Is This It?

I was on my way home on Wednesday, September 23, 2009, with my dinner in hand, and I swear I just wanted to sit down and eat but I knew the bus would show up the minute I did. I had intended to eat in the restaurant, but for some reason the counter person handed me my meal in a bag to go. Since my usual table was occupied, I sighed and left; the entire day had been off like that. I should have known the universe had it in for me.

When the bus arrived, I was the second to board and the first person stopped and pushed past me to get off again. That was when I noticed one of the passengers was beating the crap out of another. The bus driver had gotten up to try and do something about it, but that just drew the psycho’s attention to himself. I had stepped off the bus and was looking for somewhere to set down my bag of food and my drink, because I’m not the kind of person who can stand around and watch something like this. None of the people standing around at the stop would do me the favor of holding onto my meal, so I shifted everything into one hand so I could reach in and pull the mad man off the bus driver.

I had no desire to get involved in this; I don’t get into fights. Still, I tried to get the guy’s attention, pulling him back and saying, “That’s enough. You need to step back and think about what you’re doing,” while he stared at me in disbelief and asked me if I wanted to die. “You’re attacking the bus driver,” I pointed out, adding, “Think about it!” At that point, I let him go and stepped back to give him a chance to come to his senses. I can see in his eyes how pissed he is at me for “disrespecting” him, and yet there I was treating him like a sane, mature, intelligent human being, giving him the chance to resume acting like one. Instead, he turns back to the bus driver and is joined by a young woman who has come forward to attack the bus driver too.

When the guy tries the grab the girl and pull her off the bus, I step back and hope this means that he, at least, has sobered up a bit. She keeps screaming, cursing and kicking the bus driver, while people around me cry out for someone to call 911. When the couple finally does step off the bus, the driver shuts the door on them at the suggestion of the other passengers. I was trying to back away from them, but I was caught between them and the crowd at the bus stop. When the girl, who had tried to stick her foot in the door and got it stuck, pulled free, the couple bumped into me as I tried to get out of the way. The man turned around and grabbed me, shouting over and over in my face, “WTF! Do you want to die?”

I show him the drink and bag of food still in my hand, telling him calmly, “No. The only thing I want to do here is get home so I can eat my dinner.” He gives me this look of contempt and grabs the drink, crushing the plastic cup and trying to spill the contents on me with little success. Once the cup is empty, I let it go and try to step back with a disappointed shake of my head. After screaming something about disrespect, he hawks up a mouthful of spit. I looked him straight in the eye and, still in a level voice, say, “Don’t. That’s assault, and I will defend myself.” I know the adrenaline had hit my system minutes ago, but all I felt was disappointment and resignation.

He spit on me, and I took one moment to let my disappointment show on my face, and since he still held me close, with one hand gripping my coat, I pounded him in the face. I think it was the first punch I have ever thrown, and I was amazed that I felt no pain even though I could feel and hear flesh and bone compact and crunch under the blow. He did not let go, so I hit him again, still looking at him with cold disappointment and resignation. By the third punch, he was trying to jerk me off balance and his return blows began to land on the left side of my face. I had seen him go from person to person lashing out like a wild animal, and I wondered right then, Do I want to kill this guy? Will anything less stop him?

I was still amazed that I felt no anger, I was not seeing red after taking a few good punches. Not interested, I realized. I started to put him into an arm bind and headlock, and the girl suddenly jumped in, throwing punches, pulling on my hair and clothes, kicking and screaming, and I looked right at her and said, “No. I don’t want to hurt you,” as I pulled back the punch I threw instinctively in response to her attack. She kept attacking, though, so I caught her up in my other arm, for a moment keeping both of them bent over and bound up in my arms. Their struggles threw us into the side of the bus, and one of them went for my leg, throwing me over and then things really got out of hand. The next few moments were a flurry of her tearing at my hair and jerking my head around and him raining my face with punches.

This is what it is to get beaten. I thought it would be more painful, but it was mostly a series of shocks and a lot of disorientation. I could not make sense out of things, which meant I was no longer able to fight. You need trained reflexes to fight when you can’t rely on your senses. So, I curled up, protecting my head and face and gave them my back. In a way, it was an enlightening moment. I was beaten senseless, and yet I had the clarity of thought to note that while I lost the fight, I had won in the sense that I accomplished my objective of helping to protect the passenger and driver they had been attacking. I was a bit disappointed that I had not been able to defend myself, but the only thing I was really upset over was the destruction of my dinner. I was still hungry, and I really regretted that.

I finally have proof that physical pain just does not compare to the psychic pain I live with daily. The only thing that really bothered me was the twinge in my knee, which was twisted when they attacked that leg to bring me down. The broken nose bled like a faucet, and has been tender since; I suspect that it straightened my nose from when I broke it as a kid. The real problems have been the fact that I don’t have medical insurance; I could not let them take me to the emergency room and run up a massive ambulance and medical bill. I had to take a couple days off work, which I really can’t afford. I might just have enough to pay rent and bills, but that will leave me with nothing to live off of for the next month–even assuming I don’t lose my job for being out injured without a doctor’s note.

I have been taking care of myself, giving my knee time to recover. I could not walk on it Thursday or Friday, but Saturday Evening I was able to walk to the nearest mini-mart for some Advil and ice cream. I was not able to focus on school work for a couple of days; I spent a while laid up in bed and even when I was able to get around my apartment, my knee made it impossible to sit at my desk for long. In a way, I feel like my worst fear has come true, that I would get hurt and not be able to support myself while I am alone up here in Alaska. I was able to get some help from my apartment manager and one of the girls in my support group to get some food stocked up so I don’t starve, and if I am able to walk by Monday, I might still have a job. The problem is, I don’t know that I will have an income beyond this weekend, and that’s stressing me out more than the attack itself.

I have never been able to be myself, so I tried to just be the best person I could be, and yet when I truly do my best, I always seem to end up the worse for it. It really makes me wonder if there’s any point…

A Spark

My eyes opened and this is what I saw. You can in yourself be anything you desire. You create yourself from a point. You define your own existence. A soul defines itself. What words cannot define, they can characterize, so that the truth may be recognized as it is encountered. The existence of a soul is absolute, at once all and nothing. The qualities of a soul are both infinite and eternal. A soul is not a question, nor is a soul an answer. A soul is a statement. A soul is an expression, a unique, individual creation.

While I gazed in wonder, I realized that even before a soul embraces the awareness of other souls, the darkness of a soul embraces the light of other souls, filling the emptiness of its existence with the certainty of others, both as a foundation for its own reality, and a medium for the realization of its self. A soul dreams its dreams, innocent of consequence, immune to concern, often unaware of those who chance to share its dream. But already it is evolving. Its attention expands to encompass a growing understanding of its condition, and its will develops as it struggles to grasp the essence of its awareness.

Then I looked upon myself and had to see that in adopting a design, a soul is often faced with a limitation that arguably compromises or violates its integrity. If, within a given archetype, a design employs mutually exclusive characteristics, a soul, which by its intrinsic nature encompasses the gamut of mutually exclusive characteristics, can be stifled by the emphasis of its adopted design. Confounded by an exclusive emphasis, a soul is often compelled to find expression elsewhere. The diafracture of a soul can result in the functional and dysfunctional aspecting of a soul. The fact that such a situation can occur is not in itself damning or flawed, but a certain sophistication is needed to distinguish between a functional and a dysfunctional emphasis.

I looked upon my life and considered what was there to see. As the soul evolves, it creates. Constantly grasping existence anew and refining its understanding, recreating its universe. The power of its dreaming creating dreams. And in its dreams, it begins to experience moments of clarity. The questions and answers that it eternally weaves suddenly resolve and it awakens to a world. There was so much wonder in that. One soul can give birth to all souls, for that which can conceive of itself, can conceive of others, and in conceiving of others, can conceive of others that can conceive of themselves, and those that can conceive of themselves and each other can conceive of that which can conceive of itself.

So I understood, that one soul, dreaming of many, makes an invitation. The souls, dreaming of themselves, realizing the same truth, making the same invitation, are revealed to each other. Thus souls born dreaming alone, become souls dreaming alone together.

It took so little effort to put this epiphany to words, but the longer I looked at it, I realized that so much of it was beyond words. So much will ever be beyond words, and perhaps that is why the relationship between the body and the spirit is easier to describe than the relationship of mind and soul. Like the soul, a mind is a possession of itself, but unlike the soul, the mind is vulnerable. In a way, mind is a soul’s way of transcending itself. A soul can touch, and can be touched, only through its mind. The mind exists at a crucial threshold, as a premier interface between the individual and the infinite. Where every soul is a thing of innate perfection, each mind is a unique work of art. A mind is a soul’s way of representing itself.

At the same time, I could not help but notice that a mind is also a soul’s way of influencing itself. The power of a mind is derived of itself, in the expression of its soul. Mind is key to existence. The function of mind, to make dreams into reality, is demonstrated in our own realization of each other. The ambition or promise of mind, to realize the ideal, is demonstrated in our insistence on finding meaning in what we experience. In the world, the mind — not the body — is the seat of the soul. The mind is so central to existence that people are often blind to it, though nothing within it is ever hidden from the soul. If the soul could be said to be the light of our awareness, then the mind is the lens through which that light is focused.

It is a lens shaped by the soul, as much as by experience. It is intimately personal, yet exposed to everything. A possession of itself, a mind is also an object, a thing that can be grasped, manipulated, probed, and even possessed by, or shared, with another. I know that seems to imply telepathy, but even if there is something to that implication, there is reason enough for us to find it unsupportable. No intimacy can compare to what the mind can invite, and that is what makes telepathy, or any true example of what we would think of as psychic potential particularly difficult and dangerous for us to accept. Even without telepathy, we have enough ways to know each others’ minds. Even without other psychic abilities, we are capable of realizing that in order for the mind to influence reality, it must open itself, and become vulnerable. Only a strong, stable, healthy mind could bear to be so naked to reality. Only an open mind can touch naked reality.

Or maybe I should say, only a closed mind can avoid it. That is sort of the paradox of the position we find ourselves in. It is not our minds that define the limits of our grasp of reality, but the manner in which we perceive it. We give precedence to the senses of our body, as if the fact that our minds truly make sense of what we perceive means that the mind itself has no means of perception. And yet, all that we can ever truly know, we know only in the mind. Our connection to the physical universe we perceive as containing us lies solely in the information our minds derive from our perception of the world. The world we exist in is contained in that information, as much as that information is contained in the structure of the world, so the world we experience is really just an idea of the world. What that information really is or what it represents we are unable to know, because it can only be observed indirectly—if at all.

Our senses provide a very limited perspective. Our physical senses only provide the mechanism for transforming electrical and chemical impulses into information, perception itself is rooted in them and thus in the body, but only in the full focus of consciousness is perception truly realized, and only the mind perceives meaning and purpose. If you take the mind out of the process, information ceases to be a meaningful concept. Even limiting the mind to the function of processing information, storing and correlating data, the mind becomes distinct from the brain and nervous system by virtue of perceiving information. That transition to an information state crosses the same boundary between that which is purely physical in nature to that which is mental, or psychic or spiritual in nature. If one must look for a reason to accept these diverse terms, a justification for a soul as well as a mind, all I can offer is the common observation that what ultimately distinguishes one of us from another is the possession of our own awareness. That awareness is not always conscious and focused and it is not always neatly confined to the bounds of our own minds or even the bounds of our bodies or the world those bodies exist in. Also, while the minds provide that awareness with structure, the awareness is not passive. Awareness penetrates and pervades us, active and impulsive, persistent and pensive, focused in both understanding and intent.

It has taken me a long time to find the words to capture what I glimpsed, and that was neither the first nor the last glimpse I’ve had. I am sorry to say that these words only offer a glimpse of what I saw. If I thought I would live a long and productive life, I still do not think I could do more than scratch the surface of all that I have seen. In the life I have, I have barely made a scratch.