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Pestles on a Pounding Stone

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APT. 21

    Sure that truth and morality and the arts don't mean much to people anymore, you fill the hot air balloons connected to your room and gently lift away from the other rooms in the apartment complex. Exhilarated by the view, you glide over the valley, a vast quilt of farms with packing sheds and processing plants and towns that develop outward around nuclei of malls, fast food restaurants, box stores, and gas stations. You notice that the small towns in the valley resemble serfdoms, with a few extravagant mansions and a few run-down middle-class homes and numerous tawdry shacks surrounding the inner core of affluence. You glide over to the foothills, some regions of which still seem pristine. You glimpse a network of trails and amuse yourself by trying to map the paths, realizing that they must form an ancient web connecting Native American village sites all over the range, but the trails keep vanishing in the grass. You go higher above the smog and glimpse all the cultivated and urbanized land where wetlands and lakes used to be, the dams on every river; beyond that are strip mines and patches of clear-cut forests. You go even higher where the oxygen grows thin and view a huge fault and the opening of a volcano, the ocean in the distance. Every now and then you hear jets and explosions, and you wonder how high you need to go to escape the wars and disasters as, breathing through an oxygen mask, you approach the cold blanket of outer space.

History

PENDULUM DREAMS: 

REGRESSION

   Ninety seconds before midnight, I was 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, 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 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.
   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 window that contained 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 paraphernalia intended to mesmerize, as far as I could tell. Suddenly Dr. Browning rushed in, apologizing for being late.
   He was an older gentleman, with protruding 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 smiled.
   "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 brokenness and 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. You realize that I'm going to record this session. Is that all right?"
   "Yes."
   Apparently, I am a receptive subject. I remembered 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 playing some game, possibly 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. 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 herds of animals were stirring. 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.
   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.
   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 woke 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 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 like partners.
   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 the others had missed in the raid and made camp where her old village had once stood. She built a small hut on the ridge and survived by hunting and grinding acorns. (I understood then why I had found only one pestle in the mortar under the oak tree on the ridge.)
   All of this passed before my eyes fairly quickly. Some parts seemed to move in fast forward. I saw clearly only what seemed 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 look at the 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 probably 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 do 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 cosmos. 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, for instance, were to deny that I have celiac disease, foods with gluten that everyone else can eat would poison me until I eventually died. Why should having visions and intuitions and reliving a past life be any more or less insane? I have at key points in my life ended up adjusting my thinking and changing radically for unexpected, even strange reasons. Why should I do anything differently now?

Go on a different adventure.