Zen Commuting

by
RG Liberty©2003

Settling back into my seat on the train, I opened my book to where I'd left off, fully intending to begin reading, but my attention was inexorably drawn to the continual, hissing drizzle of fine rain pattering lightly on the tarmac outside my window. I put the book aside for a time and simply stared into the gray mists swirling around the train and the platform. I became  first engrossed, then mesmerized by the sight and the sound.

Allowing my eyes to unfocus, I let my mind follow a path I had never before traveled. With my eyes fully opened and my breathing slowed to a meditative cadence, I observed a space between the window and my eyes. With the delicacy of a dust mote on a sunray, I entered, softly and quietly into that space, a  place between noise and worry, want and care, hope and despair. Down, down I slipped into a misty-mid region, toward a golden halo at the end of a concentric tunnel.

There was warmth there. And there was infinite peace. I willed my mind to follow the spiraling of the tunnel. I desired the warm glow at its end. My body was forgotten. My mind, or my spirit, moved of its own volition through the vistas revealed within that cylindrical abyss. I experienced a sense of complete freedom of movement and release from the mundane, and embraced the call of the glowing, amorphous mass, the heart of the thing. I raced to an end I was not sure existed outside of my dreams.

The pulsating kaleidoscopic essence expanded within my vision. I felt overwhelmed. I felt surprise. And I felt awe. And by degrees, I grew content with all around me and developed an innate knowledge of my abilities to cope with the unknown and the known, with equal acuity. My new consciousness flickered back to scan its former environs for a nanosecond and coughed, embarrassedly, into its incorporeal fist to see what poverty it had once known. I recognized, for the first time, that I had been embroiled, not in life, but in living out my allotted time. Not in the verisimilitude of reality, but in a phantasmagorical charade of unconnected events and epochs, bound  tenuously together by a string of beliefs inbred into the species since the fall of Atlantis.

The human race had been, and was even still, deluding itself into believing life to exist on a single, time/space-continuous, plane, and now I had been made to realize this was simply a dreadful chimera. For we exist in multiple planes of many textures and layers with myriad avenues of logic and sensate explorations that cannot be called merely understandings or knowledge, in the purest connotation. Words themselves, base vocalizations, have no real purpose but to obscure these planes. We have invented our own prisons, barring us from our true existence ~ our true path in the order of the chaotic cosmos. This, and more, I grew to understand while traveling toward the soul of all the layers. The Godhead.

As I approached, bathed in enlightening caresses, all was made simple. The smoothing of humanity's tortuous paths was made clear to me. The end to all suffering, want, greed, murderous, lustful, wanton bestiality was  becoming my sacred knowledge. The many petals of the flower of wisdom were opening to my willing acknowledgment. The Many Mansions were illuminated for my appraisal.

But, suddenly all forward motion unexpectedly jerked ~ slowed ~ jerked more violently, once, twice ~ and again. A terrible, confining implosion ~ and a popping of the ears. The contents of my briefcase were scattered over my lap and onto the floor of the train car. I opened my eyes. Passengers were rising and gathering their cases, bags overcoats and umbrellas. I checked my Rolex. Good, still ten minutes until my station. I collected the fallen papers back into my portfolio, inhaled deeply of the recirculated air and peered expectantly into the spot where the space between the window and my eyes had been. Shunt, screeeeshunt, rumble, umble umble. Hiss, chhhhhhsss. Hiss, hisssszzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzzz,  zzzzzzzz (eureka!) Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

The End