Sights, Sounds, Smells, Tastes, Going to One

              The bus arrives later than usual today. I board the 42 Cummer bus on the way to edit my friend’s accounting assignment. I feel stuffed from a big lunch I had today. My mouth tastes like salt. I feel the upper contours of my palette and decide that I need potassium to neutralize the sodium. I resolve to drink a lot of juice when I get back to the subway station. I feel like the makeshift doctor of my fleeting soul.

             
              The bus has a strange ailment itself. As the lady sitting closest to the driver tells him, the electronic stop announcements seem a bit garbled today, and there are incoherent letters scrambled across the stop display. The lady looks concerned, as though she was diagnosing the ailing bus. I admire her concern, not for herself, but for the concept of the broken bus. The driver is a crisp and nasally voice behind a thick brocade of black leather. He sympathetically nods to the lady’s polite concerns. He even plays with a few buttons just to indicate his care for the sick bus. But all of us in the bus know that flipping a few switches won’t reassemble the signal problems haunting this bus. We might as well say that the bus is haunted by a prickly ghost who just likes to scramble letters for the sake of confusing other beings.

             
              But when I look at the scrambled letters, I am seeing it with a different lens. I simply look at it with a relaxed mindset. The feeling is not to want to make sense of it, but to see the background as a totality. There no desire to make sense of the letters or words. In fact, they are not even connected with one another at all. The garbled images: do they frustrate me with incoherence, or do they point to a space where the symbols don’t actually interact with each other to create anything?

 If I am always living life trying to make sense of symbols, then I only see what I am creating, not mind itself. I become preoccupied with meaning, and this can be a great source of suffering. An example might be a situation that creates an expected ending, only to turn out in a different way. This happens because language almost furnishes a mindset that expects certain kinds of completions. For example, how many times have I read novels, and then subconsciously started to see life in the same way as novels, complete with ‘characters’ and plots? This happened to me when I was much younger, but I can see that the reason is that narratives often create subconscious expectations. I see a word and then expect it to signify, to function in a way that is comfortable and familiar to me. It ‘makes sense’. But if the experience lacks the familiarity of language, where does that search for confirmation lead me?

Sometimes, I have to let go and stop trying to finish, to make sense, and see what kind of space that can create. Is it frightening? Is it liberating? Letting go of my need to solve things neatly. To where do all those sights, symbols, sounds return?