(Source: The Natural Trajectory of Human Consciousness)
Have you ever seen a coyote move across a landscape? It does not matter what landscape. It can be in the middle of a forest, a fairly well-frequented municipal park, or along a quiet street lined with cars. The coyote carries the scene. It carries it like Atlas carries his world. But effortlessly.
Suen, on the other hand, was no coyote. She still had so much life and illusion that needed to be whittled away. She had a vague sense of where she needed to head to. She needed to close her eyes to certain outside things and open her eyes to more inner reality.
In time, she would lose an arm to gangrene.
She would have to raise a child single-handedly, literally.
The child at thirteen would kill another child.
Suen would lose her savings to a swindler who promised her the world. The swindler looked like the man she thought she had killed. The furry rabbit was right after all. You could not kill such a man as that.
Her guilt had been getting the better of her, so much so that she began to see the man she had killed everywhere.
The man with no ego had told her about compound interest. He had shown her how her money would grow on its own. Then he had schooled her on property speculation, neglecting to tell her they were at the tail end of a dangerous bubble. Without money, she had to live under the stairs of a condemned two-story building. (The old couple there had finally died, so no one cared.)
The grinding poverty, however, did not affect her as much as it had during her childhood. It seemed her mind’s eye had turned within, and she no longer cared about such things. The act of killing somehow changed her feelings about the materials that previously brought her comfort.
Her sense of place in the world had also begun to dissolve. Some days, especially hot days, she would not have a shred of clothing on her. Naked, she slept under the stairs during the day and roamed the streets at night.
She started talking to herself, and then she stopped talking altogether.
Until now, she had not realized how little she needed. She kept to herself as much as she could. All she cared to do was to feel her existence quietly. And even though she might stay still for hours, she was never bored. She would have nothing on her mind, not even the thought of the egoless man. And it did not trouble her.
Had the furry rabbit and the egoless man fundamentally changed her? Or maybe it was really a dream—not just the act of killing but everything. All her life and all that she had lived through could be part of an elaborate dream. Was that why, even amid excitation, there was something in her that had remained unmoved? It was as though the unmoved was the dreamer. All the rest, including all her feelings and sensations, was the stuff of dreams. Could it be that what she had thought of as her life was not really hers? Or was it no more hers than the lives of the characters in a movie were hers? Was it that only the watcher or the dreamer was real and substantive?
Over time, her need for distraction had dwindled to nearly nothing. She walked for long hours for no reason other than to allow herself time to feel every muscle and every bone in her, as well as the sun and wind that occasionally fell on her skin.
In the end, she also stopped fearing death. Death would be just a cessation of her being alive. Living was similar to reaching for an apple (or any other object). When you stop reaching for it, you simply stop. The apple was not yours to begin with. And death would be as simple as that. Nothing at all would be amiss.
Then, one day, she rolled off her perch and quickly got to an intersection where a blind man was about to cross. She offered him her arm, which he gladly took. Obviously, because he was blind, he did not mind her stump for an arm or that she was barely dressed.
She was not surprised that the blind man had the face of the egoless man. She had grown used to that. A person could only be surprised by the same thing so many times; it would only be a waste of energy to object to it endlessly.
After they got to the other side of the road, the blind man slipped her a five-dollar bill. With the money, she went into an ice cream shop to buy herself a two-scoop cone with sprinkles.
The egoless man was standing behind the counter. “What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?”
Suen shrugged. She didn’t care. All she wanted was that strawberry flavor to sit briefly on her tongue.
This sudden want had become, in fact, all-consuming. She could kill for it. Cut a man’s throat to get at it. Thankfully, she only needed to hand over the five-dollar bill.
Thereupon, her mind did a U-turn, and she wondered if she herself wore the face of the egoless man.
There was a large mirror in the shop behind the tabletop fan. Would she see the reflection of the egoless man in the mirror if she looked?
But she didn’t look. She didn’t have to. Whether she had an ego or not was irrelevant now. Her mind, it would appear, had been stripped bare by hardship and deprivation, leaving behind nothing but a shining awareness. And she liked it like that. She liked to live in the glow of her awareness. Over time, she had become deeply engaged with it. It was her sun and sky. It subsumed not only the man she had killed and the children she had given birth to (and lost) but also her own body and mind to the point that all had become bright and bearable.
“There you go.”
Ah. Here it is.
It was a simple but brilliant transaction. With ice cream in hand, Suen smiled and headed for the exit.
(The End)
(Next story will begin soon.)
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