Feeling particularly emotional this morning. I dreamed about my fear of insignificance.
I was with friends, who left me in a shabby apartment with an old Slavic woman. They didn't tell me where they were going, or when they'd be back, and I felt like they were dumping me; I felt alone, in the wrong place.
The woman was past middle-age and shaped vaguely like a potato, in an ill-fitting, clinging rayon dress of some drab earth tone.
The apartment reflected her; depressed and dull. The walls were covered in fading, stained and peeling wallpaper showing rotting plaster underneath. In the hall, rosaries of all different sizes and materials hung high on the wall. The living room appeared to have once been a marvelous room, but the fireplace was closed off by a metal plate and the mantle was gone and the same horrible wallpaper in a terrible state covered the walls.
There was a worn and broken bookshelf set in the wall with an old table of weathered wood under it. It contained books on herbology and like subjects, falling apart, barely held together by brittle, browning, ancient sellotape. I recognized some of the books from my own collection.
The old woman was growing younger - as insignificant and dull as her older self, just younger.
I touched something and it was vaguely sticky. My eyes wandered towards the couch and the rest of the ill-kept room; there was junk everywhere. I surmised that the stickiness came from an exploded hairspray bottle among some crumpled cloth and papers on the couch, the piping inside it visible and looking vaguely like a female reproductive system.
On the floor was the woman's coat, dropped in front of the littered, broken couch, as if she had just slipped it off her shoulders and let it trail on the floor as she walked into the living room to sit down. I looked at her again, and she had become younger, and I felt like she was beginning to somehow echo or become myself. We were somehow connected, or one being, or mirrors of each other.
I woke up, discomfited, wondering if that was actually who I was - drab, dull, insignificant. It took me a moment to take myself in hand, and to realize I was imposing a story on the dream. There are questions I've learned to pose myself regarding dreams. What was the feeling? What were the associations? Ah, ego tricks. Or, not tricks, but what the ego does for me. I try to recognize the important role my ego plays in my existence. It brings up feelings and thoughts but it doesn't intend to have me believe them. Rather, it is giving me the opportunity to examine them, to bring into awareness what lies underneath. If I buy into the thoughts and feelings, if I believe they are the truth, then I get stuck in stories I make up, stories made up to try and understand, but stories nonetheless. I add a layer of complexity - I start creating stories instead of just looking at what my ego has presented to me.
The message in my dream is not that I am insignificant, but that I fear insignificance. Fear clouds perceptions and are a common source of story-making. Sure, I fear being forgotten and lonely, of not contributing, not being part of something greater than myself. The dream even contained symbols of things I identify with and cherish - society, spirituality, nature, healing, art, appearance - and all were neglected, rotted, worn. But that isn't me, those are interests, identities, and areas where I once held hopes of making myself known.
Who doesn't want to be recognized, to make their mark, to be famous? Growing up in the eighties I got the message I had to become exceptional to be of value, to be worthy. To be special. It's my job to save the world. To make 'a difference'. This wasn't planned, I'm sure, but inadvertently I was taught that my value was dependent on external things. In pursuing these goals I sin, to use an archery term; I miss the mark.
My purpose is to be alive and to be part of life. There is no effort in that; I don't have to 'do' anything, I am simply 'a part of' something. It's when I think I'm supposed to 'do' something that I become 'apart from', and I start to 'sin'.
This doesn't mean passivity. All things strive. The worm is food for the bird, yet it strives to survive, to hide and to escape the pain caused by the sharp beak. Microbes are food for the worm, yet they strive to multiply. The bird strives to feed itself and reproduce, yet it's mortal and will die. And the bird corpse permit the microbes to multiply to feed the worm to feed the birds. And I am the same. It's so simple.
But simple doesn't mean easy. As a human I am a meaning-maker; that's our special evolutionary trick. Whether or not that's an advantage or a disadvantage is yet to be determined and, given the crises we're currently experiencing, that may well be in the final stages of decision. Meaning-makers translate experience into symbols to communicate experience to other meaning-makers and our species has come to believe the symbols are more real than the experience we're trying to convey. Language really is a virus (but is it from outer space?).
How do I simplify? How do I strip away the noise created by all the meaning-making that has layered itself so thickly over experience that I fear what's really real, what real experience is? I don't pretend to have the answer, and my dream reminds me of this. I try to simplify my meaning-making tools to their most simple components, dropping the power tools and complex machinery of 'modern' society in favor of simple hand tools to become simple myself, to merge once again with the flow of life, of being 'a part of'.
I was just thinking that living simply isn't simple, but I'm wrong. Living simply isn't easy, but it is simple. The thick encrustation of meaning laminated onto my experience, created by myself and inherited from generations of sinful (in the sense of archery) meaning-making layers comes between my understanding and the simplicity of experiencing existence. The difficulty of living simply is getting past this layering. If I may extend this analogy, it may be a way for me to understand when those who have come before me who appear to have gone beyond the layering of meaning say that enlightenment can take ages or it can happen in a moment; it can take a long time to wear through encrusted paint or it can flake off in an instant. Ah, I've started to think in terms of goals again. The goal is not to 'become' enlightened, it's to 'be'. Not enlightened, but to 'be'.
