestern style with paintings of Native Americans curled up next to big clay pots, a room devoid of any paraphanelia intended to mesmerize, as far as I could tell. Suddenly Dr. Browning rushed in, apologizing for being late.
     He was an older gentleman, with bulging white eyebrows. "I just have a couple of questions before we get started," he said. "Have you ever been hypnotized before?"
     "No," I replied.
     "What do you expect to learn from this experience?"
     "You'll probably think this is silly, or maybe not--I don't know. Recently, I've had feelings that I've lived before, and I was hoping that you might be able to regress me back to that time, if that's possible."
     "Do you believe in reincarnation?"
     "I'm not sure."
     "Are you religious?"
     "I'm not sure what that means."
     "Do you consider yourself a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim?"
     "No. Really, I don't believe in any particular religion. Usually, I find my spiritual strength in the 'church of nature,' so to speak. In fact, that's where I first had these feelings. I was near a creek and I felt like I'd been there before. I felt like a Native American woman who had lost someone she deeply loved. And I have never wanted to be a woman, if that's what you're thinking," I grinned.
     "I appreciate your frankness. What you're asking is not easy, and if we are successful you might not like what you find. Every life contains a certain amount of pain, as I'm sure you know."
     "I'm willing to risk it."
     "As long as you understand that there is an element of risk, or at least the possibility of some unpleasantness, I'm going to go ahead and start the process of hypnotizing you. You realize that I'm going to record this session. Is that all right?"
     "Yes."
     Apparently, I am a receptive subject. Listening to the tape afterward, I found out everything that had transpired during the session. After regressing me back to my birth experience, the hypnotist asked me to walk on the trail next to the creek again, but this time in my previous life. He asked me to describe what I saw. I described the huts on the ridge and women at the pounding stone gossiping and laughing. One man was making a spear, another a trap, while others appeared to be gambling.
     "Tell me what happened to you," the hypnotist said.
     I saw the village on the ridge, noticing a hut near a small pounding stone by a trail where before I had not noticed anything. A few people were huddled around fires but almost everyone else in the village was still asleep. I gazed far off into the valley, where I thought I saw herds of animals moving. Rain was beginning to fall. I had the feeling that something terrible was about to happen, but I was thirsty, so I decided to walk down the hillside to the creek for a drink of water. When I crouched down to cup water in my hands, I looked up to the hillside and saw white settlers attacking the village. I screamed, realizing at that moment that I was the woman in that past life.

Larkspur, Chinese Houses

     Then I remembered what had happened to the woman. After she had been knocked unconscious by the rifle butt, the white settlers, most in uniform, had burned the village and the winter stores. When she came to her senses, she discovered that her hands were tied tightly behind her back. A few members of the tribe were wailing over the dead strewn across the ridge. They dragged her over to a group of men who were being whipped into line. A white man with a long beard and dressed in skins was arguing with a man in uniform and pointing at her angrily. Suddenly the bearded man stomped over to her and pulled her aside, just before a line of soldiers marched in front of the prisoners, lifted their rifles on command and shot them dead. 
     The white man tied a leather strap around her waist and dragged her along behind him with her hands still tied behind her back. She could see her aunt wailing over the body of her uncle. She wanted to scream but could only grimace and weep, falling to her knees as she was dragged along and then pulled face down onto the ground. The white man turned around and whipped her hard across the neck and back until she got on her feet again. After that, every time she slowed, the white man whipped her until she moved at a pace more to his liking as they hiked up a trail that led to her old village, finally making camp on a ridge overlooking the great valley in the west and the foothill valley in the east where her tribe was still encamped.
     The white man used her like a wife that evening and then tied her up tightly to an oak tree. She sat with her back to the tree, gazing at the constellations, seeing fires like tiny stars in the valley on land that no longer belonged to her people, as though part of the great sky had also been taken from them. In the morning, she stared, unable to move, as men in uniform marched past her over the ridge into the foothill valley. Later that morning, she heard gunshots far off in the distance.
     They remained camped on the ridge several days, occasionally hearing gunfire. 
     After a few days she heard only birds and squirrels and frogs and crickets. The white man dragged her behind him on the trail into the foothill valley down to the creek near her village. They hiked along the hill above the creek, but even hundreds of yards above the village, she could smell smoke. The white man whipped her when she paused, so she trudged along behind him with tears streaming silently down her cheeks.

Kings River

     They finally made camp close to a place where some of her tribe had settled long ago, east of the creek where she had grown up. He used her practically every night whether or not she cried and then tied her to a tree. At times she could hear animals trampling through the brush, and one night awoke to a bear sniffing her. She remained perfectly still until the bear grunted and wandered off. The next day the white man dragged her down to the creek, untying her hands, and then tied a string around her finger and slapped a bush with his whip to let her know what would happen if she tried to escape. He showed her large flat rocks and where to carry them, above the river bed in the clearing where he began stacking them as evenly as possible on top of each other. By the end of the day they had four walls, all several feet high. In a few days they had built a solid house with planks and branches for a roof.
     Soon other white men made camp nearby in the clearing. They all had large pans and shovels and picks and spent most of the day by the creek. Her companion also spent a lot of time by the creek, showing the nuggets of gold that he occasionally found, but he would usually go hunting in the hills, leaving her untied but whipping the bush before he left. All the while, he had fed her well, deer and rabbit and squirrel and quail. After a little while, she realized she was pregnant. She had nowhere else to go, so she spent her days gathering acorns and making mush at the pounding stones by the creek just like her people had done for countless years. He refrained from whipping her, and they began to work more as partners.

Larkspur

     After she had the baby, she spent most of her time near the house while her companion went off hunting, sometimes for days. He even had a mule that he had bought from one of the other miners. He would sell some of the meat he brought back for gold to the other miners if he had any left over. She took care of the baby and did what her companion wanted.
     She was always the first one to rise, just before dawn. The baby was usually asleep at that time, which gave her a little time to prepare herself for the day. One morning while she was at the creek at sunrise, the camp was attacked by several men from her tribe, who shot the sleeping miners in their tents and then either crushed their skulls with clubs or slit their throats. She started running toward her house just as her companion was coming out. A gun went off close by, and he looked at her, surprised and pained, before he fell flat on his face. As she screamed, one of the attackers crushed his skull. Her baby, who had been screaming, suddenly stopped, and one of the men stepped out of the house with blood covering his knife. She tried to run into the house but was stopped by one of the men. She fell to her knees, wailing.
     The men took all the mules and the gold and whatever else they decided they could use and left her alone with the dead. First, she buried her baby under the house and then tore down the stones from the walls, one by one, to lay on top of her companion's shallow grave, the way she had seen the other miners bury an old man who had died of fever. She buried them all the same way, six in all, before she headed back up the creek to her old village. She found two more bodies near a stone house by the creek and buried them as well, side by side.
     Her companion had once shown her how to load and shoot a rifle, so she took a rifle and powder and bullets that had been left behind and made camp where her old village once stood. She built a small hut on the ridge and stayed alive by hunting and grinding acorns. I understood why I had found only one pestle in the mortar under the oak tree on the ridge.

Lupine, Goldfields

     All of this passed before my eyes fairly quickly. Some parts seemed to move in fast forward. I saw clearly only the most significant aspects of the experience. 
     The hypnotist woke me gently from my trance. "Do you remember what you just told me?" he asked.
     "Yes, I do," I replied. "I can't believe it. This is incredible. Why don't more people know about this?"
     "'This' meaning reincarnation?" the hypnotist asked.
     "Yeah. Imagine if everyone knew they had lived before and would live again. Wouldn't that knowledge eliminate a lot of horrible social problems?"
     "I doubt that everyone is ready for this. You weren't ready until now, and how old are you?"
     "Forty-one."
     "I doubt that we could force anyone to do this. They have to be ready for it, like you. Anyway, realizing that you have an eternal soul doesn't necessarily mean that you will be a good person."
     "Yes, but don't you realize what power you have to do good? The white racist would realize that he could have once been black. The sexist would realize that he was at least once a woman. The homophobic would realize that he might once have been gay, or might be in a future life."
     "Yes, but prejudice is a type of power that very few people are willing to give up."
     "But what if this became an accepted practice. Children could be regressed before they could become prejudiced!"
     "You mean they would go to their hypnotist like they go to their dentist?" he laughed.
     "Why not?"
     "You are not only a receptive subject but extremely brave! Unfortunately I don't have time to change the entire world right now. I have another appointment," he said with a warm smile.
     I thanked him and left the office, pondering the significance of reincarnation for many days afterward, without telling anyone.
     I suspected that I was tapping into something huge, something that connected me to everything else in the world. All of experience must be imprinted in the subconscious mind, I thought, or maybe the subconscious can somehow tap into a record of experience somewhere in the "mind" of the universe. That was the only way I could view the woman’s experiences at times from her perspective and other times from a different perspective. That raised a question: What is identity? Was I the woman in a past life or was I simply reliving someone else’s experiences? If the latter, does that mean that I am one pair of eyes for the collective mind, even though for most of my life I have believed that I am a unique, separate individual?
     Insanity is the denial of reality. If I were to deny that I have celiac disease, foods that everyone else can eat would poison me until I eventually die. If I were to deny that Blackmore is attempting to murder me, I would sooner or later fall victim to his homicidal plans. In fact, I have only remained alive due to my intuitions about his intentions, intuitions that many other people would view as incredible or insane. Why should an intuition be considered any more or less insane than reliving a past life or having visions of spiritual symbols or encountering spiritual entities? I have at key points in my life ended up adjusting my thinking and changing radically for unexpected, strange reasons. Why should I do anything differently now?