DREAMS IN A BACKWATER

PART THREE

III

(1)

SONG

Autumn is beginning.  One day, the wind blowing through the trees makes a drier, rustling sound.  Another day it rains a hard, steady rain all the afternoon long.  Another day, and the air feels suddenly chill against my skin.  Autumn is beginning.  And I – at last, at long, long last – I have found a job.

My parents raise their faces to the sky, weeping for joy.  Strangers stop to congratulate me on the street.  Little children burst into song.  "At last, at last, Simon has found a job!"  Thank goodness.  Now all's right with the world again.

It's only part time.  Two days a week I work as a clerk at one of the newsstands downtown.  I stand behind a counter in a rather poky, dusty little store, selling newspapers and magazines, cigarettes and lottery tickets, to the people passing by.  It's not terribly interesting work:  I've done it all before.  On the positive side, however, my boss is very easy going and pretty much leaves me alone during my shift.  I'm even allowed to smoke if I want to, right there behind the counter.  I find that I want to.  Nothing better expresses my feelings about working than smoking on the job.

At least the customers here are a nicer lot than those I used to wait on at the convenience store.  That store was located in the "bad" part of town, frequented by drunks and druggies, small-time schemers, wanna-be shoplifters and, of course, the occasional knife-wielding robber.  Now the people I wait on are mostly business folk, smartly dressed professional types, always in a hurry.  Hey, hey! – I'm moving up in the world!

The salary isn't much, but at least there's a little money trickling in now.  Because of my low-income status I've also qualified for a small monthly stipend from the state – limited strictly to the purchase of food; but it helps.  I've begun to be able to pay at least some of my bills.  I'm still sliding down the slippery slope into debt, but the slope has grown a little less steep, my plummet downward a little less precipitous.  Hurrah!

The axe no longer hangs quite so close above my head, waiting to fall.  Curiously, this fact has only inspired me to new depths of boredom.  I can see my future laid out neatly before me now:  unfortunately, it consists of a flat, featureless plain stretching out endlessly on every side.  Sooner or later I know that I will either a) be given more hours at my present job, b) find another part-time job of similar sort to supplement the one I now have, or c) find myself a full-time job of similar sort elsewhere.  But at least the specter of abject poverty no longer threatens.  I find it oddly disappointing.  "So," I think, "this is how my days will pass" – and my months, my years:  working at some menial employment, living on through all futurity in this same small apartment.  There are no great adventures coming my way, not even those engendered by the perils of destitution.  Life feels suddenly too small for me – or I for it.  My brain feels too cramped and cumbersome, too primitive, too limited, for the kind of usage I'd like to put it to.  I feel sometimes that the desire I have to expand into some larger life is greater than what my brain and my physical circumstances will ever allow.  I'm not sure what territory is left for me to explore inside my own head, and yet I have no way of exploring the outer world either, beyond what is offered within the confines of this one small town.

Boredom:  it's a new variation on the theme of loneliness.  I have nothing and no one through which or with whom I might expand my realm of experience.  Considered in the abstract, I suppose it's as true now as it ever was that I do not want, really, the kind of experiences had by most people; I'm not sure they would lead me anywhere that I'd feel in the end to have been worth the trouble.  Which is how most experiences feel, to me at least – once they've been had.  The past is past; what was worthwhile at the time is not worth the time spent cherishing it in memory.  What I'd like most is to find a way to expand my ability to experience what I have now, to find within the present moment and current circumstances enough to satisfy.  It appears that the only way I can make this happen is through the exercise of my will.  I no longer feel myself hampered, as I once did, by the idea that I can do no more than passively express the "flow of experience" as it passes through me; the awareness of the presence of Empty Mind has somehow changed all that.  It's still true that I am but a "point of particularity" manifesting the "flow of experience" which constitutes the "ground-of-all-being."  And yet, I've become aware of an active element within my nature too.  This active element has, albeit to a limited degree, the ability to express itself through choice.  By which I mean, I have the ability within me to be aware of my life, and to bring this state of awareness to the forefront of my attention:  I can "choose" to be entirely conscious, to live entirely in the present moment.  Of course, any close examination of who or what it is that constitutes the "I" which has the ability to focus its awareness will eventually lead back to an awareness of the presence of Empty Mind.  On the other hand, the capacity for focused attention may also be said to exist as a sort of counterbalance to the presence of Empty Mind:  the latter exists, as it were, behind the world which "I" call reality, but know to be illusion; the former manifests as an "I" that exists within the realm of illusion, and experiences this illusion as being completely real.  This happens because the act of focused attention, existing as the counterpart of Empty Mind, is expressive not of pursuit (as is, for instance, intellectual hunger), but of quiet attentiveness:  that is, it's an attentiveness that strives not to possess and consume for the sake of egoistic enlargement, but which wishes simply to observe, and, through the process of its observation, expand consciousness through a concomitant withdrawal of the ego.  Its purpose is to discover wisdom, wisdom as defined by the experiential processing of the contents of awareness.  Call it the attentiveness of the Seeker.  And call that which it seeks, Love.  Not romantic love, but that Love which is the binding force under whose power all things are brought together into a single, unified field of experiential consciousness.

Of course, the question that still remains is, Who, or What, is it that causes, or brings into being, this illusion that I experience as a coherent reality through the act of focused attention?  Who or What, for that matter, brings into existence the illusion of "I"?  And the answer would seem to be:  Nothing.  Nothing – and Everything.  By Nothing I mean of course that Nothing which brings forth Everything:  that state of Non-existence from which all Existence springs.  To understand this definition of life is to understand the true nature of the dream which is reality, comprising both its subjective (everything around me is what I dream) and objective (I am that which everything around me dreams) aspects.  Everything in life is – as I myself am – a point of particularity in the flow of existence, behind which lies Nothing, or Emptiness.  Because there is Nothing, there is Everything.  Because there is illusion, there is reality.  To know this is to know that there is no "I."  To know this is to know that, in truth, "I" am Nothing, "I" do not exist; and yet it is also to know that, in truth, "I," as defined by the state of focused awareness, am ever existent in the trenchant reality of the Here and Now.