E.H.E. AUTOBIOGRAPHY

When SMiles told me about the work of his friend Rhea White
and the E.H.E. network, I was intrigued. The thought of writing
(and thus having as a reference) a document cataloguing the
particular experiences which changed or shaped one's awareness
seemed like a valuable tool to have in the "quest for truth".
SMiles, of course, urged me to start writing my own E.H.E.
autobiography, but I have balked for awhile because, to tell
the truth, I have felt a bit overwhelmed by the prospect: you
see, when I looked back at my life, I began to feel that my
entire life has been one long Exceptional Human Experience.
I recently, however, began to gather my thoughts into a workable
configuration, and have decided the task is something I should
start to tackle.

This will definitely be done in on-going installments, due to
something I have discovered about the very nature of the
process--as I have remembered certain experiences, these have
clicked "locks" in my brain that have been rusted shut for years,
revealing other experiences I had boxed away, hidden from my
view for years, for whatever reason. Thus, there will be a
certain amount of timeline-jumping I am going to have to do,
so prepare yourself for some non-linear reading.

That I should give a bit of background, to show that my
experiencing of my own consciousness has always been far from
"normal" seems paramount. I will, however, make a supreme effort
to make this not simply a "litany of hurts," but rather a
compendium of specifics about my background which helped to
shape my perceptions and hone my consciousness into what it is.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt apart from the rest
of the beings in this world, isolated by "something" that made
e different from everyone else; something that made me a freak,
I spent the majority of my twenties and early thirties trying
to get myself "fixed" so that I could be "normal", but to no
avail. Only after I reached the age of 35 did I really begin
to accept myself and my seeming "difference", without berating
and negating myself for being the way I am.

I am one of those people whom the rest of society and its
label-makers describe alternately as highly sensitive, psychic,
crazy, gifted, heretical, blessed, blasphemous, difficult,
brilliant, sociopathic, dangerous, or any number of a host of
equally incomplete (and thus inaccurate) terms. My earliest
memories are of a very astute and intense realization, a
"knowingness" or "gnosis", if you will, that what I was being
fed as "truth" by those responsible for transmitting "truth"
to me as a child was, actually, fundamentally false: all the
reasons for things being the way they were, all the explanations
of why things happened, all the "truths" about "god" and the
structure of the Universe, All of these were seen instinctively,
on a deep, deep, level by my child's consciousness as falsehoods
and cover-ups. My own inner "gnosis" signaled to me that I was
in mortal danger if I were to really speak out and question
"truth" deeply.

My family was a chaotic and tension-filled dysfunctional Southern
Baptist household, with a genuinely crazy mother, a stone-cold
statue of a father and two siblings a decade older than me who
never questioned anything that I could see. The few times I
did question, I was invariably screamed at with dire warnings
that began "The Bible says...", or I was whipped, or both.
Oh, sure, Jesus loved me. He was more than willing to put
sores on my tongue and send me to hell for all eternity if I
lied, he loved me so much. You get the picture. My father
basically negated his entire existence to provide for a crazy
wife and three kids. He gave his life to a mega-corporation
for 38 years, and in exchange they sucked his soul out. He
never showed any real emotion other than resignation or anger,
and never made any attempt to deal with my mother's insanity--he
just "shut down" and tried to ignore it. My mother was a victim
of her depression-era-Texas-sharecropper's-daughter upbringing
and her inability to deal with her own power. She was a powerful
witchy-type woman who denied or suppressed that power. She
lived in constant fear and paranoia, and so remained a victim
until she died.

I know that the preceding encapsulation of my family seems
a little harsh, but at this point in my life, I prefer not to
sugar-coat things. I'm not sure we really have time to be that
nice anymore--just the facts, ma'am. For the sake of fairness,
all right: yes, there was love in the home; it was just a very,
very strange kind of love, and you had to jump through a whole
lotta psychic and emotional hoops to get it, OK?

Since I was emotionally and spiritually traumatized on an
(essentially) continuous basis, I accessed the world assembled
by my consciousness from a very distant and insulated space.
Contrary to what is normal for most children of dysfunctional
families, my memories of early childhood (before the age of
five) are distinct. I used to attribute this to my constant
state of hyper-vigilant awareness as a small child; now I simply
accept it as part of what I am, The overall impression I get
when I think back to that time is one of realizing that I was
in danger if I simply WAS myself. I developed a chameleon-like
character to compensate--to ensure my safety at any given moment
This made me very observant for, say, a three year old. I became
a very quiet and cautious little boy.

As I got older, I became even more isolated and insulated from
everything outside the family walls. Since I was not allowed
much chance to be with other children, I constructed my own
Universe to inhabit, peopled mostly with the characters in books,
my records, my piano, TV cartoon shows, and (most importantly)
the top-40 station DJs who spoke to me over the airwaves late
at night, They became my secret friends via my (now that I
think of it) "sacred" little AM transistor radio, pressed tight
between my ear and pillow, so my mother wouldn't hear it and
take it away.

Kasey Casem signing off from American Top 40 with his tag-line,
"And remember...keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching
for the stars!" gave me some strange sort of comfort, a kind
voice telling me to hang in there and keep trying--I remember
crying sometimes, finally realizing, through this simple, (now
sadly archaic) outside contact with the world, just how
imprisoned and sheltered from reality I was.

Believe me: as a terror-stricken, say, eleven-year-old kid
in Victoria, (Armpit of South-Central) Texas, who felt as though
he had surely been dropped onto the wrong planet, being able
to pick up a radio station like WLS out of Chicago
("Eigh-Tee-Nine! Dubble-Yew Ell-Ess! The ROCK of Chicago!")
along with a slew of other mega-watt stations of the late '60's
and early '70's (X-ROK 80 out of El Paso, trucker stations out
of Shreveport and New Orleans, etc.), this simple act seemed
magickal--I suppose it seemed to me, well, religious.

There: the scene is pretty much set. That should be enough
background informational download to start from.

I can always remember feeling connected with nature, even though
I was kept indoors nearly my entire childhood (My mother had
an intense fear I would get sick if I went outside...parkas
with hoods in July...you get it.., I developed chronic asthma.
Go figure.) A key experience which altered my perception of
reality as a very young child was being held up to the screen
door to watch a thunderstorm happen. I was enthralled, awed,
terrified. I was probably between two and three years old at
the time. I have a vivid memory of the lightning bolts
themselves. I saw what looked like an army of distinct z-shaped
bolts come out the bottom of one specific cloud that totally
caught my attention. This cloud was especially dark, much darker
than the rest, and had a perfectly flat bottom. The wind, rain,
lightning and thunder all combined into some sort of transcendent
or religious experience for me.

As I look at the previous paragraph, I'm surprised to see that
my description of the lightning bolts and the cloud, and the
mythic feeling they invoked in me could be interpreted as classic
symbols associated with some forms of UFO experience. Never
had thought of it, until I saw it down in print. I feel it
simply points out the universality of these archetypal symbols.

It was as if I understood completely that if there were anything
that deserved my awe or "worship", it was the force or forces
responsible for this spectacle--The Earth Mother, and the Sky
Father. I understood then, at the age of about two and a half,
on this very deep level of "gnosis" or "knowingness" that needed
no words to be expressed, that the whole "Jesus" thing (as
presented to me) was ludicrous, and that I believed in, and
resonated with something so much older and more "real" than
that. In essence, I realized my "pagan-ness" with this thunderstorm.

I suppose it sounds incredibly strange for me to remember feeling
so deeply at such a young age, but this is how I remember these
experiences being, Whether time has embellished the memories,
or whether it is that I now realize that I was indeed, as a
child, more deeply and strongly connected with my "gnosis" (as
we are told children truly are) I can't really say. I simply
know the intensity of the feelings that come with the memories,
and remember the impact these things had on me at the time.

Perhaps it is the hindsight of thirty-odd (some of them extremely
odd!) years which allows me to see that impact more clearly
now, perhaps more maturely. I feel that I must have surely
made at least some of these same realizations at the time the
experiences took place, though, and on some fairly conscious
levels. Otherwise, my anarchic tendencies would not be what
they are, I would not have found the strength to fight what
I knew was wrong, and I would not be who I am.